creepingnet
Veteran Member
Ah yes, CreepingNet 486, that extraordinary cumulation of my "RetroPC" skills hailing from a time before there was anything people called a "Retro PC". I've been beating on this Franken-Four-Eighty-Six for about 15 years now to this point, and it's pretty much the best of all my efforts, rolled into a ball. So what am I doing here? Oh, nothing too amazing, just downloading OpenBSD 7.5 from the internet over WiFi using a CD-ROM booted off OnTrack Disk Manager 9.88.
Did finally get some maintenance done on the ol' gal. The motherboard had a loose keyboard jack, the VESA slots were causing either graphical corruption or hanging on hard disk idle, and the CPU fan had died and the CPU itself was so caked in black-muck it looked like someone tried to vulcanize the top of it at the Goodyear plant. So all that is done. The Keyboard jack was reinforced with copper wire looped through the grounding tabs for the sheild around the keyboard plug as the pins had broken off., so now the keyboard is good to go there.
HDD's have been organized, I have a boatload of em' going on my E-bay page, now the drive setup includes a 8.4GB Seagate, an 80GB Seagate, a 40GB Seagate, and a Intel SSD in SATA for FreeDOS (the one I use the most). Windows 95 was xferred over from a 250GB drive I was only partially using to the 80GB, and the 40GB has been a struggle to find purpose for. The 8.4 replaced the one that went into the Compaq, which I think soon I'll be rattle-canning the DVD-ROM drive for as I
have a guitar build for a relative that shares the same color I'd like on the Compaq. I pulled that out today because my old LiteOn drive in the 486 was acting up.
The FMA3500C is also getting some mods done. I'm installing a switch that allows "silent mode" at night, internal speaker as stock, and a output to a 1/4" phono jack for recording YouTube videos. I'm going to need to adjust the output setup for the computer because it seems the speaker I have in there is not working, and the output for YouTube is causing weird system behavior and is too loud anyway. So what I might end up doing is some modifications to perfect the audio output volume levels. This may also get a one-way output implemented for a LPT audio card of some kind as well (thinking DB25 into an FFC).
The original battery idea did work, and worked for awhile, but it did eventually die (it was an old Dell E7240 CMOS battery). I decided to opt for a more sustainable method - a CR2302 mounted in a holder over the Floppy Drive....so I only have to pull 2 screws to replace it. Also, you might have noticed, another 40GB Seagate Medalist was installed in the BSi/NanTan - it's running FreeDOS now. I've been feeling increasingly more antagonistic towards Microsoft in recent months as their lunacy with Edge and strange changes that affect certain elements of using their O/S have been driving me batshit crazy to a new level unseen since the days I was bemoaning not being able to get Windows 3.1 disks in the set off the internet and getting mad at them every time a new system requirement introduced tried to put my old Pre-Pentium Jalopies to pasture in the early 2000's. It's almost at a point that I want to make FreeDOS the official O/S for my retro-computing....
But I'm getting very interested in *nix now as well....so hence the BSD install on the 486. I might be playing with some other vintage OSes in the future as well. I'm tempted to get a CF Card reader for the black caddy, which is my "Experiments" caddy.
No real plans for the other PCs. I just bumped up the Tandy and Compaq to the lastest mTCP release, and everything with a web browser is on Links 2.29 for DOS or RetroZilla 2.2, or Firefox LTSB (if I put 2K back on the 486....I'm doing that again due to the fact it actually worked surprisingly well, and the sheer insanity any version of Firefox from after 2000 could run on a 486 DX4-100 stable enough and (barely) fast enough to be usable). Soon the next round of #SepTandy videos are to start once I finish my rig in the "studio" for it.