New website - Rush.Gifts

I love Amazon wishlists, but nobody knows where to find them.

Rush.Gifts simply links to wishlists for me and my family.

  

Subdomains like Dylan.Rush.Gifts will link to specific lists.

Packard Bell Axcel 130 restoration

 

 

I purchased a robust collection of an Axcel 130 along with its monitor, boxes, manuals, peripherals. I was really enticed by the stickers on the desktop which promised "Packard Bell Navigator", Microsoft Works, etc. Unfortunately, when I brought it home, it wouldn't boot. I explored some of this in a Vogons post.

With so much of the original material included, I really couldn't help myself.

I believe some of the software promised here was missing from the hard drive.

The original board with some cards I tried adding 

The culprit: a leaky battery. This seems to be such a problem with these models that I couldn't find any without a leaky battery. This Youtuber found the same issue.

 

I desoldered the battery and cleaned up the corrosion, but I still could not boot - the BIOS kept claiming a missing operating system.

I was lucky to find a replacement board just down the road from me. This IBM board came with its own processor and RAM.

 

The IBM board's floppy connect had all of its male pins populated, while my cable (and all my other cables) had a female pin blocked, so I created a little adapter to fit them together.

I could also boot from my CF adapter using the IBM board. The board fit in the case and worked with the AT power supply. The ports were in a different order, yet fit just right, so now the subtle labels are amusingly mismatched.

I also had to replace the 3.5" drive, but now everything works! I may try to switch the drive's plastic face to match the colors again.

The next step is to wait for the replacement ISA riser to arrive so I can install some more cards, and try to fix the monitor's power switch, which needs to be held down for it to work.

Jankily driving my vintage computers with new USB devices

Github

 

Using a Raspberry Pi, one or two Arduinos, and possibly a cannibalized PS2 mouse, you can create a device that translates modern USB inputs to PS2 input for a vintage device.

This project is basically a very janky version of USB4VC. USB4VC is a much more polished, well-engineered and maintained product. I built JankPiPS2 before I knew about USB4VC. I am putting it on GitHub in case someone may find it useful.

In the current incarnation there are two Arduinos, although you could probably just use one. One Arduino uses the ps2dev library to emulate a keyboard. The other controls a mouse.

I couldn't get the Arduino to emulate a mouse, so instead, I cannibalized a PS/2 roller mouse. There were two clicky buttons which would click if I brought them up to +5v, and the two quadrature encoders used for rolling. The encoders have four pins: GND, +5V, A and B. A and B would cycle as the ball rolls around. So I brought X-A, X-B, Y-A, Y-B, L and R to pins 4,5,6,7,8 and 9. The Arduino cycles the encoders to simulate movement and clicks the buttons. I actually works great and is much easier than emulating PS/2, BUT it is slightly slower than emulation - it has to "roll" the ball!

If you'd rather have serial mouse input, I have found that USB-Mouse-to-Serial works very well.

So this is about $20 worth of parts not including the Raspberry Pi. If you are very frugal this is probably the cheapest way to connect nested USB inputs to a vintage machine.

 

Keyboard-driving Arduino on the left with pins 2 and 3 driving PS/2 data. Raspberry Pi, hub pictured. Mouse-driving electronics in a little box behind the hub.

Mouse-driving Arduino soldered to the zombie mouse's encoders and clickers.

 

 

Love191.Live - Streaming Loveline episodes 24/7

 This is a simple internet radio station using Icecast and liquid soap (internet radio streaming tools)

 

https://love191.live/

World Records for Overclocking Obscure Hardware Combinations

 
I gathered four LGA775 mobo's - 3 from Craigslist and 1 from eBay. I also gathered a few CPU's from my local PC recycler (RE-PC in Seattle) and eBay. All of these parts are dirt cheap so I won't be heartbroken if they die.

For my GPU I pulled my 3080 out of my daily gaming rig. So I set out to get world records with the oldest CPUs that would run Windows 10 and a modern GPU.

My first rig was an Intel confidential / engineering sample QX6700. I put this under a modern Zalmann cooler - one of the only ones I could find with LGA775. For some reason this CPU would not go above 3.2ghz. I am pretty sure it was the CPU and not the mobo - no matter what FSB or multiplier I gave it, it wouldn't top 3.2ghz.

I paired this with 8gb of DDR2-800 ram and hilariously, an NVMe drive on the other PCIe slot.

I got a TimeSpy overall score of 4661. The graphics scores were fine but the CPU scores were understandably abysmal. But this is the world record for the combination of QX6700 + RTX 3080 - because nobody has submitted benchmarks for this combo.

dylanrush`s 3DMark - Time Spy score: 4661 marks with a GeForce RTX 3080 (320bit)

At almost 20 years old, the QX6700 was very snappy, especially with a modern SSD. I really think it would perform fine for a person just doing office work and internet browsing.  

 

The Pentium D 805 was my first real overclocking chip. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to properly boot into Windows 10. So I put it away for another day. I also had a Pentium D 945. As far as I know, this is the oldest chip that will possibly boot into Windows 10.

I put this chip between a ASUS P5W Deluxe (Intel 975X chipset) and a new Raidmax 240mm AIO cooler. The GPU was again my 3080. This time around I procured some 1066mhz DDR2 RAM from Corsair.

With voltages in the rather extreme range (1.65v CPU, I think 1.7v FSB and 1.5v NB), I was able to get the CPU up to 4.9 ghz (!), stable enough to run a benchmark.

Time Spy didn't run on this chip - probably lacking some instructions. Fire Strike did, though. I have the lowest Fire Strike benchmark ever submitted for a 3080. But again I have the world record, this time for the combination of Pentium D 945 + RTX 3080. I truly think I may be the first person to ever combine this CPU and GPU. I also might be running the fastest Pentium D in the world right now.
 

 

Two Compasses That Always Point To Each Other

 A wedding gift for my brother and his bride to be.

When sitting still it's a normal compass. When it's tapped or moved, it will get its position with GPS, send this to a server, and get back three bearings: the direction towards your house, the direction towards the companion compass, and magnetic north. Hold the compass so that magnetic north is under the red arrow and start walking where you need to go.

Based on the SparkFun asset tracker board

Restoring a 1997 IBM Aptiva

I found an IBM Aptiva 2127-E26 on Craigslist. It had a ton of charm so I decided to purchase it and restore it.

The original specs were:

• AMD K6 233mhz
• 256mb RAM (beefy for the time - this was likely upgraded later)
• 6GB HDD
• Crystal 4237 audio
  
• ATI Rage II+
• Windows 2000 was once installed, but it had been wiped. Windows 95 was the original OS.
  

It came in a quite vintage and unique 90's case.

A beige CD-RW/DVD drive is shown here which is obviously not stock. The original CD drive did not want to read some of the disks I had burned, so I replaced it with this. Unfortunately this drive quit as well so I've since replaced it again.

While the exterior is beautiful, the case is removed in a rather violent way by grabbing the front and yanking it off. This seems to have killed the original IDE hard drive and a bargain bin replacement.

Front case removed

So I replaced the hard drive with a IDE to SD card adapter. This thing is great. You can swap out the SD card in the back, if you want to make backups, transfer files quickly or swap out operating systems. Using a design I found on Thingiverse, I 3D printed a bracket for it that works really well.

I also added this nice 3COM NIC from the late 90's.

I have a few computers in my office and they're all hooked up to a 4-way HDMI/USB switch. Ideally I'd be able to use this machine with the switch, so I wouldn't have to pull out a new keyboard, mouse and monitor every time I wanted to play retro games.

Adding the PC to the huddle

 

My KVM switch with an audio switch alongside

 

So I set about trying to get this old hardware working with my modern input and output. This was the most challenging part of the project.

The first challenge was the display, which was VGA only. I tried several cheap VGA to HDMI adapters all covered in this Vogons post with mixed and disappointing results. When in DOS mode, the VGA signal is 70hz, and all of the adapters I tried just tried to output 70hz to HDMI, which was not supported by my monitor.

I also snagged a Matrox G450 as a period-correct adapter with DVI input. Sadly the G450 had problems with EDID with my monitor when using DVI, but I decided to keep it anyway and to keep pursuing VGA.

Matrox G450

 I finally landed on the Extron RGB-HDMI 300-A which almost did the job out of the box.

The one issue I had was again EDID. The Extron will pass this through HDMI by default which of course led to a broken 640x480 display in Windows. The Extron can also emulate EDID if you disable HDMI data, but the emulated 1920x1080 EDID wasn't honored by Windows - the best I could do was 1024x768. So I severed the EDID pins (#15 and #11) on my VGA cable and finally Windows stopped caring about what my monitor "supported". I was able to set a 1920x1080 resolution in Windows and now the whole thing works great.

VGA cable with the EDID pins severed

Now on to the input. My KVM acts as a USB hub. I wouldn't be able to use the generic USB to PS2 adapters because I only have one USB connection coming from my USB KVM switch. 

This computer does have USB ports, which work when you're logged on to Windows, but the BIOS does not support HID devices, and I doubt DOS would either. I didn't want to have to grab another keyboard and mouse to use outside of Windows 98.

So I used an Arduino Uno with a Sainsmart USB Host shield to connect my keyboard and mouse. I used the ps2dev library to emulate the PS2 keyboard using GPIO pins. I tried doing this with the mouse but was unsuccessful. So I bought a TTL to RS232 adapter and use that to emulate a serial mouse.

My very rough Arduino sketch is here.

It took awhile to make this reliable but it works quite well now, with not too much lag.

The custom adapter with serial output for the mouse, and PS2 output for the keyboard. The top shield is just an Arduino proto shield so I could solder the PS2 and serial connections.

USB input on the middle shield

 

I named this PC "Little Blue" - after IBM's now sort of antiquated nickname of "Big Blue"

The bad ass boot logo

Yes, it can browse the web using RetroZilla

Old school Roller Coaster Tycoon