SSTV2 wrote on 2023-09-12, 22:09:Hello and welcome to Vogons! […]
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Hello and welcome to Vogons!
No need to apologize for posting in this thread, it will remain relevant for as long as this forum exists, simply because of the somewhat under-discussed, rare and unusual Premmia 4/XX series of computers.
After I revived and tested the performance of the Premmia MB, I did not continue to assemble the full system. This was somewhat influenced by the very poor performance of the memory bandwidth and the non-standard dimensions of the board. For these reasons, I cannot answer the question of whether this system even requires the EISA config util, but as far as I know, the regular "Premmia" line of computers simply did not have a dedicated EISA config util. I know that the "AST Premium SE/TE" and "AST Premmia MTE/SE" line had their own dedicated EISA config utils. Also, in theory, the "Premium SE/TE" EISA config util should not be compatible with a regular "Premmia" because "Premium SE/TE" used an ASIC chipset designed by AST, while the "Premmia MTE/SE" EISA config util might work, since it may also be using the TI TACT84500 chipset (can't confirm). Try EISACU 2.84 on this webpage, it's meant for "Premmia MTE/SE", EISA config files are also there. You can also check these EISACU and CFG files uploaded by Horun.
By the way, congratulations on your new acquisition of old hardware 😉 The system seems to be nearly maxed out in terms of upgradeability, it would be interesting to see how well it performs.
Thanks for the reply.
I have put the project on hold for now.
Managed to clean up the acid damage and found a triple AA battery pack that serves as the CMOS battery. I also found an eisa config utility as well as a couple of disks with cfg files that boots and seem to work.
My trouble is mainly centered on the PM2012B/90 SCSI controller and the original Quantum 1GB SCSI disk. After the card is configured the computer no longer boots from floppy, let alone the SCSI disk. It just pauses after the SCSI ROM display has listed the disk (seemingly with proper naming and config). Keyboard works so it’s not fully frozen. Tried basic fault finding like swapping RAM sticks, changing EISA slots, and reseating stuff, but no joy. The disk must have been working when the computer was put on storage, but despite this it wasn’t configured to terminate. I found the jumper and fixed it, but the symptoms didn’t change.
Some times the bios will pause after counting the RAM, but gives two beeps and continues if I press F1. It doesn’t prompt for F1 though. Just a trick I found during googling. It may then try to initialize disks, of which there are none (IDE) before the SCSI card starts up.
Since I don't have similar equipment laying around it’s extremely time consuming trying to isolate ehat can possibly be multiple faults or config errors, or both, in between intermittent instability caused by age, acid damage and whatnot.
The BIOS is extremely simple with just basic stuff like date, keyboard, ram test and floppy settings.
A few questions though:
My EISA config “worked”, but could it be that other EISA utilities and newer config files would configure things “better”, solving the issue?
Are there any keyboard shortcuts to access settings during the SCSI ROM post?
Should the floppy be connected to the SCSI card after it’s configured?
Didn’t try using only one stick of RAM, and not sure if the Motherboard works with only one.
Both with the disk connected and not, the situation reminds me of when bad IDE/SATA disks just makes the computer act funny/unstable, even when everything seems to work fine.