Search results

With the camera at this angle the soldering and alignment looks good.

From that picture I wouldn't be surprised if you've got a short between pins on the CF socket.

I just received another board, a 386SX, with some Varta damage, and it's got cheesy SIMM sockets, too, with some physical damage.

Turbo Pascal, now that's a surprise!

I have used the technique of using a heavy copper wire (like solid 14 ga) and plenty of flux and solder, and a heavy iron tip, to successfully remove parts like DB-25 connectors from boards like the Xerox 820. I didn't think to use that on the 60 pins worth of dual SIMM sockets on the 386...

Yeah, I don't think removing 30-pin SIMM sockets (60 pins since they are sistered) is something I'll be doing again any time soon. If ever. I managed to accomplish what I wanted, w/o wrecking the motherboard. So I'm happy. In general, despite (or perhaps because of) having been doing this...

@GiGaBiTe I'm not recommending it either. But there was no way *I* was going to manage to unsolder those things without wrecking the board. Each socket is a dual, 60 pins, 8 of which go to a power or ground plane. I was never able to fully clear the solder properly from some of those ground...

Yes, IMHO, current modern Unicomp is not as good as the mid-'80s Model Ms that I've been using for decades.

I'll take it.

I'm not sure where I found this article, years ago. (but I've been using those 8085 instructions since Jesus was a little boy)

Microsoft did use the 8080 -> 8086 translator in their early work. So it did turn out to have an actual valid use.

One motherboard had some not-fully-decoded I/O ports and while scanning for something we managed to blow the Flash BIOS. That caused a lot of cussing.

Yeah, I saw that. (I follow that blog) 386MAX and related products were very complicated.

I tried to use a motorized vacuum solder sucker and was getting nowhere. I don't have enough experience with hot air, and was afraid to try it. There's a guy on Twitter who does this with hot air, no trouble. So... I took the motherboard for a ride on a Bridgeport milling machine and removed...

At Qualitas, our in-house debugger was 386SWAT. I added Windows features to SWAT that required a small helper VxD. There was a DOS resident device driver in the MZ stub.

Well, I know of at least one that did use the MZ portion. I wrote a VxD called CAVEMAN for Rex Conn for use in 4DOS. It created a WIN386 VM with no visible window, and ran programs there, moving the I/O between it and the GUI 4DOS app. The MZ stub had actual code in it. Looking at the source...

Of course a Win3.x/9x VxD has an MZ header and an LE header.

I replaced the physically broken SIMM sockets on this random 386 motherboard, and it it works with 32MB.

Gotta hand it to MSFT for backwards compatibility. Those binaries still work today on a 64-bit Windows 10 command prompt. I guess the MZ header part which loads the Phar Lap, etc. is simply skipped because it sees a 32-bit PE section.

Yes, I guess sometimes the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Before Qualitas I used the Phar Lap DOS extender (and Metaware High C) at STSC for our PC APL product. For a long time I used (at home) a 32-bit flat model code producing C compiler that was part of one of the...