VOGONS


First post, by LR35902

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Hello everyone,

I recently acquired a socket 8 motherboard plus processor during a sudden inexplicable interest in computers of this period.
If this is the right place, I would like to ask some questions about it.

The board in question is an MS6104 (which is MSI I assume) running a Pentium Pro 200 (256k) and a mix of ram adding up to 32MiB.

1. Is there any non totally-luck-based way of acquiring an i/o shield for this board? The shield I need:
excerpt.png
(This image is directly taken from the german wikipedia page about I/O-shields 😜 )

2. The memory check upon boot seems to repeat itself for a total of three runs. I am planning on upgrading the ram anyway, but is this anything to be concerned about?

3. I am currently using an Eagle S3 Virge/DX as a videocard. It works, but the image is somewhat rainy, with lines seeming to glide from the top right to the bottom left of the screen. I am not sure what to make of this.

And of course, this board has no external battery, so I will have to replace the pesky rtc chip. So I haven't done anything with it other than staring at it booting.

Reply 1 of 11, by Ampera

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1. Besides luck, you can buy blank I/O shields and you can cut the holes out yourself. I honestly wouldn't bother as it's not 100% needed.

2. Define concern. My 486 does this, and it has an option to skip the memory test, yet my Pentium Pro machine doesn't do this (tests once) but doesn't have an option to skip.

3. New card or bake your old one.

Reply 2 of 11, by Jade Falcon

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1: Hunt on evay for an i/o cover. Just pull up I/O covers on ebay and dig. Or make one from a black or aluminum tape.

2: thats typical on some boards msi server bards even more so. If its a option enable quick boot in the bios

3: could ne many things. Check the card in another system, clean the contracts and take a close look at it to see if anything is missing. A bake will likely not fix such an old card.

Reply 3 of 11, by LR35902

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Ampera wrote:

1. Besides luck, you can buy blank I/O shields and you can cut the holes out yourself. I honestly wouldn't bother as it's not 100% needed.

2. Define concern. My 486 does this, and it has an option to skip the memory test, yet my Pentium Pro machine doesn't do this (tests once) but doesn't have an option to skip.

3. New card or bake your old one.

Yes I am aware of the blank shields and that they aren't vital. It's just that I have seen various types of common shields, but none with the ps/2 ports next to each other.

Hearing about baking cards makes me think of the 8800 series of Nvidia cards 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

1: Hunt on evay for an i/o cover. Just pull up I/O covers on ebay and dig. Or make one from a black or aluminum tape.

2: thats typical on some boards msi server bards even more so. If its a option enable quick boot in the bios

3: could ne many things. Check the card in another system, clean the contracts and take a close look at it to see if anything is missing. A bake will likely not fix such an old card.

I will look on ebay some more. It's just that I got the feeling I've gone through hundreds of them already. 😵
The test is skippable yes. Might also be a bios option, but I think I will have to replace the rtc before being able to do anything.

Reply 6 of 11, by LR35902

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sprcorreia wrote:

I have a box with something around 100 backplates. I'll check if I have one of those.

Very cool, much appreciated! 😊

Ordered a rtc replacement. Will have to try and remove the old one with mediocre soldering skills. 😵

Reply 8 of 11, by Jed118

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LR35902 wrote:
sprcorreia wrote:

I have a box with something around 100 backplates. I'll check if I have one of those.

Very cool, much appreciated! 😊

Ordered a rtc replacement. Will have to try and remove the old one with mediocre soldering skills. 😵

I could probably fix the RTC for you, I've done three quite recently.

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What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 9 of 11, by luckybob

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checking the ram 3 times is normal for some boards. Look in your bios options for "fast post" or something to that effect.

Or just not turn it off.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 10 of 11, by LR35902

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Jed118 wrote:
LR35902 wrote:
sprcorreia wrote:

I have a box with something around 100 backplates. I'll check if I have one of those.

Very cool, much appreciated! 😊

Ordered a rtc replacement. Will have to try and remove the old one with mediocre soldering skills. 😵

I could probably fix the RTC for you, I've done three quite recently.

Thanks, but I really want to do this myself. It's going to be okay.

luckybob wrote:

checking the ram 3 times is normal for some boards. Look in your bios options for "fast post" or something to that effect.

Or just not turn it off.

It's not bothersome, I was just curious. And yes, it says it is skippable.

Reply 11 of 11, by LR35902

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ppro150.png
At 150MHz for now, as I don't have a fan on the heatsink. Next step might be upping the RAM, but that would have to be bought first. Not sure, maybe I will focus more on a P166 MMX build I am doing concurrently. 😈

Probably needs more ram before I attempt to let it run a very light modern Linux distro.