Thread by @RetroTechChris

Alright, let's check out the $10 photo booth PC that I picked up on Thursday. Allegedly this PC was used in a mall photo booth kiosk, and it definitely is weird... and, well, I did get it to power on a few times, but that was it 😅. Time for a 🧵

First, in addition to being a desktop ATX case, it does have an interesting black oval on the front! Probably for infrared, I didn't take it apart, I was lazy. If so, that's a cool feature. And this ATX case has an AT mobo in it, with an AT I/O shield!

As noted in the first post, this PC has some weird stuff. Looks like this DE9 connector supplied... power. Yikes! Yea, I took that out, we don't want to have any surprises later. Guessing this powered some other kiosk device.

Here's some more weirdness: an ISA card labeled "Foto Fantasy" with a timer, a bunch of flip flips, and a relay to say the least. I wonder if it was used for a picture taking delay or something of the sort. We'll never know probably, there is ZERO documentation on this available

Here's the mobo, both inside and outside of the case. It's a FIC VA-503+. Must have been a transition board with its support for AT and ATX power, as well as 72 pin SIMMs and 168 pin DIMMs.

So, one thing about this case, it has PLENTY of rust. The screws were pretty rusty too.. we'll replace them with some fresh ones!

The case also had some weird standoffs for the mobo. Either the PC builder did this, or "someone has been in here" over the years...

The CPU is a 300 MHz Cyrix MII . I guess that is all you needed if you wanted to take photos in 2001 😂

Here are some of the other cards. I really want to know what is up with that bodge fix on the Tseng video card. And, wow, this PC had A LOT of I/O... three parallel ports in total. Probably to run photo printers or something of the sort.

So, in trying to get this to power on, at first, I couldn't get it to POST at all. And occasionally the power supply would "buzz" which signifies some sort of overload/short. Eventually I moved the video card to the second PCI slot and it powered up!

But my joy was short lived. The PC did power on a few times. I swapped a different power supply and memory module in to see if it would be more stable. And it worked a few times, until it was back to not POSTing again.

Tried a new CR2032 for good measure too. No luck. The problem? Probably needs a recap, a few of these caps around the CPU are suss. I won't troubleshoot further, this PC will have a new home soon. Sorry we don't have better news, but thx for reading.

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