Now that is very interesting. Anyone have any suggestions for systems that are internally covered in nicotine tar? I couldn't come up with any solvents that wouldn't also destroy the components, especially since they are 30+ years old and vulnerable.
My first thought is isopropyl alcohol, but maybe it's not strong enough to move the tar? I've seen videos where old boards have been cleaned with warm soapy water and a scrubbing brush, but my biggest concern would be solder mask coming off due to scrubbing followed shortly by trace damage.
Some boards are more likely to have poor quality solder mask than others; Sinclair boards are notoriously bad, but I've seen it on other 8-bit main boards from machines such as the Commodore 64 and Acorn Electron. A telltale sign is solder mask that looks crinkly.
If you mean that, That crinky "bloated" solder mask some of these old boards have on the backside is because through manufacturing there's globs of soldering tin on the copper where the solder mask is supposed to go directly on the copper. It's true, the solder mask on such boards has no footing and just falls off at the slightest provocation in these places. It doesn't have much of a function there to begin with though as the copper is already appropriately protected by the tin and the manufacturing process is long over. Of course, if you want to keep it as untouched as possible for keeping stuff original as possible, agressively washing such boards is not optimal as that stuff will come right off. It won't affect the function though. If you're paranoid about shorts because of wide areas of exposed tin, there's sprayable and paintable solder mask.
Yes, the adapter is entirely passive, basically just does the wiring to the port. The protocol is in whatever IC that's in the mouse and detects ps/2 vs usb automatically. A few years ago I would've told you to buy the cheapest possible, but even that isn't a safe bet anymore.
Actually that seems to be precisely the solution. I didn't think to check, but if you look up Microsoft's cheapest business mouse, lo and behold, they even have a picture of it with a PS/2 adapter.
The cheapest mouse Logitech has (or had) the B100 or B200 or something did not work with PS/2 anymore when I bought one about a year ago, it's sadly really not a universal rule anymore and research first is necessary, like you did. My guess is these basic mice don't get chipset refreshes often because for what, but if a component in the supply changes (e.g. different sensor) it might be necessary to update whatever controller they bake and that might be the time PS/2 gets kicked out of the design.
It made some games run faster due to having more texture memory, their setup meant that the 12MB card had twice as much texture memory as the 8MB one because the reserved memory for the frame buffer was 4MB on both cards. It played some difference in later games but I have no idea to what extent, you actually bring up a great question with that one.
I have a honest memory that the general picture quality was better on Matrox cards for a long time, although I have absolutely zero proof to back that up. They were some of the first cards that have DVI ports of what I remember though. Good stuff. Although yes, an absolute joke that their 3D stuff was so crippled and it all started so promising with the Mystique too. Mech Warrior 2 was pretty cool on it.
They did! They used high-end RAMDACs and tons of filtering to make sure that the digital signal could pass as flawlessly as possible over the VGA cable in an analogue format. I don't know the technical terms, their signal just didn't get as crusty on the way to the monitor and they spent money to make sure of that. The Matrox Millenium marketed itself as having something like a 250mhz RAMDAC and a bunch of other crap to make sure 1600x1200@24bpp over an analogue cable looked as it should.
Ah yes. Earlier in the early 90s Cirrus Logic had pretty much the only chips that had the RAMDAC integrated on the die of the main graphics chip and not only was it cheaper, it really helped matters of quality too. There were actually really wide disparities in output quality now that I think of it. Before it became standard and in ISA times, the VGA cards who could do more than 256 colors were also pretty expensive. The graphics chip usually could always do it, but they were limited by their RAMDAC and only the expensive ones would do truecolor.
Thanks, that's informative, I just remember "RAMDAC!" at this point. It was the marketable hook in Matrox advertising. It had mhz in the 90's.
