Recent content by Hak Foo

Joining the brigade of people with random suggestions: how are you loading the power supply? I know some power supplies get fidgety if you don't load all the rails, or only have a minimal amount of load. If you toss an old hard disc you don't care about on the PSU, does it impact anything...

If your board isn't deluxe with onboard code readers, a PCI POST card could be interesting. I recall buying one like this (http://www.qiguaninc.com/met/producten/producten119_en.html) which promised a bunch of additional diagnostic data, which came with a little booklet to decode the additional...

I hope that the era of keyboard scavenging is at an end. There are a galaxy of high-quality switches and keycaps available new now. You can even get new beamsprings. If anything, it's nice to be able to pick modern layouts.

If this is like every other external LS-120 I've ever seen, you can shuck it and have an IDE drive which can be mounted internally and used as either straight PATA or with a SATA-IDE adaptor. Windows 10 even still assigns it drive A. The bezels are hen's teeth though. I don't need it (got...

The CH32V305 is actually RISC-V. But it fits in the space of "cheap MCU available on a breakout board."

If you're not beholden to the RP2040, maybe the CH32V305? It advertises *51* GPIOs. The breakout I've used as a USB keyboard controller has like 42 of them broken out.

I showed up late, with a weirdly overengineered 386SX clone that was obsolete the day it left the factory. The parents likely decided it would be educational. I got into programming probably in significant part because it was like 1994, so without a modem or much of a local community, you were...

I want something dual-storey like the Cooler Master HAF XB. It gives you the all-around accessibility of a desktop case, with the opportunity to hide many of the sins of cable tangles. The original design had 2x5.25 bays and 2x3.5; I'd go for four 5.25 bays. Maybe rotate the PSU to improve...

"Couldn't do better" is a huge window though. Pretty much any 80-column machine (Apple II or an IBM compatible) in the early 1980s is going to cost you over $1000, and add a couple hundred for the monitor. Being able to say "you can bring this thing home for $200 and hook it to your TV" is a...

I think my biggest capacitor-plague victim was my first LCD monitor, a Viewsonic VX910 that I paid like $350 for. It lasted about 3 years and then wouldn't power up. The electrolytics on the board were bulging and burst, and replacing didn't help. Ironically, I had passed the monitor almost...

I was probably oversimplifying things. I figured if the memory is on the same ISA bus as other devices, any memory access is going to toggle the address lines on that bus, and doing that at 16MHz might annoy ISA devices. If it's on a separate bus, I could imagine only exposing accesses to the...

I'm wondering about timings. If it's targeting 6 or 8MHz, that might work okay. But if you wanted to use, say, a 16MHz 286, that would be feasible with the common 55ns SRAMs, but you don't want to run the rest of the ISA bus at 16MHz, and running at 8MHz would force wait states for memory. If...

I think that's at a different level. 0xEC as IDENTIFY DRIVE seems to be an IDE/ATA command, not something we can really present when it's a completely non-IDE device.

I had no problems with one bought off of AliExpress. You need to cut and jumper a few wires if you want to use it with the "16-bit wide port" mode and appropriately configured software for a marginal performance boost. See this post...

I suspect the Eng Sample chip is more a "chipset" than CPU. The CPU might be U12 under the heatsink.