Trash to treasure (rescuing 286 and more retro hardware )

[@catriona_drummond]

I LOVE that rainbow firmware message from the Graphics card! Awesome! :D

[@necro_ware]

Yes, the OAK BIOS message is very nice.

[@catriona_drummond]

@@necro_ware RGB before it was cool :P

[@86smoke]

This video was randomly suggested to my by youtube algorithm. So - 1. it sometimes does its work properly, 2. you just got yourself another subscriber :) Now I'm going to explore this channel more.

[@necro_ware]

Thank you and hope you'll enjoy it ;)

[@lisandro3614]

Asus P2B! I had the «P2B-F» variant 20 years ago. An absolute beast, I had my first truly successful overclocks using that board.

[@attiliofiandrotti]

Me too, I recall pushing a Celeron 300 to 450 or so

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

I have a p2b98-xv board in my Pentium II. It’s a similar board but has an onboard ati graphics chip instead of an AGP slot. Wonder if I could solder one on and have it work.

[@agentkruger]

Merci, c'était très intéressent 👍👍❤❤

[@JorgeCarvalho_web_dev]

Hi my friend! What a nice find! I wish I could find something similar here in Portugal! Congrats for this pickup!

[@necro_ware]

Hi Jorge! Thank you for watching! Yeah, sometimes it's just luck :D Many people don't actually know, what they are throwing away....

[@Hessi]

You did a great job again. I didn't expect something else.

[@n.h.s.a.d.m.]

The large board at 2:25 appears to be for a CRT monitor or TV. Good video, by the way.

[@necro_ware]

Thank you! Yes, I guess something like that too.

[@austinmaxi]

Enjoyed the vid! its great to see how interchangeable stuff from that era is. I have to ask... 286 Overclock? :D

[@necro_ware]

Hehe :D I knew you would ask it! I'll think about it, you asked for real world benchmarks and I have to think about how to make that. Overclocking for 286 happens in the same way as I showed it for the 386, with the crystal oscillator, however it is even more complicated to find proper benchmarks for 286. I have two 286 mainboards now and I'll make some tests behind the scene. If I have an interesting result, I'll do a video, ok? :)

[@austinmaxi]

@@necro_ware yay! no worries. I thought the process would be similar to the 386 to be honest. Its interesting to me at least how much performance wasn't fully unleashed from CPUs from the manufacturer, meaning you had to buy a whole new main board and CPU to gain performance if you didn't know about changing the crystal to control the speed of the processor. So many people must have had to upgrade every year to stay on the cutting edge of speed to run the latest software when, in some cases the hardware was the same just made to run faster and was perfectly capable all along just turned down to sell higher models. something that Intel are still doing today unfortunately.

[@cd-lf8xm]

You do great videos thanks mate !!

[@necro_ware]

thank you very much!

[@BlackEpyon]

I take it that the "high" and "low" is because the BIOS ROM chips are only 4-bit word width? This was the case with early RAM chips as well, with 1-bit and 4-bit chips being common well into the early 90's. I recently had to reverse-engineer a quarter of the motherboard for an XT clone I've been fixing up (no technical reference manual to pull schematics from), to trace a memory error, and got a good understanding of how the memory control on these old computers worked. The error turned out to be due to a bad 74LS00, one of the gates was bad, and it caused memory bank 3 to switch off when bank 4 was enabled.

[@necro_ware]

Almost right. The ICs are 8-bit, but the AT mainboards can access BIOS in 16-bit words (two bytes). So low means lower byte and high means upper byte. If you have two BIOS ICs every second byte is located on the other ROM. With the memory it's similar on 286 and 386SX. There the memory bandwidth was 16-bit, that's why the 30-pin SIMM modules had to be used in pairs. Each such module was 8-bit, so you had 16-bit with two models. On 386DX and 486 the memory bus is 32-bit, that's why you had to use a set of four 30-pin SIMM modules. The PS/2 memory modules (72-pins) were 32-bit already, that's why you could use single module there.

[@BlackEpyon]

@@necro_ware You're right. I completely forgot that 286s are 16-bit. (facepalm) Most of my playing around with hardware is either Pentium class machines or XT-class machines. I've got one 16-bit machine, my Tandy 1000 RSX. I've got both SIMM slots populated with 4MB sticks. Now I know why both sticks have to be identical. The video RAM on that machine is in two banks of 256x4-bit chips (one bank soldered, one socketed, as you know), so the Acumos AVGA2 chip uses an 8-bit VRAM bus despite being a 16-bit chip? Or was that just Tandy cutting corners? I've seen at least one other example of that chipset using 256x4 VRAM chips.

[@sebastianwalker1081]

Fantastisch!

[@necro_ware]

Danke, danke! :)

[@muaxky]

I've spotted this MME chip at 04:29. It kinda looks like an Z80 clone from an east german computer like a robotron. Do you remember of what type of computer it came from or is it just some replacement part that was floating arround somewhere? :)

[@necro_ware]

That's right, you eagle eye! Unfortunately I don't have a robotron in my possession. I bought once a bag full of ICs harvested by someone somewhere, because there were some chips in the pile I needed. Some GDR ICs were among them. I kept them, because I found it exciting , but I don't know, if they are working. May be one day I get my hands on one of such machines and then I can give it a try.

[@bundesautobahn7]

Für den einen originalen Award-BIOS bin ich ziemlich nostalgisch, weil ich ihn auf meinem alten 286er von Karstadt hatte. Ich verstehe aber nicht, wieso sich nichts einrichten lies. Ich weiß, dass wenn man Typ 49 in dem BIOS auswählt, man dann die benutzerdefinierte Festplattengeometrie eingeben können soll. Vielleicht war es einfach inkompatibel mit der Hauptplatine.

[@necro_ware]

Mit einer inkompatiblen Festplatte kann es nicht viel zu tu haben, die Einstellungen müssen veränderbar sein sogar wenn die Platte gar nicht angeschlossen ist. Ich bin nicht der einzige, der dieses Problem hatte. Vielleicht gibt es eine magische Tasten Kombination, die erlaubt die Einstellungen zu verändern, ich bin ganz Ohr. Jedenfalls gingen leider nur voreingestellten Werte, man konnte keine benutzerdefinierte Werte eingeben.

[@catsspat]

2:43 "GoldStar" trivia. It's a South Korean company that eventually became LG. You know, the same LG that pretty much owns the big OLED screen market currently.

[@necro_ware]

Yes, GoldStar was the name before it became LG.

[@BlackEpyon]

Used to have a GoldStar TV, years ago, and I think I've still got a GoldStar multi-I/O controller kicking around somewhere.

[@jimbox114]

Thats great. There is only 1 local area that accepts e-scrap. They won't have anything to do with trying to save anything. I even offered to pay them double what it scraps for and they wanted nothing to do. Its a shame because I suspect they get a lot of old computers.

[@necro_ware]

Same here, no way to buy anything from scrap yard. I get this stuff from Ebay, which is sometimes a win and sometimes a loss.

[@MrHBSoftware]

@@necro_ware i live in Portugal and there are two local srapyards were i can buy e-scrap,although very rarely something old or interesting appears there.... one of them sells no problem but the other is expensive and reluctant to sell because of so alleged data privacy reasons....they even destroy the hard drives and whatnot....they have a bunch of 3dfx cards there, those with multiple cpus, that they refused to sell to me, guess they went to check their prices online and got super greddy...they are gathering dust there for years, some day an inspection comes there or maybe during a "spring cleanup" and i am sure they will toss the cards in the big bag for shredding....makes me a little bit sad...today i bought an olivetti 286 pc in miserable shape,very rusted.. opened it up and surprise there is a western digital caviar 86mb drive inside, the black ones with white letters...those are super reliable and my favourite hard drive series, i am testing the computer and the drive this weekend and will post a video on that. i am very anxious i hope the hdd works. i also bought there a miniscribe 20mb mfm drive that was stuck, in order to avoid snapping the heads i opened it and freed the heads very gently. then i rotated the platters by spinning the flyweel on the bottom by hand, the heads did not appear to be disturbed or dislodged...but the stepper motor was badly seized when i tryed to rotate it, i ended up rotating/dislodging the "interrupter" that says "do not rotate" by accident. the drive then threw me some blinking lights that meant an error with head positioning and sector zero...i eventually got the interrupter adjusted to a place were that error does not appear anymore but now it blinks again in a different pattern indicating a "seek error dring burn in or recall"...do you have any idea what can it be? is it worth trying to fit the drive onto a pc and doing a LLF? or since its throwing an internal error and blinking the lights it wont be recognized and i need to sort it first? the drive seeks well and sounds healthy, i still remeber how a good drive of that vintage sounds like

[@BlackEpyon]

Here in my area of Canada, all the electronic waste goes to the local Bottle Depot, who handles all kinds of recycling. Of course, since it's a government contracted operation, they don't let you in the back room to see any of the old computers.

[@BlackEpyon]

Found in the "trash." That is seldom possible where I live, thanks to electronics recycling, which means the best chance to get retro stuff is on eBay or Craigslist. To avoid jacked up prices on eBay, go for the stuff listed as "parts or repair" and just fix it up yourself.

[@necro_ware]

By "found in the trash" means, I bought a box of electronic scrap and found this inside. Not, that I found it by going down the street. This is not possible here since many years as well...

[@BlackEpyon]

@@necro_ware You can tell somebody already went "gold mining," since all the socketed chips were yanked. I hate those guys. You don't even get much gold from it.

[@hyp3rvirus]

Could you please to upload new bios for 286 somewhere. Both of odd and even roms have equal AMI firmware?

[@necro_ware]

I don't have this board anymore, but you can find compatible BIOS on the Ultimate Retro project. Just search for a similar board: www.ultimateretro.net/en/

[@hyp3rvirus]

​@@necro_ware can i write both of roms with same firmware? i will write to modern dip chips because it is working for 386 and 486 boards

[@necro_ware]

@@hyp3rvirus No, odd contains higher bytes and even contains lower bytes. Two roms contain different data.

[@dawidoszkiewicz5607]

It seems that the VGA card was registered in FCC directly by OAK Taiwan.

[@necro_ware]

Oh, now you really go deep into the old videos :D

[@dawidoszkiewicz5607]

@@necro_ware I'm just picking what is interesting to me don't looking on upload dates. This is retro right? :)

[@ratos74]

10:51 Made by Oak Technologies

[@infi84]

The ALS100 card has an OPL3 clone ;)

[@necro_ware]

Yes, and it's soooo bad :)

[@infi84]

@@necro_ware It should sound the same though as it is a direct clone ^^ ...signal quality might differ though and is often worse than on other cards.

[@necro_ware]

Oh yes, you are actually right. Somehow I mixed it with the AD1816 chip, which was on the TerraTec Base-1. ALS100 has an OPL3 clone indeed.

[@JARVIS1187]

"Starten von MS-Dos"... You tend to use german versions more often, don't you? Is there a reason why?

[@necro_ware]

It's may be because I live in Germany?! :D

[@JARVIS1187]

@@necro_ware das erklärt es natürlich! Grüße aus Münster!

[@necro_ware]

@@JARVIS1187 Hehe ;) Ebenfalls Grüße aus Hannover....

[@e1woqf]

@@JARVIS1187 Hi; Grüße ebenfalls aus Münster!

[@HuntersMoon78]

It would be so irritating if today's PC's counted up the RAM that slowly, I mean counting 8GB, 16GB and 32GB at that speed

[@necro_ware]

Yes it would. The PCs back in the days didn't just count the memory, but also made some simple memory check. That's why it took so much time. Later, when the memory size increased, mainboards stopped scanning and checking the memory, they just read the data from SPD chip, which was on the memory modules since SDRAM DIMMs.

[@Megabobster]

Turn on your PC now because you might need to use it in a few weeks!

[@FindusXP]

Usually a BIOS setting allowed to skip the Memory check, but the First count was Always performed.