VOGONS


Reply 40 of 71, by MaxWar

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I tried removing both 72pins, then it booted fine with himem using only its 8 mb (8x1mb) of 30 pin. No parity error.

Then i removed all 30 pins, and put back the two 72 pins, now it will not boot and only gives me long beeps. i suppose it likes his 30 pin slots filled first ? Anyway gotta go to work bbl.

Reply 41 of 71, by Anonymous Coward

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Are there any jumpers on the board for controlling the memory banks?

update: is this you board?

http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/I-L/30378.htm

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 42 of 71, by luckybob

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it looks like it to me... interesting to see that it will only take 4mb simms on the 72 pin slots. Not that surprising considering the age, but still.

32kx8 chips are available on ebay but usually people want an arm and a leg for them. especially compared to finding a crap board with 9 chips and salvaging them.

4mb sticks of FPM ram is easy to find. I see sellers selling them for $4 with shipping. so maxing out the boards ram should be easy. (I ALWAYS max out my ram)

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

Reply 43 of 71, by MaxWar

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

Are there any jumpers on the board for controlling the memory banks?

update: is this you board?

http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/I-L/30378.htm

Nice find! It definitely looks like my board, i could not find a model number on the board but it looks like the right one. The other schematic i found did not have the 72 pins slots.

So it appears i cannot use the 72 pins slots as long as i did not fill both 30 pin banks. I would like to max the board but then i would also like to keep one bank of 4mb sticks for sound card upgrades, to me this is more important then maxing ram, i will not use these 486 for intense tasks. I have a 440bx based dos powerhouse, i will use the 486 for stuff that run too fast on the other machine.

Looks like the best i could do without buying new ram and keeping 16mb for sound cards is :

28MB -(4) 4M x 9 -(4) 1M x 9 -(1) 1M x 36 - (1) 1M x 36

But Then that would only leave 6mb for the other machine...
I also need to find some 4mb 72 pins chips that do not produce parity error. I happen to have two behemoths. Will try them. Looks at those things, they feel like paperweights!
woot.jpg

Reply 44 of 71, by MaxWar

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Errrrrrrrr. PArity error with those too.
I even tried to take the 2x8mb sticks in my P90, recognized them as 4 mb + parity error.

I found an open source himem replacement/update called Himemx.sys . Im gonna try with that later 😀

http://www.mdgx.com/dos.htm#DOS

Reply 45 of 71, by Anonymous Coward

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Those 72 pin SIMMs are hilarious. I've never seen any like that before.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 46 of 71, by MaxWar

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Those simms are ludicrous 🤣, they barely fit in the mobo, they are so thick that they touch each other once installed.

I made good progress tonight.
I tried the replacement HIMEMX.EXE and it does not give me the error and works just like himem.
I dont think the error is due to a bad stick anymore since it does it with 3 different pairs of simm. Seems more likely it is some sort of 3some incompatibility with the system, himem and the 72pins ram.
I cannot tell if my sticks are parity or non-parity. I am gonna try memtest86 and see if i get a problem with that but so far, system seems happy.

I also ditched my 1.6 gb hdd and scrounged a 6.4 gb fujitsu drive that i trust more. Maxblast would not let me format more than one partition of 2gb ( or i did not find out how) so i used ontrack disk manager instead. Not as user friendly as Maxblast but i managed to format my drive in 4 fat16 partitions with it.

I now have 6.4 gb on my 486, the dynamic overlay does not even take any conventional memory. It also allows you to boot from cd when pressing spacebar. Did not test if this feature works on a 486, but that is still great! Just make sure you have a mouse connected when you install it, its a graphical thingy and has a glitch at one of the screen that you cannot get past with only KB. I had to reboot and go on a hunt for a serial mouse the first time 🤣

Tomorrow ill start to screw the computer back together as im pretty set on the hardware at this point.

One more thing you guys can probably help me about is tweaking the bios. I did the basics (hard drive, floppies, time/date ... ) but did not touch anything else, its all reset default. Might be that the Parity glitch with himem is fixable with bios ? Anyway here are two screenshots of the advanced settings. There are several options that i do not know about. My favourite one being : Single ALE enable : no ( i usualy drink more than one )
bios1.jpg
bios2.jpg

Reply 47 of 71, by Tetrium

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I've seen some weird SIMM's but never ones like those!

And yes, some boards with 30p and 72p slots require you to first fill up the 30p ones 🙁

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Reply 49 of 71, by shspvr

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Tetrium wrote:

I've seen some weird SIMM's but never ones like those!

And yes, some boards with 30p and 72p slots require you to first fill up the 30p ones 🙁

Your rigth that is odd looking memory stick
I haven't seen anything like that before and I though I seen it all
What come to mind is that really system memory

Reply 50 of 71, by DonutKing

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Looks like ZIP RAM mounted on a SIMM. Perhaps the manufacturer had an oversupply of ZIPs and made those to shift the stock.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 51 of 71, by shspvr

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DonutKing wrote:

Looks like ZIP RAM mounted on a SIMM. Perhaps the manufacturer had an oversupply of ZIPs and made those to shift the stock.

That what there where called ZIP RAM I have only saw thoses on a few PC devices like Old Video ISA/VLB Card and SCSI Harddrive/CD drive controllers.
So then more then likely this could be Amiga ZIP RAM Module after all there where the only one that used type of stuff.

Reply 52 of 71, by MaxWar

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Damn!

I just installed my cd-rom and decided i would install duke3d atomic edition to celebrate. When i tried to launch the game :
PARITY ERROR SYSTEM HALTED !!!!!

I guess ill just have to take those 72pins simms out, unless somebody has an idea. From what i read, the parity ram has 1 bit of parity memory for each byte of ram, resulting in an odd number of chips on the stick. All my 72 pins have even number of memory modules on them. But i looked at pictures of parity 72 pins simms on ebay and some of them have even numbers on them...

I could take a chance and order confirmed parity FPM 4mb sticks with odd number.
Anybody can give a reliable way to test if a stick is parity or not ?

I counted the chips on those badass simms you guys like so much, number is even.

Reply 53 of 71, by Anonymous Coward

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Can't you just disable the parity error check?

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 54 of 71, by WolverineDK

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3some incompatibility... is almost an invitation of invoking the rule 34 😉

Anyway, since you have been trying to check the parity stuff with the rams, then my question is this. Are you sure, it is not a hardware/trace error on the motherboard itself that is the issue of your ram giving you that error ?

Reply 55 of 71, by luckybob

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the parity error is because those simms ARENT PARITY CAPABLE. there are 32 chips. you need 36 for parity.

2 chips simms are NOT parity 3 chips are
8 chips no parity. 9 chips make parity.

So basically the simms are fine, just turn parity checking OFF in the bios. 😀

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

Reply 56 of 71, by MaxWar

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luckybob wrote:
the parity error is because those simms ARENT PARITY CAPABLE. there are 32 chips. you need 36 for parity. […]
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the parity error is because those simms ARENT PARITY CAPABLE. there are 32 chips. you need 36 for parity.

2 chips simms are NOT parity 3 chips are
8 chips no parity. 9 chips make parity.

So basically the simms are fine, just turn parity checking OFF in the bios. 😀

That is pretty much the idea i had.

Actually, about the parity check option, i noticed it of course and i would swear it was off by default, i actually remember putting it on just to see if the bios would give me more details about the error. But now... i removed it and the error is gone .... It just takes forever when himem loads... but it works! Damn my mind is playing tricks on me or what ??? Anyway tank you for that, i feel like a fool now 🤣

Btw i will need to check with that evergreen upgrade, i tried duke3d and it does not seem fast enough , feels like a regular DX33 and i remember it was faster than that back then on the other computer. Also, i noticed my turbo is inverted 🤣.

Edit: Awesome! found a pdf manual of the evergreen

Reply 57 of 71, by Anonymous Coward

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There is a flag you can set on himem to turn the memory test off. This should greatly increase the speed in which it loads. I had a similar problem with my 486, which has 128mb of memory and was causing me headaches between boots.

I suspect that what is holding duke3d back is your graphics adapter. Sadly there is very little that you can do about it, because VGA Wonder XL is pretty much as fast as VGA graphics got on the ISA bus. Your only real solution is to get a board with local bus graphics. You could of course try overclocking your ISA bus, but that is not recommended as you would be overclocking all your adapters, not just the VGA card.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 58 of 71, by MaxWar

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I mean, i used the same vga adapter when i was a kid, the same cpu overdrive, and i remember my duke3d was better than that. This is the same hardware. Only the mobo changed.
I get like 4 fps in the opening demo, this is wrong.

I just booted Ultimate boot cd on my 486 and ran x86test, it does say my CPU runs at 133mhz! In the evergreen manual they hint that performance issues can be caused by cache access problems. There was an evergreen diagnostic program, etdiag, but i cant find it anywhere. Actually i found a floppy image of it, but it is corrupted ... Im gonna have to play with setting, ill start with the write through/write back jumper.

Reply 59 of 71, by luckybob

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there is a thread here at vogons called "the ultimate 486 benchmark" or something to that effect. there were some benchmarks for vidspeed 4.0 and others. it would be worth giving them a whirl to see if its just duke being a pain or if its something else.

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