Nostalgic computing weekend

 I got a bit nostalgic last weekend playing with old PC motherboards. Previously I made some metal frame for mounting HDD on standoffs.  I guess you could call that minimalistic open air PC with nothing other than a bare PSU on the side. . It gets tedious having to disassemble the frame to swap HDD. So I designed and 3D printed 2.5" HDD mounting hardware with HDD caddy.  

2.5" removable Caddy on old Dell P4 motherboard

The design is split into a few smaller pieces on top of a frame over the front right hand corner of an ATX motherboard.  As there are no standards other than the mounting holes, some adjustments to the frame might be needed.  

I opted to skip one of the standoffs to allow for long video cards. I even recycling my failed caddy design prototypes. I had to make some extra clearance for the thick power cable.

One of my old 2.5" to 3.5" adapters have no mounting holes and the other one has a flimsy plastic hood.  So  I printed PCB holders blocks for them. I glue them with 0.5mm thick double sided silicone adhesive tape.  

I had to do some cable origami to line up the correct orientations for both ends of the connectors.  This allows me to swap the caddy without having to mess around the cables and connectors.  I used the secondary IDE connector to free up the primary connector.  Thankfully that the PC BIOS is flexible to boot.

My initial design has 2 mounting screws that doubled as stops for the caddy.  I have made some latches with straighten paper clips for the pins.

I broke the fan blade in my DIY Dell Dimension 3000 heatsink fan. I had glue it back together with super glue and baking soda. To prevent future accidents, I printed a resized High-efficiency Noctua 120mm fan grill .  Sadly it has some mechanical interferences, so I had to trim off part of the fan grill to make the latch work.  There was no problems with my other motherboard or the same motherboard without the fan mod.

Sketchup and stl files are available in my github page. 

It is probably a good idea to use PETG for the frame and connector block as the PLA screw threads and fittings would loosen over time.  Threaded inserted could be an option for PLA if there are extra clearance on the motherboard for larger standoffs. There is no reasons why the rest of the pieces couldn't be glued together.

I've just found out that Amithlon runs perfectly on current revision of VirtualBox 7.1.4 r165100.  It was one of those things I kept trying for each of the VirtualBox major revs.  There was something funny about their SVGA driver.  

Amithlon has issues with more than 1GB RAM.  Probably the upper address bits were being used in the emulation for something else.  So that pretty much limited it to much older PC or running in a virtual machine.

It feels snappier than my Barton XP3000+ CPU.  This is nothing short of a miracle considering the emulated Picasson96 SVGA driver on the Amithlon MC68040 emulator on a linux kernel in a VM running its emulated (finally working) VGA driver.

 

My setting: