We (the Heinz Nixdorf Forum Computer Museum) host a talk about the history of Apple today. A few Apple products will be on display in the conference hall, among those the Lisa 1, which we had to take out of its display case. I decided to open the Lisa’s back cover, which led to me finding out what I’ll be working on tomorrow. Hopefully the board is salvageable…

The date is 1997 for the packaging

This is heavy as balls and the packing is comically specific and stout - from research these came out in 1992, active in SunOS stuff, which makes sense, seems like this was an engineering outfit

The "RMA" on the shipping sticker could be either a good sign or a bad sign; as the seal is broken, I suppose this is the "bad" one ;)

Anyway, gonna get a machine together with a controller and some drivers and see what's up with this stupid thing - it's like almost the size of two power supplies and weighs more

Got this for free from an old guy clearing out the loft on his barn. Irs an AST Bravo 386/16 with 4mb of ram and 70mb quantum disk! No battery leakage amd it fired right up! Only thing was the disk was stuck.. gave it a horisontal smack while powering it up and it spun right up 🤩

Cross platform compliance neat

So that was my stupid idea™ for the rainy fall season. Framing a bunch of RAM bricks for my home office. Nothing here is of professional quality, but it was a fun little thing to do and just the right visitors will be eyeing these a little closer. :P I hope sharing it here will make sense to some of you.

No running PCs were harmed in the making of this project.

So this is progressing far better than I expected. I've finished checking the power, and it's not getting anything at all, so I'm hoping the flex might be damaged. I'll need to wait on a few parts, but hopefully the issues should be rather simple. I've also done a short test on all of the power supply, and there are no shorts, and absolutely zero power is coming in to the board.

The giant capacitor also tested perfectly, which is a relief. Will update when I hopefully get it working. :D

Local thrift find! Never heard of it before

This floppy drive from a Dell 486 laptop isn't working. At first it sounded like it was spinning out of control as soon as I placed a diskette in it. The reason for that was pretty clear when I opened it up and saw the decayed belt.

However, using a replacement belt it still isn't reading disks. There's one that seems to start but falls right after, most diskettes don't seem to read at all.

Tried clearing the heads but to no avail. But, I just noticed the big wheel isn't rotating freely. There's a few points where it drags.

I guess some sewing machine oil could work here? But how to apply? Any ideas on how to go about this?

I tried removing the Keyboard to take out the CMOS but the screw is stripped

This machine has been in my storage in the box for 20+ years, I had forgotten about it, just pulled it out and it powered right on and works perfectly. It is from 1983 and was made in Japan.

Any S100 fans out there?

Earlier this year I posted about a 1998/99 Packard Bell desktop I bought, with the intention of adding some period appropriate bits to it to make it an authentic (if modest!) gaming machine of its day.

An I-O Data Voodoo Banshee came up for sale in Japan complete with box, driver floppies and demo disks and after some finagling (i.e. learning I had to switch a jumper on the motherboard to disable the onboard VGA) I finally got it working.

As expected it doesn’t run things very smoothly by modern standards, probably around 30 fps with some stutter and drops when the action heats up, but I think someone would have been pretty chuffed by the upgrade back in the day.

Have also included a picture of the sound card I put in - I fancied something with EAX support, maybe I’ll check how well Thief: The Dark Project runs one of these days!

I am trying to get a drive (68pin) working with a V250 by adding it to the unused connector at the top of the system 5.25" drive bay. I have set the id to 4 which isn't used by the backplane. While the system sees the device (sd4), it doesn't show up as available when I used the format command. The drive works in an SGI Fuel and with an adaptec card in a PC.

If you grew up gaming in the 70s or 80s, you likely crossed paths with the granddaddy of all space simulators: the original 1971 Star Trek text game. There was a unique thrill to typing coordinates into a glowing green terminal, hunting down "K"s on an 8x8 grid, and carefully rationing your energy reserves. It was a groundbreaking experience that laid the foundation for the entire tactical genre.

I wanted to capture that exact feeling of sitting in the center seat, but elevate the mechanics with the kind of strategic depth modern players expect. Enter Star Trek: Quadrant Command.

This is a complete tactical evolution of the classic formula. It takes the foundation you remember, the ticking stardate clock and the delicate power grid, and turns the galaxy into a living, hostile ecosystem. You aren't just clearing empty sectors anymore; you are triaging a quadrant actively under siege. The game forces you to make hard, high-stakes decisions. You might have to choose between warping across the map to rescue a civilian freighter desperately trying to escape its attackers, or holding the line to defend a critical Starbase from a coordinated enemy assault.

The combat rewards careful positioning and resource management. You can calculate photon torpedo chain reactions to wipe out clustered fleets, or divert your dwindling power to focused phaser beams and wide-arc cone dispersals when things get close. And you will need every tool in your arsenal, because you are up against methodical Klingon wolfpacks, Romulan ambushers that cloak to hide their energy signatures, and relentless Orion pirates.

Even the environment is out to get you. To secure the quadrant, you will have to navigate blind through sensor-jamming nebulae, weather shield-battering ion storms, and sometimes take the ultimate risk of dropping your shields entirely to siphon emergency power directly from a star.

The Enterprise has the tools, but the math of the universe is working against you. If you love deep, turn-based strategy and have a soft spot for the retro classics, I'd love for you to take command.

Do you have what it takes to save the galaxy before time runs out?

Play it for freehere: https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/sttr1/

Please note, much like the main viewscreen on the Enterprise, this game runs best on a large monitor

For some reason I have never come across this one. Usually I only see the RadioShack / Tandy MMS 10! This one has the 5 band graphic equalizer that is fun to mess with!

Cleaning up and decluttering, I find this 1995 Digi board. Originally intended for a BBS that never happened. Still in the original boxes. Anybody have a use for this? Or should I just toss it out as E waste?

Not for sale or trade, just want to know if anybody wants to rescue it before it goes in a dumpster.

EDIT: I’m in MD, USA.

Pictur - my PaintShopPro 7.04 inspired image editor

Got that retro Windows98 look with color schemes.

It's using Gimp/Krita effects. It supports webp, jpegxl, old Amiga image formats, any format you like to read?

I'm using SVG for vector and have support for HTML layers (create layer,

add html code - it gets rendered), svg layers, glsl (shader) layers.

It's still (buggy) in development but I have Windows 10/11, Linux appimage and Intel macOS binaries.

Development: C++ 20, Claude, Ubuntu, litehtml for layout, OpenGL Gles3 and NanoVG for drawing.

This is my first Reddit post and my first retro pc ever, I’m so excited and I felt I just had to share it.
Its a IBM PS/2, model P70 386 +387 8573-061
Which from what I could find means that it has a mathematical card.
I have not put power to it yet, it has been stored in a garage for over 30 years so it would probably not be good for it.
But I will try to clean it out and change the cosmos and etc.
Any thoughts?

Hi all!

I have a RLL-encoded MFM drive and ISA controller (Adaptec ACB-2070A) with very special contents that I need to back up. The Adaptec is as extracted from the original computer system (which has a blown proprietary power supply at the moment) and has no jumpers populated.

I restored an XT clone (ITT Xtra), purchased a Picomem card, and hoped I could use the Picomem to boot and then pull the data off of the MFM drive. The problem is that the Adaptec appears to have a fixed address of 0xC8000 so it always appears to boot before the Picomem (which my HDD image from the Picomem GIT defaults to 0xD000). I'm not experienced enough with XT systems to know how to get around this...

So... Does anyone have any ideas on how to backup this drive? Is there some way that I can get the Picomem to boot first? Is there a different piece of hardware I need? Is there some combo of all this plus a floppy bootdisk maybe? Any thoughts or ideas would be extremely appreciated!

In early 1996, its superior integer performance justified premium pricing over Pentiums at the same clock speed. The weak FPU barely mattered. Then Quake arrived, changed the rules, and shattered Cyrix's dreams. That's what history remembers.

https://www.ardent-tool.com/CPU/docs/MPR/19960212/100202.pdf

So I bought a bios password removal from eBay but since plugging it in expecting to show something else it just stays on the screen

Was at my local dump when i saw the back of a beige desktop sticking out of the electronics recycling trailer I always look through, it was a full HP desktop set with the matching crt (last week I found a working gateway ps2 keyboard and bose companion 2 multimedia speakers). The computer is fully functional and 100% original so I assume someone passed away and the family decided to toss it, seems like whoever owned it took great care of it. Its a HP pavilion 6336 with an amd k6 333mhz, 64mb ram, quantum bigfoot hdd (working with its original win98 installation), LG cdrom, 3.5 floppy, and a relatively large ISA modem. the plastic sleeve and wire tie was still on the vga cable and the original warranty seal was still very much attached to the pc, but an expansion card was missing. the front of the side panel had been yanked open but not slid off so it didnt break the seal. why someone removed it that way to end up scrapping it i dont know 🤷‍♂️