Click on a chip to drag it to the correct position. Press the ‘r’ key on your keyboard to rotate the chip. Press “Check” to evaluate your chips placement. Make sure that the chips are not overlapping! Overlapping chips, or chips that are too close to each other will be counted as misaligned.You can also see which chips are active when the corresponding RAS and CAS lines are…
Camera for Chip Markings
Click “Start Camera” to scan chip markings. Adjust sliders and invert image to improve text detection. Click and drag on the OCR video to draw a rectangle for OCR focus; click outside to clear, double-click inside to clear, or click and drag inside to move. This tool is limited to supported chips only, but will be gradually extended.
The camera I tested…
Few games capture the magic of ‘90s gaming like Tomb Raider. Released in 1996, it introduced us to Lara Croft and set a benchmark for 3D action-adventure games. For retro gaming enthusiasts, there’s nothing quite like playing the original Tomb Raider on a period-accurate PC, especially with the enhanced visuals of a 3dfx Voodoo card. But it isn’t that easy to get everything right –…
If you own a 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo 2 card, there’s a good chance it might not work as it once did. In my experience, the most common issue is broken solder joints. Over time, solder can weaken, losing both its electrical conductivity and physical strength. However, don’t give up on your card just yet – there is still hope it can be saved!
Poking 3Dfx chips and look for…
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…
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. I also added a fuzzy search that also allows you to filter chips using regular…
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…
Since version 3.2, Microsoft included the file RAMDRIVE.SYS in MS-DOS (released in 1986)
Did you ever wonder why Microsoft invested effort and resources into providing a tool for creating RAM drives during a time when memory was a pricey commodity? Back in the mid-80s, your typical personal computer boasted a mere 1 or 2 MBs of system memory. Perhaps Microsoft felt compelled to compete with…