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CircuitBored

CircuitBored

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  • CircuitBored
    Has anyone else noticed that ebay's "Vintage Computing" section has been overrun by trash-tier early-00s x86 desktops at ludicrously high prices? There's always been an element of that sort of pricing but now it seems like everything is £100+ as standard.

    Don't even get me started on how expensive the actually-interesting Sun Ultra workstations are now :(
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    Iesca
    Iesca
    @finkmac "Did you mean...?" "NO, I really would like to search for the thing that I typed, thankyouverymuch."
    finkmac
    finkmac
    oh its even better because it'll be like "oh we thought you were searching for this, here are 20,000 listings". and if you click "search for what i typed" it returns like 100 listings
    • Haha
    Reactions: Iesca
    M
    max1zzz
    Even RS components dose that now, drives me up the wall. "Here's 100 random items rather than just saying we don't stock the thing you searched for". Though if we are moaning about search features I would like to complain about how searching by price on ebay / amazon magically makes half the results disappear.... Strangely it's always the cheaper results that disappear....
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    CircuitBored
    Oh, what fresh hell is this?
    IMG_0258.jpeg
    CircuitBored
    IMG_0083.jpeg

    Ghostly SE/30
    CircuitBored
    This is hands-down one of the strangest things I've ever seen in an electronic device. Do we think it's there for ease of replacement or because someone said "sod it, put it wherever it fits"?
    IMG_7402.jpeg

    (Sony HVC-3000P)
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    Phipli
    Phipli
    Agree with demik.

    Used to be common to find high power parts thermally coupled to the chassis or case. Weird thing is that it isn't mounted from the PCB, but perhaps they were expecting vibration / movement?
    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    @demik @Phipli oh yes, I've seen the chassis used as a heatsink plenty. I've just never seen a component like this just floating, connected only by a block connector! Having given the rest of the unit a once-over it seems like they really had no other place to put it, as the two main control boards are quite surprisingly air-gapped from the chassis, save for some grounding wires.
    luRaichu
    luRaichu
    CircuitBored
    I thought this was the coolest setup back in the day. This was right at the tail end of PPC's relevance.

    2012-08-04 19.16.48.jpg
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    Snial
    Snial
    I think PPC is still relevant!
    1. It proved the principle of emulation for jumping CPU architectures! (cf the history of 286, x86, x64, ARM64 emulation mess in Windows: http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm)
    2. It took us into the Mac OS X era and 64-bit era (just).
    3. It took us close to max GHz!
    History_SE30_Dude
    History_SE30_Dude
    For a long time I used both my 1.42 MDD and a Intel Mini in a similar setup. I found some software I can't remember the name that allowed me to use my keyboard and mouse across both systems it worked really well from what I remember. I thought I was super cool with that setup.😎🤓
    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    @Phipli The second computer was a Quicksilver, which I upgraded to dual 1GHz not long after this photo was taken. The eMac can indeed only mirror its video, sadly.
    CircuitBored
    CPU photos, eh?

    IMG_8802.jpeg
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    Snial
    Snial
    68030 Hey, I guessed right! I wondered if it was a 68000 to begin with, but then I counted the pins and figured it was about 126, so started googling for CPUs with about that many! It's defo not a Transputer, they have 84 :) !
    Phipli
    Phipli
    1280px-Motorola_MC68030RC33B.JPG


    There is always the photo on the Wikipedia article to compare against. But I didn't think to go searching.
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    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    It is a rather pretty bit of silicon, I must say!
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    CircuitBored
    Behold: The Umapple Power Macintapdra C16350ci
    IMG_7223.jpeg


    Fear it.
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    Snial
    Snial
    Yes, it's less like a 1990s PC than the PM4400 was. I remember taking my beloved PM4400 apart to add RAM or cache or a PCI TV card and being aware of how razor-sharp all the burrs on the casing were as well as how much effort it took to prise the casing apart: just like a PC, about to inflict war-wounds on the faithful.
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    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    @joshc It's grown on me a lot, I just wish it wasn't ever so slightly wider than a Q650 so I could stack them more neatly.
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    Snial
    Snial
    I've been doing some performance analysis on the 603e at 160MHz. Because it, like the 601, 604 and 750 all have one FPU it's relatively strong on FP. I estimate that with the MrC compiler (not MW) it could achieve 115MWhetstones/s, making it 20% faster than a Cray-1 at 98MWhetstones/s in vector mode (it helps that it all fits in L1 cache :-D ). The 603e is a SuperComputer!
    CircuitBored
    I stitched these magazine pages together for a project I'm working on - here's some PowerPC-era goodness.

    pinnacles improved.jpg

    Filling in missing imagery is not something I've ever attempted in a photo editor before. The original two pages were missing the inside edges so I had to re-fabricate the edges of the two monitors on the right and create some mountain and sky.
    CircuitBored
    Tiger, tiger, burning bright
    In the disc drive, out of sight.
    What immortal Mac of i
    could tame thy instability?

    What update could stabilise
    Unix system's fourth reprise?
    You will find yourself in heaven
    (Once you upgrade to dot eleven)
    CircuitBored
    OVERTEMP
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    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    @cheesestraws I am having defenestrative urges toward the Quad right now. It sure would be colder out there...
    Phipli
    Phipli
    Grumble grumble still no heating grumble.
    20231018_202321.jpg
    • Wow
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    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    Well, it turns out that PC coolant has a shelf life of only three years. For some reason I thought the stuff I have would last five years. Ah well, time to completely flush and refill the Quad again... might be a good opportunity to attempt to cram a reservoir in there.
    CircuitBored
    It is now cold enough for the Quad to come out of hibernation! After a coolant top up and a bit of fan lubrication she is sitting pretty and ready for space heater duty.
    IMG_6916.jpeg
    CircuitBored
    After a very long hiatus I am pleased to report that the Pulsar lives again.
    IMG_6883.jpeg
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    beachycove
    beachycove
    What was so unique about the second 604e card? Was it the configuration of the processor slot, or was it necessary to connect the two processors somehow above and beyond just plugging them into the processor slots on the logic board?
    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    @beachycove The 2nd slot has a custom pinout and the 2nd card has some custom logic on it to accommodate for the oddness that comes with having what is basically two CPUs wired in parallel. The 2nd "ASPD" CPUs are also flipped compared to a normal PCI PowerMac CPU so as to not block the first PCI slot. There's a ribbon cable that has to run between the cards too. The ASPD CPUs are insanely rare.
    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    The above is basically just what I've gleaned from contemporary magazine articles and such. There's also a little jumper cable that has to bridge the cards for dual-CPU mode. I'm fairly certain that both CPUs share data lines though.
    CircuitBored
    Just bought a PowerBook G4 Titanium while on holiday, demonstrating my absolute lack of self control when it comes to cheap, lonely old Macs. Luckily it has the exact opposite broken and roughed-up bits of my other TiBook so I should be able to meld them into one quite nice one and one utterly awful one.
    CircuitBored
    Sometimes a diode will simply decide that it is time for current to flow in neither direction any more.

    tempImageZDGkBW.jpg


    This is possibly one of the most bizarre component failures I have ever seen. The rectifier in this PSU failed and had created a dead short. It turns out that two of the diodes had split in half while the other two had simply turned into 0 Ohm resistors.
    C
    cheesestraws
    on average, they're still letting current through in the right number of directions!
    CircuitBored
    CircuitBored
    Better safe than sorry! The new diodes are significantly chunkier than the originals.

    IMG_6850.jpeg
    CircuitBored
    I finally gave this hunk of junk some love and, hey presto. It's alive! All it took was a whole new logic board...

    110MHz, 40MB RAM, and what I believe is the original 2GB hard drive, which is quite a "vocal" disk.

    IMG_6803.jpeg
    CircuitBored
    IMG_6650.jpeg

    The SE/30 Reloaded is alive! After months of chasing my own tail, so sure that there couldn't be a single bad solder joint or faulty component left to test, I finally had the brainwave of removing the CPU and putting it back in again. Sure enough...
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