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    Software for troubleshooting ISA VGA cards

    Sorry if this has been covered before. I couldn't find anything directly related. I have an ISA VGA card that displays weird stuff in text mode, but I can see the normal POST patterns (i.e. the weird characters are different and in the normal places where text would be). It seems that the...
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    Flash BIOS longevity

    I have some Pentium era motherboards with the BIOS in flash (e.g. MX28F1000PPC-12). How long should I expect the flash to hold the BIOS code? Would it be worthwhile to proactively reflash the BIOS to avoid data retention problems, or am I more likely to cause harm? I have heard of UV-erasable...
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    External Cache Diagnostic for 486?

    I have an MS-4145 VER 1 (PCI 486) board that fails to work right with the external cache enabled. It will boot Memtest-86 V2.8 from a floppy, but fails at the same point every time (15% into the first test). It doesn't display an error message or anything, it just winds up going through the...
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    Hip6008cb sop-16

    This is a PWM controller used to drive the buck converter on an ASUS SPAX socket 7 motherboard. I haven't found these anywhere online except AliExpress, and I haven't bought anything there before (and they don't do PayPal).
  5. U

    ATX power supply with -5V and big +5V +3.3V rails?

    Is there a new high-quality ATX power supply on the market that is suitable for early ATX server boards? The early ATX specification included the now-optional -5V rail, and was much more +5V and +3.3V centric than the V2.x specs, which are mostly about feeding lots of 12V to the DC-DC...
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    Did anybody build a Dual Socket 7 ATX motherboard?

    I know about the Tyan Tomcat D boards (Tomcat IIID S1563D, Tomcat IVD S1564D), but they are in the baby AT format (nice, but not what I am asking about right now). I am also aware of the dual Socket 8, Slot 1 and PGA370 boards, but they are not Socket 7. Did anybody produce a usable dual...
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    Memory addressing/architecture and system responsiveness

    In the 1980s, I recall shipping a bunch of systems based on PDP-11/23's and /53's, the occasional 11/44 or /73. A Q-bus -11 with 512KB and an ST-506 interfaced disk running RSX11M-PLUS was pretty responsive. You could easily put 1/2 dozen or more people on it and none of them would complain...
  8. U

    Living Computer Museum T-shirt sighting - film at 11

    I was buying gas today at a nearby "wholesale club" ($3.439 today - cheap for my area) when I saw a guy in a red "Living Computer Museum" T-shirt. I asked him where it was, and he said, "Washington. <long pause> Seattle." I said, "Oh, is that Paul Allen's collection?" He didn't know who that...
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    Geek milestones

    My nerdy little brain sometimes can't keep techno-stuff compartmentalized away from everyday life. Examples follow: My car reached 68000, 68010 and 68020 miles yesterday, 68030 and 68040 today. Sometime in the next year it will reach 80386 and 80486 miles. When I was working with PDP-11's a...
  10. U

    CDROM works, but can't really boot from it

    I have a 486 system with AWARD MODULAR BIOS v4.50G with an ID of 09/08/94-OPTI-802G-2C4UKD01-00 (I know it isn't quite 20 years old yet). I don't expect a BIOS this old to be able to boot from an IDE CD, but using the PLOP 5.0.14 boot manager I can get the UBCD 5.25 CD to boot to the menus...
  11. U

    12887 hack horror story (with a happy ending)

    I shut down and restarted my Pentium-100 Shuttle HOT-553 board last night and discovered that the DS12887A was dead. So I chewed up the top of the RTC chip from just past the clock symbol to the far end of the chip, and extracted the battery (it's a BR1225 in there, BTW), and got ready to add a...
  12. U

    Midnight PDP-11 Overclock

    Sometime in the late '80s I ran a software group that built systems that integrated equipment with embedded micros and multi-user computer systems (DEC PDP-11 and VAX at that time). We had an 11/83 (rack-mount BA23 plus another Q-bus chassis) that we used for a lot of development purposes...
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    Just found out I bought a fake cache 486 board

    My junk bin had a working 486 VLB board labeled "SIS 486G 3.3/5V Ver: H", with SiS 85C471 chipset and an Award BIOS. I ran NetBSD (0.9?) on it with a AM486DX2/80 CPU when the board was new-ish. It has 9 AA26257AK-15 chips soldered in (8 that don't work for cached data, and 1 that doesn't work...
  14. U

    Cleaning up green trace corrosion

    I pulled a '94 era 486 board ("ExpertBoard" with Opti chipset) out of the mothballs the other day just for the hell of it. I stuck a CPU, 32MB RAM, and an ISA video card on it and the BIOS came up, but said there was a keyboard error. Uh-oh. Of course the 3.6V barrel-type Ni-Cd battery had...
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