The riser board sits in between the memory slots/sound card portion of the motherboard and the video portion:

Missing wavetable headers on sound card portion of motherboard:

The processor only has a small heat sink and fan:

...but there's a big fan that's attached to the front of the case and that sits right next to the processor. When I tested the system the processor fan was a bit noisy, so it might need replacement or a drop of oil.

The missing item next to the processor is for a COAST socket - not sure what the performance impact of missing that will be...

The motherboard's jumper settings are indicated on a sticker on the inside of the case cover:

The CD drive on this machine is really cool, IMHO. It uses a tray that looks like a combination of a CD-tray and cart system, with a little door that opens up when the tray opens (and needs to be manually closed again once the tray is closed) and little moving tabs to keep the CD in place that move when the tray closes:

Surprisingly, the CD drive still seems to work flawlessly after 20 years... It also is a standard IDE drive. Unfortunately the system doesn't support booting from CD.

The case unfortunately suffered some minor damage during transit:

I'll try repairing the damage to the outside by gluing back the broken piece, but the other part is one of the clamps that holds the front bevel in place. 😒

After switching the power supply from 115V to 230V, I successfully started the machine from a Windows 98 boot floppy (no hard disk). The CD drive worked right away with the OAK CD-ROM driver, and I was able to load (and play) some old DOS games from CD. This also allowed me to confirm that the on-board sound card worked, as the games that could do so without a driver loaded successfully detected one or more of the following: Soundblaster, SB Pro, and/or Adlib FM. Some games defaulted to the PC speaker instead. I was also able to load games that for some reason never wanted to work on my 486 (some others still failed to work though), so it looks like this will make a good vintage gaming PC. I then remembered some Maxis games included a system information program and used that to find out a bit more about my system.

So, now to decide how to continue with this system:
- Compact Flash card to replace hard disk?
- Install my old Adaptec SCSI card and try to revive my SCSI hard disk that I last used 20 years ago?

In any case, I'll need to replace the CMOS battery, as it's dead. Fortunately, it's a CR2032 and not a cancer barrel. BTW, the BIOS is by AMI, and supports emulating a 23 MHz AT machine (real mode only).

Huh that's a weird one, any date stamps on it anywhere? I thought generally NEC took over Packard Bell around '98 so it's a little strange it's a P166 (think that's what you said but can't find it now 🤣).

King_Corduroy wrote:

Huh that's a weird one, any date stamps on it anywhere? I thought generally NEC took over Packard Bell around '98 so it's a little strange it's a P166 (think that's what you said but can't find it now 🤣).

Specs can be found here (in Japanese): http://web.archive.org/web/19980216132122/htt … ec_promatev.htm

Although the page is from 1998, the release date listed is November 1996 and the CD-ROM drive also has a date stamp of November 1996.

Yesterday I repaired the case damage by gluing the bits back in place with superglue:

Not a perfect fix, but will do.

I then replaced the CMOS battery, which was a pain in the behind to do because the battery holder held the battery so tightly I had to wedge it out with a flat screwdriver. Today I changed some BIOS settings, discovered the system can actually boot from CD, and later had to change some more settings because setting it to a Plug 'n Play OS causes the onboard sound card to fail in Windows 98 DOS.

I then installed my old Adaptec SCSI controller card, and checked whether it was properly detected at boot and whether I could access the card's BIOS utility:

That all worked fine, so it was time for the moment of truth:

Hooked up my old 1Gb SCSI hard disk, an old Compaq server disk. Upon power on, the disk spun right up! 20 years after I last tried to use the drive, I could access my old files on the drive... 😘

...at least, some of them. Some directories threw up read errors, so off to Scandisk it was. Scandisk has been finding a lot of cluster errors until now, and a partially trashed MBR. The last system this was hooked up to was a AMD Duron MSI-based system with a intermittent power issue that caused it to destroy 2 IDE hard disks and damage a third (that still works fine 15 years on in another system). That system also failed to spin up/read this drive properly, and I also couldn't access the SCSI card's BIOS on it, so I guess the damage was caused back then.

I'll have to wait until Scandisk finishes its simple tasks (might take a while), do a surface scan, and then I think I will reformat the drive and check whether I can use it as a boot disk if I have an IDE CD-ROM drive present.

And I'll need some 5.25"->3.5" brackets to mount it because it's too tall to fit into the standard drive bracket...but I will only buy those after checking whether it works properly. Otherwise I'll have to try and find a larger SCSI drive (if I can boot from SCSI) or IDE drive (might go with a 4Gb CF card).

Well, looks like the SCSI drive is toast. Scandisk hangs on 26% completion, FDISK can remove the logical partition but not create a new one as drive verification fails, and the Adaptec SCSISelect utility can't low-level format it until I've verified all of the sectors one by one, which throws up a lot of hardware errors - result of a head crash? It doesn't make any clicking sounds or the like, sounds normal while reading and writing...

Anyone know of an utility that would let me tell the SCSI hard disk to simply skip a whole lot of sectors (i.e. the part of the drive damaged)?

Edit: Apparently the drive has a self-diagnostics mode: http://www.alyon.org/InfosTechniques/informat … s/em2694es.html and http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/f … H-SCSI2-SE.html, which I'll try once I've discovered how it works.

yawetaG wrote:

Edit: Apparently the drive has a self-diagnostics mode: http://www.alyon.org/InfosTechniques/informat … s/em2694es.html and http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/f … H-SCSI2-SE.html, which I'll try once I've discovered how it works.

Good luck, hope you get it working!

I pretty much gave up on it. So that brings the tally of drives destroyed by my shit AMD Duron machine to three... 😵

The SCSI card will see some more life in my Epson MMX machine, probably as a means of talking to a hardware audio sampler and/or MO-drive (and the Epson will be repurposed as a simple MIDI to Yamaha FM sound box since the NEC is better for the games I have).

For the NEC, I think I'll go the compact flash card route, with two CF adapters and two CF cards, as I don't feel like tracking down some <8 Gb hard disks for it.

I've identified the CD drive by the way, it's a NEC CDR-1400a, a 8-speed drive (just slow enough to not be noisy and just fast enough for decent loading times).

Edit: Hmm, interesting. The motherboard on this machine was only available through OEM manufacturers: http://web.archive.org/web/19961220033515/htt … d/oem/index.htm

Figured I'd get on with this.

yawetaG wrote:

and Soundblaster Pro/Vibra 16 - unfortunately where the manuals states there should be two MIDI/waveblaster headers this OEM version lacks the headers, also the LAN port was left off.

Besides the missing headers it also lacks a game port...

Also present is a PCI LAN card by Japanese IT company Buffalo:

IMG_7159.jpg

LAN card drivers located (I already found them a long time ago, but forgot to post about it):

http://buffalo.jp/download/driver/lan/lci-t2.html

Seems the card worked both in PC98 and AT systems. With the drivers, I should at least have a working network connection.

So, wondering what to do with this. I think it would be a nice little MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 system, although installing NT 4.0 on it is also an option.
Available space:
- 1x internal 3.5" bay
- 1x 5.25" bay
- 3 additional IDE connections max. (CD-ROM takes channel 2 master), however somewhat lacking in space to add more than 2 additional IDE devices
- either 1x PCI + 2x ISA or 3x ISA slots free.

I'm thinking of adding a hard disk, either 3.5" in original bay or 2x 2.5" in adapter in bay.

Slots:
- Since the on-board Rage II does have the feature connector, perhaps a PCI-based MPEG II hardware acceleration card? Any suggestions?
- To get around the limited internal expansion space (and because I'm curious about it) maybe a ISA-based PCMCIA adapter board - wonder if I then add a PCMCIA sound card whether I could use the onboard sound blaster together with the PCMCIA card...

A slightly failed upgrade attempt

As I mentioned in the recent purchases thread, I got my hands on a PCMCIA adapter, which I wanted to use for this system:

(Yeah, I know it says "Windows 98", but as you'll see, that would not matter for this system anyway... 😐 )

First, some better looks at the card than what I showed in the other thread. It's a PCI card with an ISA bridge board, suitable for both 16 and 32 bit PCMCIA cards:

The boards are connected together using a flat cable:

(Since I was working on the system I also pulled out the network card and took its picture:

But well, that's an aside...)

I installed the ISA bridge board and then tried to put the PCI card in the slot:

It fit in there very tightly, in fact too tightly, because one of the eject buttons hit the case, even if I removed the plastic part of that button:

The slot for installing the PCMCIA cards also sits too low, and I couldn't screw the card into place.

It seems the spacing for PCI cards in this PC case is just a little bit off, so the slots are located too far back a fraction of a milimeter, but also a mm or so too low. So no go. 😵

I then noticed this:

To get the network card to fit, they had to file off part of the BNC connector! 😲 😲

So it looks like I will only be able to use ISA cards in this system...

I did however add a slot-mounted CF card adapter to the case:

Now on earlier pictures, you might have noticed the power supply actually obstructs the screw hole for this slot. The solution is simple:

There's this little bracket that holds the slot bracket in place (and actually no screw hole in the usual place).

And that fits as follows:

The CF card adapter almost entirely clears the ISA slot on this side:

I wonder whether there are internal cards that would fit in that space...

I will need to get an adapter cable to be able to hook up the power, as the CF card adapter takes a floppy drive power connector and the power supply only has one of those. I'll also have to sort out the cabling as it's a big mess right now.

=====

Anyway, I still want to show you the PCMCIA adapter in (some) action, so off to my other system with both PCI and ISA slots it is! 😎

We jump forward in time a bit, to a system that's about a year newer and my main game machine:

Gateway 2000 Pentium 266 MHz, 320 Mb of RAM, Asus 3800 Magic TNT2 M64 AGP card with 32 Mb of memory, Ensoniq Soundscape AudioPCI, Gb Ethernet card, CD + DVD-RW drives, two hard disks, and one PCI slot, one shared PCI/ISA slot, and one ISA slot free.

In goes the ISA bridge board with flat cable attached, in the lower ISA slot:

And the PCI board goes in the PCI part of the shared PCI/ISA slot right above it:

It still is a tight fit. But this time everything sits at the right height:

After closing the case, connecting all cables anew, and booting up, Windows 98SE finds the card, asks for the Windows 98SE CD, finds the drivers on there, one reboot later, and then the card is fully functional and shows up in device manager:

I gain a PC Card thingie line in one of the other tabs too:

And there is a specific PCMCIA control panel available:

Each PCMCIA slot is automatically assigned some resources, and the only slightly worrisome thing I've seen is that one IRQ is shared with the soundcard (guess I'll disable the parallel post in the BIOS to free an additional IRQ). Can't show much more, as I currently lack PCMCIA cards that would serve some purpose in this particular system.

=====

yawetaG wrote:

It seems the spacing for PCI cards in this PC case is just a little bit off, so the slots are located too far back a fraction of a milimeter, but also a mm or so too low. So no go. 😵

A replacement that will fit is on its way:

Blank slot cover, and the PCMCIA card "drive" will go into the 5.25" bay that's still free. Should fit, right?

Having finally received the new PCMCIA card and bay, today was time to get it into my NEC.

First, a look at the bay:

It can easily be opened because the (metal) top is attached using the same screws that are used to mount the bay into the PC.

Also included is a 5.25" to 3.5" adapter, all plastic, to which the PCMCIA bay mounts with 6 longer screws than the standard ones:

I'll have to use this, as the NEC only has one 3.5" disk drive bay.

To be able to install the PCMCIA bay, I have to remove the floppy drive/hard disk cage to be able to remove the CD-ROM drive so I can have enough space to access everything (and also sort out the cabling). A better look at the floppy disk/hard disk cage:

CDR-1400A CD-ROM drive with readable label:

Cable mess to sort out:

To be able to install the drive bay adapter I have to take the front off the case, remove a metal blocking plate on the bare case itself, and a plastic one on the case front:

First do a crude test fit of the cable for the PCMCIA bay:

This showed the cable was just too short. So it was time for a different solution:

I swapped the PCMCIA bay and the floppy drive, and mounted the floppy drive in the bottom 5.25" bay. This also allows me to route the floppy cable much more efficiently, as well as use the same power cable for floppy and CD-ROM.

Then I put the CD-ROM drive back in place:

A test fit of the PCMCIA bay on the old location of the floppy drive shows it fits pretty much perfectly:

...and there's much more room and a less big mess of cables underneath.

I thought the shared ISA slot would be the perfect location for the ISA PCMCIA card:

...to put in the ISA card:

Like so:

But the PCMCIA cables were very hard to route through the case and almost completely obstruct the air flow:

So I removed the slot-mounted CF-card reader, and put the PCMCIA ISA card there:

This took several attempts because I had to route the cables carefully to get them to fit. Air flow still looks pretty bad:

...but it looks worse than it is, and there's quite a lot of free room behind the cables. As long as I leave the hard disk out it will work out I think.

Summary:
- 1 ISA slot less, one 5.25" bay less, no bays left free (except for the hard disk bay).
- 2 PCMCIA slots gained.
- Less cable clutter.
- Primary IDE cable and other power cable are now routed towards processor/graphics/free slot area, so I can hopefully find a solution to fix the CF card adapter somewhere in the vicinity.
- 2 ISA slots still free (one shared with a PCI slot with incorrect spacing to the back plate). There's also a VESA feature connector still available...

Maybe I should add a hardware MPEG decoder card? It needs to have drivers for Windows 3.x and/or Windows 95. Adding a separate graphics card is not really necessary, the on-board graphics are ATI Rage-based.
I could also add a second sound card to compensate for the on-board Soundblaster missing the game/MIDI port and wavetable headers...