kanecvr wrote:Thanks for the link, maybe I'll get lucky!
Too late! Got it yesterday... 😈
It was a long struggle... 😵 All jumpers were placed on the front panel connectors 😠 , one made of course a short between the 5V rail and ground, after applying the juice... 😊
After hunting down the (in)famous .exe manual, and placing the jumpers correctly, replacing the drained lithium coin, plugging in an ISA ET4k, and two 8MB FPM DIMMs, it went somewhat smoother: the i486SX33 finally came to life. 😀
Trying an i486DX2-66, lying around, was a no-go - maybe a bad CPU. 😒
Replacing the ISA VGA card with a PCI Stealth64, got the dreaded video-RAM error beeps. 😐 Tried a bunch of other PCI VGA cards: no joy. 😢
A bothering limit of the on-board F0 BIOS is 2GB HDD. Older 386s had no problem with bigger drives... 🤣
Time to hunt a newer BIOS, got the F2 lingering on the net, including the (in)famous .exe (actually a SFX LHA).
Time to extract the BIOS chip from it's socket and plug it in the programmer. Auto ID the "flash" chip, and got an 1Mbit EPROM (M27C1001). 😕
Where should the plug'n-pray ESCD tables be stored? It needs a Flash chip... Someone cut corners in the production run. 😠
Got an 1Mbit Flash (29F001), rotting in a drawer, and burned it with the F2 file. Plugged it back in the M/B, and voila, BIOS checksum error, enter Setup, modify the settings, correctly autodetect the 8GB CF, save, and reboot: ... "Updating ESCD", and smoothly booting to DOS. 😎
Time for the PCI VGA card... no more error beeps, and it works 😲
Let's try again the DX2... surprise, it works too 😲 But it quickly gets hot, time for a heatsink... and a well deserved rest.