~Slideways~ Posted December 9, 2019 Author Share Posted December 9, 2019 Can't win them all I guess, I built the next computer which was to be: - Win XP based - "Fast" single core AMD Athlon 64 - PCI-E RX800 graphics card (because I had one) - My original 2000-ish ATX case - What ever working ram I could find. - ASUS A8N-E motherboard Had a failed RAM stick, one old SATA drive is stopping it from booting and the other SATA is intermittently working. Older IDE 40GB drive was fine. Got it all running, installed Half Life. Worked well, is still a cool game and played through the intro. Decided to try transfer files from semi-working SATA drive to IDE drive and see if a format would help it. Transfer completed after a few minutes, came back to do the next transfer and simply moved mouse and it all powered off instantly and refused to boot again. Long story short got it down to just the mobo out of the case trying to find a short or dead capacitor. No post beeps, no display no ram lights (one stick has gimmicky led's). But it does start the fans, nothing else. Swapped power supply, same thing. I think it's dead. Dumb. It was only 16 years old. So I'm going to put in a cheap core 2 duo motherboard instead. I also have a dead 1GB HD4870 (from memory) graphics card that I might see if I can get working by trying the solder reflowing thing, probably with a heat gun because I don't think the wife will like me doing it with the oven. As for the dead A8N-E mobo, recapping interests me so I'm going to look into a capacitor tester and one of those solder sucking things. TLDR built XP machine, played Half Life, mobo died out of the blue just moving the mouse pointer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 9, 2019 Author Share Posted December 9, 2019 Also pretty cool that while I was working on it I got my 5yo boy into playing the original Lemmings. He loved it which is awesome. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 9, 2019 Author Share Posted December 9, 2019 Also also, the mod 'Brutal Doom' for the original Doom's is fucking amazing. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nominal Posted December 9, 2019 Share Posted December 9, 2019 You should try the Alien TC mod, IIRC that was remarkable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 9, 2019 Author Share Posted December 9, 2019 7 minutes ago, Nominal said: You should try the Alien TC mod, IIRC that was remarkable. Sweet I'll have a look. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 9, 2019 Author Share Posted December 9, 2019 Nice! I just received a package addressed simply from "H4ND"... I lol'd It's like an 90's computer parts santa sack, lots of cool stuff including a Voodoo 2! fck yeah 3dfx time and there are enough ISA coax network cards to set up my own beige LAN haha Thanks man much appreciated. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 10, 2019 Author Share Posted December 10, 2019 I don’t think this old version of Diablo 2 likes running on my newish win7 machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cubastreet Posted December 12, 2019 Share Posted December 12, 2019 CTRL+ALT+DEL Our first computer was a colour genie. 8KB RAM and a tape drive. There was a club based in Auckland we could order games from, and the monthly newsletter had a BASIC program in the back which took forever to type and never failed to disappoint. Next was an 8086 with 2 SSSD 5.25 drives. Dad bought some more RAM in Aussie and Roger down the road came and soldered it in, which brought it up to 512KB. I bought a used 386 in uni and the hard drive failed. I invested in a 540MB hard drive, which was pretty big at the time. Alan from the shop came and installed it for me and found a bud on the carpet so we went and spotted it then went out for a beer. We became good friends. I bought a 14.4K modem and got my first internet account. I paid $7 per megabyte. 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nominal Posted December 12, 2019 Share Posted December 12, 2019 1 hour ago, cubastreet said: Our first computer was a colour genie. 8KB RAM and a tape drive. We had one of those too. I even bothered to download an emulator and try it out a few years back. https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/system-80/hardware_eaca-colour-genie.htm 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 12, 2019 Author Share Posted December 12, 2019 15 hours ago, cubastreet said: CTRL+ALT+DEL Weirdly it displayed the menu perfectly fine. It works no problem on the Win XP E5500 Core 2 Duo machine though, but it's having intermittent shutdown issues. Have been trying to figure out why, HDD tests, ram swaps, reapplied thermal paste to the cpu and motherboard chipsets, changed power supplies, even changed the power switch out of frustration lol. Early 2000's motherboards seem to be far less long lived than the 90's stuff, especially ASUS ones. Then again I've got a machine I built in 2009 which must have been when Intel i5's were a new thing, which has never had an issue. In fact I put an SSD in it a couple of years ago and it runs just as fast as the newest 'main' computer which I think I built about 3 years ago.... Moores Law kind of forgot for the last 10 years? Jesus when did 2009 become over a decade ago?! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 12, 2019 Author Share Posted December 12, 2019 Also, man a decent CRT looks crisp compared to the average LCD! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyteler Posted December 12, 2019 Share Posted December 12, 2019 I loved my CRTS, used to get high level Viewsonics and they were crissssp. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post HighLUX Posted December 12, 2019 Popular Post Share Posted December 12, 2019 Used to love hooning this on the primary school computers 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vivaspeed Posted December 13, 2019 Share Posted December 13, 2019 Oh yeah incredible machine game. Those conveyor belts always went the wrong way first time around, flip the belt over. Kids today need more 'build shit' games to learn mechanical theory. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 13, 2019 Author Share Posted December 13, 2019 15 hours ago, vivaspeed said: Oh yeah incredible machine game. Those conveyor belts always went the wrong way first time around, flip the belt over. Kids today need more 'build shit' games to learn mechanical theory. Minecraft is pretty good for creative building like lego, my 5yo boy plays it and I'm constantly surprised what he makes. Like I showed him how to make a mine cart track with powered rails and now he's done stuff like make an uphill ramp which then flies off the track and lands on another one and loops around to do it again etc. Or how he made a tree house with a door, windows and 'treasure chest' up a tree that he'd built to the maximum build height possible. Plus the biggest part is that at first he didn't know how to use a keyboard / mouse and now he's typing in words, using the shortcut keys, changing the view, opening the game from the desktop, choosing the correct saved game etc etc. It's amazing how fast they pick things up. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 14, 2019 Author Share Posted December 14, 2019 Got this commodore 1084 monitor for free, It had the power plug cut off for some reason. Covered in dust and come kind of tar stuff. Opened it up to look for the missing scart connection, doesn’t look like it was ever there. Cleaned up the dust and put a plug on it. Used an extension cord and powered it on outside on the driveway incase it was the exploding kind of monitor. Turned on fine. Only input I had to suit is a composite video cable and a 20 year old laptop with a composite video output. And it works! Doesn’t look particularly great, quite blurry but I’ll play around with settings or maybe a different cable type. Might be because it doesn’t like 640x480? ... hmmm maybe I should try it with a vcr or old video camera. I was hoping it’d have a nice crisp image for low res stuff. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h4nd Posted December 17, 2019 Share Posted December 17, 2019 Cool, cool. Watch out for those very nasty high voltages in the back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Slideways~ Posted December 18, 2019 Author Share Posted December 18, 2019 On 17/12/2019 at 14:25, h4nd said: Cool, cool. Watch out for those very nasty high voltages in the back. I've heard this can be a thing, I wasn't too worried though since it had been under a guys house for who knows how long without a power plug. But I did make sure not to do anything stupid. I wonder what kind of voltages there would be stored in big capacitors and how long would it stay charged? When I was 8 or 9 I got electrocuted by an exposed switch on a bench mounted sander at a friends house, still have the white mark on the end of my finger 28 years later. I remember not being able to pull my arm away, then putting it in the pool outside for some reason. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cozza Posted December 19, 2019 Share Posted December 19, 2019 I remember turning on a broken power point in a friend's garage at one point. I was not a smart child, put it that way. Now I teach children..... 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoKer Posted December 19, 2019 Share Posted December 19, 2019 On 14/12/2019 at 15:30, ~Slideways~ said: commodore 1084 monitor this was my 1st Playstation Screen I used in my Bedroom a teenager (nabbed it from my Primary School) so I didn't have to wait for Coro St to finish Played the PS Demo Doom Level heaps on that (had the T rex and Manta Ray) then got Destruction Derby / I still have all of these things 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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