ACRPC.NET

My Vintage Computer Virtual Museum and blog page.

WANTED, Dead or alive! —

I am in search of two different “laptop” portables from the late 80’s.

  1. Toshiba T1600 – 80286 laptop with “blue” EGA monochrome LCD display FOUND
  2. Grid GridCase 1520 – 80286 laptop with “orange” Gas-Plasma monochrome display

If anyone has any leads on either one it would be much appreciated.  My offer on price is conditional on functionality and cosmetic condition.

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Repaired a few old motherboards. —

Found a few old motherboards in my storage, for some odd reason all 3 were missing their AT keyboard ports.  Put in an order to digikey for some 5-Din AT Keyboards ports and soldered them in.  The Acer Pentium board also had a badly leaking capacitor that was replaced.

Followup, The Acer board does not POST, not sure what its problem is, need to get a POST card to see whats hanging up.

On the plus side, the Zeos P60 and FIC 486 both POST, so they will soon be working machines!

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Partially recapped my PowerBook 100 —

I have partially recapped my PowerBook 100 with great success, it now boots up.

The down side is my soldering iron crapped out mid-project, so I will have to finish replacing all the old SMD aluminum caps later, but I got all the ones that were visibly leaking, and it now boots, so I will consider this a win.

I made a photo with capacitor values so I would remember after I pulled the caps off, I will attach it here (I did not mark the voltage values, other than the 1uF caps which were rated 50volt, all of the rest were 16volt, I had no 16volt parts, I recapped all mine with 50volt rated parts).

When this photo was taken I had already replaced the two 10uF nearest display header, you can see I have used radial caps and just bent them over to fit.  After this photo I got as far as all the 1 and 10uF parts in the lower right near mouse port.  I still need to do the 1uF parts near debug/reset buttons and near keyboard port and ALL of the 47uF and 4.7uF parts (though none of those have leaked, yet!).

capmap

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Sony DPP-SV55 (and SV77, SV88) and Windows 7 —

So I decided to pull out my old Sony dye sublimation photo printer which I hadn’t used in some time, only to find Sony dropped support for it after Windows XP.

After hearing about other peoples success with old scanners under “XP Mode” I figured I would try with this old printer, and it worked like a champ, minus a few flaws of “XP Mode” itself.  I will provide a basic overview of how to get it working below.

Installing “XP Mode” is out of scope for this tutorial, I am sure there’s several guides out there on this topic, this document will assume you have it installed and working already.

  1. Launch Virtual PC “Windows XP Mode”, wait for it to bring up an XP desktop window, with the printer plugged in and turned on go to the USB menu and click on the Sony DPP-SV__ usbselect 
  2. Then click YES to the “Attach” dialog yesusb
  3. Next install the Windows XP drivers for the printer in the XP Mode VM  driverinstall (this will fail if the printer is not attached following steps 1 & 2 because the installer checks for the presence of the printer).
  4. Print! (from XP Mode) I chose to install an image viewing (and printing) package within XP Mode called IRFANVIEW to make things a little more seamless with the XP Mode integration, that way I do not have to bring up the “FULL XP mode Virtual PC desktop”, only the IRFANVIEW application via the Windows 7 start menu when I wish to print a photo. irfanviewxpmode
  5. Here is where the “flaws” of “XP Mode” come in to play.  You must attach the printer under Manage USB Devices every single time you launch “XP Mode”, to do this when launching a lone Application, like IRFANVIEW, and the USB menu isn’t available in the tool bar like in desktop mode, just right click on its taskbar icon for your XP Mode application, while running, and you will find the “Manage USB Devices” option usbdevices

On a side note, unrelated to the virtualization used to get this printer working, the Sony printers have always over-saturated reds in their prints, I have found that in IRFANVIEW under Image > Color Correction (SHIFT-G) if you bump the R down to about -20 or -30 and in SOME cases bump B up to about +10 you will get spot on prints that should match your screen, the program even allows you to “save these values” as defaults for future use, so in the future to print just SHIFT-G, ENTER, CTRL-P, ENTER to set the color correction and print in just a few seconds, also note this does NOT touch your original image’s color, just whats displayed and printed for this instance of the image in IRFANVIEW.  These features are one of the main reasons I chose to use this IRFANVIEW as the default application for printing with my DPP-SV55.

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Recapped my SE/30… —

Won’t win any prizes, but I have recapped my SE/30 and restored it to 100% working condition.  Next Mac I recap I will be ordering and using tantalum capacitors, I was anxious to get this SE/30 working so I used radial electrolytic capacitors I already had on hand, looks like crap, but at least it works again.

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Decided I wanted a new “tweener” machine that has ISA slots… —

I knew I had a super 7 board with ISA lying out in the garage in parts box, found it was a Gigabyte GA-5SMM with a Cyrix 266 in it. Took a scrapped Compaq DeskPro EXD desktop style mini-ATX case (originally a Celeron 800 by its sticker), 20gb HD, 128mb RAM, CD-ROM, 3.5 & 5.25″ floppies, Intel Pro/100 NIC and tossed it all together to make a new rig.

Got Win95b loaded up on it, don’t have USB working yet, but the rest is running like a champ. I haven’t investigated the USB issues, but I believe the driver was just not part of any of the packages on gigabytes site, I might need to dig around SIS’s site for a while to see if they have 95b drivers for the USB chipset. USB is not real critical to me in this build though, since any file transfer will likely be from the network, but it would be nice to say its working 

It’s kind of ironic I stuck this in a Compaq case, because I guess this particular GA-5SMM was out of a Compaq with its nice big red “Compaq” BIOS splash screen.

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