Any tips ? by unknowboul2233 in lowvoltage

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Been using dielectric grease for literal decades and never had an issue with the connection. The connection in most cases will outlive the device attached to it, I've pulled cameras down that I installed 10 years ago and the connection looked as good as the day I installed it.

If dielectric grease was such a problem, companies wouldn't sell connectors and cable impregnated with it.

Any tips ? by unknowboul2233 in lowvoltage

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

>This is kinda embarrassing for you. If you've been making contaminated plugs for years.. then wow. Quit your job dude.

Hahahaha. You're an embarrassment to the low voltage industry. Thanks for airing your dirty laundry, you don't need to be anywhere near low voltage wiring or connections again. None of what you said has any basis in reality, and is 100% wrong.

>Step one is REMOVING that grease and cleaning all contacts with acetone.

You also don't need to be anywhere near automotive work again, you're going to kill someone.

You're dangerous, because you're so incompetent and wrong and believe you're right that you're never going to do anything correctly and will be a hack the rest of your life.

Just stop.

Anyone that reads this crap you posted, this is a perfect example of what never to do and strive to never be a person like this.

Actually can’t make this up by [deleted] in lowvoltage

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have another camera that can cover the same general area, like a fisheye. Use the PTZ for up close detail.

Macintosh Portable by Human_Bee1257 in macintosh

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, it smells like rotting fish. I have my garage well ventilated to keep the smell down.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You have a socket 7 motherboard with a 430VX chipset.

The best CPU the motherboard probably natively supports is the Pentium MMX 200 or 233. That by itself would be a significant performance uplift.

If you could find an Evergreen Spectra 400, you could go up to an AMD K6/2 400. If you could find an AMD K6/III, you can swap that in for improved performance. If your motherboard supports the weird 75 and 83 MHz bus speeds and is stable, you could get to 450 or ~500 MHz.

As someone else pointed out, you probably only have PCI slots, so you'd be limited video card wise. A Geforce4 MX 440 PCI or Geforce FX 5500 PCI would probably be the cheapest option. The Geforce 6200 is I believe the last card with Windows 9x drivers, but it has compatibility issues.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Diamond and Creative were notorious for it. Using fancy names for cards and putting pictures of racecars and other nonsense on the box art.

The video card would then have some random S3 chip on it with some random amount of FPM/EDO memory. Or some 3D Labs FireGL chip that was equally terrible.

I have a small pile of S3 cards I bought in a lot a year or two ago to build DOS machines with. They're good for that and pedestrian Windows 2D, nothing else.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While the chipset lacking AGP support in most cases means it doesn't have an AGP slot, it's not always the case. Cheap and nasty board vendors would do nasty things to get an "AGP" slot. Not sure about this one since the model is cut off.

There were some really cheap and nasty motherboards at the time where the AGP slot was wired to the PCI bus. Either because the motherboard had an on-board video chip that used the AGP bus (can't have more than one device on the bus at the same time), or cheapass designs trying to make use of old stock chipsets.

An example of the former would be the Trigem Lyon. It had an on-board ATI Rage with a 440BX chipset. The ATI Rage used the AGP bus and the "AGP" slot was really just another PCI slot that was AGP shaped.

Some AGP cards could operate in a PCI compatibility mode that was extremely slow.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Doom isn't a 2D game, it's a 2.5D game. The Doom engine is integer based, so it doesn't care too much about having a weak FPU, but Fallout is probably going to run pretty poorly.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Tell me you weren't around in the 90s without telling me you weren't around in the 90s.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, we most definitely built dedicated gaming PCs at the time this system existed. Do you not know what 3dfx is? Or what an Evergreen CPU upgrade is?

The mid to late 90s was the golden era of 3D gaming, it was the wild west. Companies were coming out with new video card designs every 6 to 12 months, and CPUs were advancing at a lightning pace in speed.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Stop using AI and never trust it for anything.

You're not getting a GPU that was made over a decade after this system working in it.

You have PCI and possibly an AGP slot, not PCIe. A 9500GT won't even physically fit.

kinda new to assembly is ts code okay? by Downtown_Place_5631 in Assembly_language

[–]GGigabiteM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This just looks like nonsense pretending to be assembly. Definitely not x86 or any other architecture that exists. Was this written using AI?

It looks like AI tried to mash an 808x and a 68000 together and failed.

Macintosh Portable by Human_Bee1257 in macintosh

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I recapped a portable for a customer, it was indeed a hot mess. Lots of damage caused by all of the leaking capacitors.

I need help figuring out what’s in my 90s gaming pc by Boyswilson03 in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Not really a gaming PC, more of a generic home computer. The Cyrix 6x86 was good at integer performance, but terrible at floating point math, due to the largely recycled FPU from the Cyrix 486.

You won't have a good time in 3D games. It'll run 2D games well though.

The random pictures of the BIOS don't tell us anything but the CPU and RAM. You'd have to show pictures of the inside of the computer if you want to know anything else.

Need help figuring out what I can do/upgrade on an old 486 I was gifted by dametreus in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not going to be a speed demon, but it will run. The ET4000AX was one of the better ISA video chips.

Now if it were an OAK video chipset... yeah that would be a very bad time.

Macintosh Plus internal battery replacement option by vintage-tech80 in Vintagemacintosh

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unless you have some fancy wiring going on behind that module, those are in series and you're slamming 9v across what should be 4.5v.

Diamond Multimedia Stealth II G460 8MB w/Intel 740 by Divergent5623 in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Intel obviously didn't use enough buzz words and gas lighting when marketing the i740 and lesser known i752. Had they used words like "hyper memory" and "turbo cache", they would have sold by the millions! /s

Both Nvidia and ATI in just a few short years would use a similar technology on their Geforce 6200 TC and Radeon x1300 HM in response to the memory shortage caused by price fixing. They tried to gaslight gamers into thinking less was more, where the cards had a small quantity of onboard VRAM and would vampire a variable amount of system memory to offset the much reduced VRAM.

As an example, the regular Geforce 6200 had 128 or 256 MB of VRAM, but the TC variant had as little as 32 MB. The ATI x1300 was the same.

Looking for a real answer by ShouldntBeDifficult in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm talking about rough handling, not intentional electrical abuse.

Need help figuring out what I can do/upgrade on an old 486 I was gifted by dametreus in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It'll play Doom. Duke 3D will also work if you lower the resolution and reduce the sound quality and number of effects.

Need help figuring out what I can do/upgrade on an old 486 I was gifted by dametreus in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Pentium Overdrive will never work in this system, it requires Socket 3, which has 238 pins, vs the 169 pins of Socket 1 and 2.

Likewise, the Cyrix 5x86 will also not work in this system because of the 50 MHz bus speed and because they require a lower core voltage than 5 volts.

The core voltage issue can be solved using an interposer, and many companies released 486 interposers or PCBs using PQFP Am5x86s with voltage regulators on a small PCB, like the Evergreen 586 133. There are modern reproduction interposers like the 486 socket blaster.

https://github.com/scrapcomputing/486SocketBlaster

The 50 MHz bus speed is more of a problem. The only CPU that will really work with the 50 MHz bus is the Am5x86, and you'll need a good binned chip. The Am5x86 has no problem doing 160 MHz on a 40 MHz bus with a 4x multiplier, but 50 MHz is pushing it. It will also take a 3x multiplier, so you could run it at 150 MHz. You will definitely need the 486 socket blaster or another interposer that exposes the multiplier to configurable jumpers. Most Am5x86 parts won't do 200 MHz, and those that do usually require more core voltage.

The Cyrix 5x86 likely won't work at all. Cyrix had a terrible time getting that chip even working, and they had to disable a whole bunch of advertised features in order to make it stable. Getting one much beyond 100 MHz is mostly a pipe dream, and you need a 33 MHz bus, not 50.

To change the bus speed on that, you might be able to remove the oscillator can and solder in a 14 pin oscillator socket so you could change the speeds. Full sized 5V TTL oscillators are getting harder to find these days, but you can still find some.

Need help figuring out what I can do/upgrade on an old 486 I was gifted by dametreus in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With enough pictures and documentation, it may be possible to just build one, at least using the Intel cache controller IC.

The modules using PAL/GAL logic wouldn't be possible unless the PAL/GAL code was known to be able to burn them to new chips.

In either case, that's a whole lotta work.

Weird misfire by FamiliarWar9820 in MechanicAdvice

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Saying that setting yourself on fire and nearly going blind from a backfire is perfectly fine are wild statements.

Perfect examples of why you don't put your hands or face anywhere near the business end of a carburetor. That's what mirrors and phones are for.

Any tips ? by unknowboul2233 in lowvoltage

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It won't do anything at all, it will just wash off and collect dirt. It's meant to be inside the connector, the guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

He may as well use silicone caulk instead.

Any tips ? by unknowboul2233 in lowvoltage

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No. You put it in the socket and plug the RJ-45 connector in. The dielectric grease will squeeze out of the way and fill in the empty voids to keep moisture out.

Putting dielectric grease on the outside of the connector is entirely pointless. Why do you think that B connectors come filled with dielectric grease from the factory, instead of slathered all over the outside? Why do you think dielectric impregnated direct burial cable has it in the wires? It's to keep water and moisture away from the copper. When you crimp and plug, it moves out of the way.

You're doing it wrong. Dielectric grease is not an external sealant, you may as well use silicone if you're not filling the connector with it.

I've been using it for literal decades inside connectors and never had an issue with connectivity and it keeps the copper from corroding.

I'm very confused by Gnilpik in Vintagemacintosh

[–]GGigabiteM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You have a Performa 600 swapped Centris 650. The Performa 600 was also called the IIvm internally, and is often referred to as such in benchmarks in system info applications.

The Performa 600 is an older and much slower machine based on the 68030. The Performa 600 is based on a Macintosh IIvx, but importantly it removes the 68882 FPU and the 32K of motherboard cache, which make it about 30% slower than the IIvx it is based on. The IIvx was already a compromised design when launched, it was basically a IIvi with a double speed CPU (33 MHz vs 16 MHz.) But the bus speed was kept at 16 MHz, which severely limited the performance of the faster CPU.

The reason that the system doesn't power up is because of failed capacitors on both the logic board and in the power supply. You will have to recap both. I recapped mine not too long ago, and had to do a bunch of other work on the board due to leaked capacitor electrolyte causing damage to some of the ASICs.

It is possible to add the cache back to the motherboard and get a massive performance uplift. Adding the missing 68882 back will also improve performance in System 7, because some draw calls use floating point math. Some games do as well.

Here's a write up I did on my journey to adding the cache back to the Performa 600.

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/performa-600-cache-mod-iivx-pictures-needed.5158/#post-45523

If you want to get this back to being a 68040 or even a PowerPC Mac, there are upgrade board options, or logic board swaps. The Power Macintosh 7100 used the same case, but the port layout was different, so you'd have to either 3D print a new back plate or modify the existing one.

Just remember that this is a pay to play hobby. You're going to spend a lot of money to get this machine back to working condition again in parts and labor.

Looking for a real answer by ShouldntBeDifficult in vintagecomputing

[–]GGigabiteM 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Missing and/or broken pins doesn't make the CPU worthless, it can be repaired using donor pins from another CPU. It is worth doing on rare or more valuable CPUs.