Rayman Pirate-Community

I figured I may as well start this since I am going to talk about a precious electrical device that ended up getting it's death wish by a stupid battery. I'm sure everyone's had some form of experience of something they liked that ended up getting ruined from either corrosion, acid, explosion, and the like.

So I begin with my beloved old friend, that got it's death sentence from a 3.6volt CMOS battery.





Last time I ran this system, it worked perfectly well, then I stored it away in my closet for probably over a year before having decided to dig it out today, to be greeting with absolutely nothing. Monitor remained off, no BIOS beep codes to indicate any particular failure, all the keyboard lamp indicators were all lit solid though. So upon taking a peak inside, I see that the battery left a nasty gift inside, a gift of corrosion left over from an acid leak. That got on both front and back of the board in that spot.

Hoping I could aid it by cleaning up the corrosion with vinegar and rubbing alcohol, I managed to clean it up but the traces on the motherboard seem effected, even after having dried, it still doesn't work.

Quite unfortunate, as this was my favorite 486 machine. Here are the specifications:

Am5x86 133MHz - 486 processor.
TMC Research PCI48AF motherboard (Capable of 128MB of RAM, max!)
32MB DRAM + 256K Cache 32K TAG
ATI RAGE LT PRO PCI Graphics Card (4MB VRAM, if I recall)
3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Acceleration Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with Add-On SIMMConn Memory Adapter expanding the audio RAM up to 28MB!
2GB Transcend Compact Flash Card in place of a Harddrive, using a Syba Compact Flash to IDE adapter, that mounts in the rear brackets.
Memorex 52x CD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive.
3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive.
5.25" 1.2MB Floppy Disk Drive.
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 with all the appropriate drivers installed.


Well, any replacement motherboards I get for this system, and any other system I obtain, I will get rid of those darned 20+ year old batteries. They ain't nothing but trouble.


So who else has had any experience with batteries ruining something? I know we have a Christmas decoration that the batteries very well corroded the terminals, pretty badly.

When I was younger, I used to collect animated novelty toys, particularly those made by the Gemmy corporation. Because of this, my family and I have had numerous experience with battery leakage, but, luckily, the toys are usually still function, albeit with battery acid caked on to the interior of the battery compartment. However, there have actually been some occasions where the battery acid BURNED THE FUCKING SPRINGS OFF.

That's unfortunate to hear about your machine. Do you think you will attempt to build another with similar specs?

I can seeing there being a worse chance of it having multiple toys like that. I don't recall any particular issues with toys as a kid, but I didn't have much for batteries... though I recall a family friend having one of those Wireless NES controller multiplayer adapters, where they had left the batteries in there for years, and the batteries very well got the terminals there with acid and corrosion.


Well, I am planning to find another motherboard, and one I found online is compatible with my CPU, and it comes with a video card, audio card, 64MB RAM, and a 100MHz AMD 486 CPU, and powers up, tested. I only would need the board and RAM, since I wouldn't mind having more RAM.

Keep the rest of the hardware configuration and all should be well.

Hm, not so much a battery issue, but I've got suspicions that the wiring in one of my toys is less than optimal, and the protective casing about the wires is flaking off.
I haven't turned it on since, but I'm going to look into it and see if I can fix it sometime.

Seriously sucks that happened to your PC, Hoodcom, I know you love your old systems, and this must be terrible for you.

It was terrible.


Well, I will rebuild the system, and I have a board on the way!



Here's the information on the motherboard: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard ... q8c6cRDtzg

This comes with a 100MHz AMD 486 DX4 processor. The unfortunate part, is I won't be able to really use my 133MHz AMD, seems this board lacks support of that chip. It is coming with 64MB of RAM though.

For any faster performance needed, I'll just rely on an Intel Pentium system.

And for anyone curious on what that little card sticking out the right is, I know I was curious, but it's actually a add-on voltage regulator for the processors.

Ooh, look at all those IC's, all in neat rows, hehe.

Why didn't you get a better board that had compatibility with your processor?

Because it doesn't really matter by this point, and it's not as easy to do so anymore. I can still wait for a nice board to show up with compatibility, but for now, this will do just fine.

Hoodcom wrote:Because it doesn't really matter by this point, and it's not as easy to do so anymore. I can still wait for a nice board to show up with compatibility, but for now, this will do just fine.

A'ight. I was just curious.

Oh, I also have videos of the system running games too, this is when the old hardware ran well!

This video shows the hardware a little bit, later on, in a different case, with out the AWE 64 installed, and before I had the Voodoo2 3DFX card installed. Ah yeah, the CF card was a later upgrade.





Oh I miss that ol' motherboard. ='(

I can imagine you would, so, how's the new one compare?

Alright folks! I rebuilt the system!






I was going to put my ATI Mach64 in, but nothing would display on the monitor, the system would boot as it does, with out any output... so I stuck the S3 Trio card I got with the motherboard, and it works great. Even in Windows 3.1.

New Specifications:

AMD 486 DX4 at 100MHz
ELITEGROUP COMPUTER SYSTEMS, INC. UM8810P-AIO motherboard (Capable of 128MB of RAM, max!)
64MB DRAM + 256K Cache
S3 Trio64 86C764 PCI Graphics card. Not sure on VRAM amount.
3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Acceleration Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with Add-On SIMMConn Memory Adapter expanding the audio RAM up to 28MB!
2GB Transcend Compact Flash Card in place of a Harddrive, using a Syba Compact Flash to IDE adapter, that mounts in the rear brackets.
Memorex 52x CD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive.
3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive.
5.25" 1.2MB Floppy Disk Drive.
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 with all the appropriate drivers installed.

Congratulations for successful rebuilding. I see R1 and Jazz Jackrabbit 1. Such classics. I also see cameo of Reese on pics :3

OldClassicGamer wrote:Congratulations for successful rebuilding. I see R1 and Jazz Jackrabbit 1. Such classics. I also see cameo of Reese on pics :3

Also even Descent 1, Descent 2, Day of the Tentacle, Kings Quest VII, Sim Tower, Sim Isle, Sim City 2000, SimCity, Fire & Ice, Silpheed, and Fire Hawk can be seen too. Well most of them.

Yeah, I thought, why not personalize the computer further, by putting my own character's picture right on the case?