Well, I think I am done with this entire “convert an old router to be a DOS/classic gaming machine” angle. (See my previous entry on the IsIs Imagestream Transport/Portwell NAD2050-3 for more details on that one).
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The basic concept was sound - the router is based on the Via ESP5000 (good downclocking support for retrogaming), Trident CyberBlade graphics (and a 10 pin VGA breakout), boots off/recognizes IDE40/44 drives (so IDE to SD conversion should be possible), USB breakouts for 2 ports and a PCI slot. So it should be possible to order a PC104 VGA breakout cable, repurpose an AOpen YMF744b Cobra sound card and we should be all set, right?
Well, not quite...
A) Got the PC104 board breakout to VGA cable today - the pitch between the female pin holes on the cable were too narrow for the male breakout pins on the board (looks to be 2.54mm on the board and 2.0mm on the cable)
B) Even after about an hour of using your typical DuPont breadboard jumper cables to extend it past the narrow pitch female connector, can’t seem to get it working at all.
Took apart the cable, desoldered the pins off the VGA connector and soldered male jumpers onto the connector following VGA connector standards on Wikipedia so I can experiment with it.
On the VGA female connector side, it’s supposed to be:
GND N/A BLU GRN RED
GND N/A N/A N/A N/A
ID3 V/S H/S ID1 N/A
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Which was easy-ish enough. Pure VGA only needed 5 pins - one for each color component (R/G/B), one for H and V-Sync, and there are optionally 2 grounds - one for each synch signal. ID1/ID3 is for DDC and not really needed.
I then followed the breakout cables back to the board via the pin outs on the manual...
Oh god, that fucking manual.
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Looking at the board I only have a single triangle indicating pin 1, which is on the lower left. So where’s pin 2 and the rest? looking at the diagram, one would assume:
02 04 06 08 10
01 03 05 07 09
^
(Since it lists 2 columns, one being odd and one being even)
Grn V/S ID3 ID1 N/C
Red Blu H/S GND GND
And I spent close to 2 hours checking continuity on the cables, looking at the attachment points, trying to figure out why I am not getting any signal at all whatsoever. After about 2 hours I just pulled all the plastic jumper blocks off both ends of the jumper cables, connected one end of the jumper directly to the male pins on the VGA monitor cable, and the other end of it to the motherboard 10 pin make breakouts, and...no joy.
I actually spent time just checking continuity and making sure that the pins are soldered in correctly, tried several different orientations, assuming that it could be flipped 180 degrees, and trying to hunt down maybe a jumper re-enabling VGA output on the board.
Then I had an epiphany. Suppose if the Taiwanese manual writer is retarded and meant for the pin outs on the board to be read cross-wise, where it is like this:
06 07 08 09 10
01 02 03 04 05
^
ID1 GND ID3 GND N/C
RED GRN BLU H/S V/S
And to my facepalming surprise, once I change the pins to this order, it worked. Well, kinda. The VGA breakout is next to the power supply unit and since it’s all DuPont jumper wires, the signal is all weak and wavy.
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Well, then I have another problem. See, the board came with 3 Realtek RTL8160 NICs (since it is a router board), and each are grabbing an IRQ, and there is no way for me to deactivate them in the BIOS. In addition to that, the board also presents a PS/2 port pair that was not populated on the board but are still grabbing resources. So once I boot into Win98, it turned into a resource grab deadlock. If there is anything Windows 98 is piss poor on, it’s dealing with plug-n-pray on tight allocations. I also installed nVidia drivers to get a Geforce 6200 to load prior to this - something tells me the driver might still be lurking around somehow and rustling my jimmies in the background.
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Okay, let’s say that I booted into pure DOS mode in Win98 to avoid the resource slugmatch. Then can I get some peace now and load up some DOS Games?
D) Eh, I don’t see an option to have USB mouse pretend to be a PS/2 mouse in the BIOS (no PS/2 ports, remember?), so while the USB keyboard worked just fine, the USB mouse...not so much even with cute mouse loaded. Not sure what's going on there.
E) The there’s that freaking AOpen YMF744B. Doesn’t work without modifying the PCI extender to add capacitors on the t5720. And it doesn’t work on this router either. In fact, it’s slightly worse here, since the clearance is tighter, and there is no AC97 to fall back on. Since the YMF744b drivers seem to need some ini file to tell it to load in a certain specific way, well...the DSDMA DOS mode drivers didn’t work at all.
*ugh* - 4-5 hours of work just to realize that I could’ve just booted up my Thinkpad 560E for the late DOS games, and T21 for the Win98 games. Both have decent enough support for FM synthesis.
Oh well, at least I feel much less guilty backflipping this router into the recycling pile, and I learned to scratch build a VGA cable. The Scientist SS02 solder sucker arrived and worked well on the VGA cable building part of the project.
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I can try to reinstall Win98 yet again and see if the clean OS will actually work for most things for a change.
