XTIDE is a BIOS extension that helps to detect hard drives and probably a lot of other devices like Compact Flash and SD-cards. After I restored a 386 board at the end of 2024, I once more was confronted with a limitation of those old systems: HDD capacity.
Many 386 and even 486 systems are limited to hard drives no larger than 500MBs. That is plenty of space for such old systems since…
During one of my adventures at the scrapyard, I picked up a 486 motherboard – the BEK-tronic BEK-V429S. As it turns out, this board had fake cache chips installed! If you want to see the full story, here is the video in which I discover that fake chips.
But how is it possible that seemingly nobody caught on and identified the fake cache earlier? The company or individual who owned…
Owning a Sound Blaster back in the mid 90’s was probably a big deal – I wouldn’t know with my ESS AudioDrive. And although my ESS sound card wasn’t a real Sound Blaster from Creative, it was a compatible card which got the job done. Recently, a viewer sent me a Sound Blaster 32 PnP for repair. My first attempt to fix the card failed. There was just no way to get past a…
I am sure you have heard of Wake-on-LAN, or at least you have read it in one of the older BIOSes. It is a technology that allows you to power on your system. When WOL is fully functioning, you should be able to switch on your PC by sending a specific packet to the network adapter: The Magic Packet.
In a video I published on YouTube, you can see this in action. We used the web interface of my…
EPROMs and EEPROMs can be programmed using a programmer like the XGecu T56 / T48 / TL866II. Unfortunately, the programmer cannot resolve the Device ID to an actual model number. The below list should aid as a lookup for anyone who needs to understand what device and model is behind a given Device ID.
Device IDNameMFG NameType0115AM27C64AMD27C640189AM27128AAMD27128(12.7V…
Some time ago, a viewer of my channel sent me a broken SoundBlaster 32 PnP with the model number CT3670. This sound card seems to be special since it has an audio chip that was apparently also used on the AWE64. Furthermore, it has two memory sockets that allows us to install 32MB in form of 30-pin SIMM modules. This memory can be utilized to install sound fonts which will elevate your midi…
From time to time, we get to know that our CPUs are not bug-free. The terms ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ comes to mind. However, there are many more flaws that sneak into a final production of a microprocessor. Have you heard of the ‘FDIV’ bug in the original Pentium? This bug resulted erroneous floating point calculations. Intel fixed this flaw and offered…
Intel released Pentium II and Pentium III processors on the Single Edge Contact Cartridge – or SECC. This type of package was required because it allowed to move the level 2 cache chips from the motherboard closer the to silicone die. Intel wasn’t able to integrate the L2 cache into the CPU die yet. Later Pentium III models, also known as Coppermine, integrated 256kb of level 2 cache…
Some time ago, someone offered me six P2B motherboards for restoration. Since I got them for a relatively good price, I didn’t mind taking them off their hands. Unfortunately, I wasn’t immediately able to work on the boards due to other projects that I thought were more interesting. Little did I know that those six boards may be more interesting than I thought!
Based on a…
A guide to upgrade the Sound Blaster 2.0 with chips that enable the Creative Music System (C/MS).
Sound cards with ISA interface trigger that one nostalgic feeling in me and remain that one piece of technology I have fond memories of. That may be surprising since this was also the time when you had to constantly fight with resource conflicts: DMA, IRQ, and I/O ports are just a few of…