Rich's Random Retro Reviews

No no no, I haven't forgotten that I have a blog - it's just, I've been rather busy over the last six months or so since my last update. So what's new? Well this arrived: YES PEOPLE! The Digital Starion 917 is here! As you can see there was a bit of shipping damage, but the plastic pieces were inside the case, so I managed to retrieve them and glue them back in place.  I took it completely to pieces and cleaned it within an inch of it's life. I also had to replace the Dallas clock battery which thankfully is socketed so no desoldering required. The machine wouldn't boot with the dead one - it would simply freeze. I managed to find a 'new old stock' one on eBay and fitted that and so far so good, it's retaining the date and time and any system settings.  The case has also received a retrobright as it was very yellowed and I'm super happy with the results. I'm so pleased to have one again - I did an unboxing video as well as a chat with another...

Looking at the statistics of my blog posts, they don't get very many views, so I'm pretty sure there is no one out there waiting for this update. But the update is - the powered VGA splitter arrived and the video capture is way better than before. The image is nice and clear bright, without artifacts.  Here's the setup: There are plenty of steps but it works out well. The quality is much better than without a powered splitter. I'll have to do a video or some pictures detailing the exact steps. 

In December of 2021 I decided it was time to retire my 2017 13" MacBook Pro. I was having to charge the battery a LOT - at least every day and sometimes twice in one day and I wasn't doing anything too taxing - other than the occasional export of a 1080p H.264 video or playing around with some retro PC in a VM.  My MacBook Pro only had 8GB of RAM and with the last few machines I'd had to settle on certain things. RAM being one of them. This time I decided that I would find the money and pay the Apple Tax to upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB and I also decided I didn't need a Pro laptop any more and a MacBook Air should suffice so I ordered one.  It arrived directly from China after a week or so as it was a Build to Order (BTO) option and it would appear that Apple doesn't have stock of them in the UK. Anyway - it arrived and I was super happy with it. At one point I managed to get 5 days on the battery - admittedly via babying it.  Unfortunately the screen developed...

It's been a while, but I haven't forgotten I have a blog!  My last post was about a £20 PC I picked up from Facebook Marketplace and this post is a little more about it and what I've been up to with it.  I found a BIOS update that allows the motherboard to support up to a 450MHz Pentium II. I have a spare Pentium II 400, so I downloaded the BIOS and flashed it - something I HATE doing. Happily it worked and I didn't brick the motherboard! I inserted the Slot 1 400MHz Pentium II and turned the machine on and....(after fiddling in the BIOS) 400MHz is a nice increase over the 266MHz CPU that it came with. I also found a vintage version of CPU-Z called CPU-Z Vintage Edition which can be downloaded here . Unfortunately I couldn't be bothered to get a screenshot of it, so this photo will have to do: I love how it only lists MMX under instructions! Usually it's alphabet soup.  Aside from that I've swapped the graphics card with an AGP ATI Rage 3D something or other...

I picked up the PC in the picture below for £20 from Facebook Marketplace. No idea what the specs were, but on the back was a label that said it had a 4.3GB hard drive in. As much as I love the noises old PCs make, spinning hard drives are SLOW and loud.  I like to replace the drives with an SSDs or at least some kind of flash alternative. As long as you're not running a *NIX or NT based OS, then compact flash cards are a great and cheap option. Anything with a more advanced virtual memory management system usually degrades flash storage solutions really quickly. It's best to try and find a proper SSD if you plan on running one of those on your vintage computer.  So I plug in an IDE to compact flash adapter, put the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE channel and turn the machine on. I'm greeted by a 192MB of RAM, Pentium II 266MHz PC. Not bad for £20 - and the case is in excellent condition.  I need to install an operating system on the computer now, but I can't find my Win...

So I've been playing today ANNNND here are my results and something I've learned that I really should have thought about.  In one of my previous posts, I said I had found an unpowered VGA splitter to be good enough for me. Well I take it back. Below is a screenshot (unedited) from OBS earlier using a VGA splitter and the new BlackMagic Design HDMI capture.  As you can see - the image is extremely dark and if you click on it, you'll see that there is lots of noise in the image. For some reason, it has never crossed my mind as to why the image appears so dark. It's because I'm splitting the signal in half. DUH! Of course it's going to be dark. I also think the VGA splitter cable is responsible for the noise that's been added to the image. When plugged directly into the graphics card, the capture is noise free. Here's what it should look like.  This is much better. (Ignore the colour depth change. The first screenshot was at 256 colours, this one is at 24 b...