I swap my DVD-RW SATA drive for DVD PATA drive and put 256 MB RAM instead of 2 GB RAM, so I was finally able to run installation of Win98SE from CD. Unfortunetaly, there is still some issue during the final part installation, which require more troubleshooting 😢

Almost done with my 486 build. Finished figuring out the remaining hardware things today. I definitely underestimated how hard it would all be, haha. Just now, I finally felt that I had earned the right to re-assemble the case (that is, I'm not expecting to have to tweak any hardware inside any further 😉 ).

Dropped my EWS64s with a 32mb simm into my 200mmx machine. 3 cards in total now, EWS64s, SW60XG and a Combo OPL3/4 card. The EWS offers the flexibility with the loadable soundfonts in DOS

Testing out some soundfonts with midi's 😊

Another PCI related setting on "max" on the Hot433 resulted in ~67.28 fps in Shareware Doom demo3. Once I get the srams from China(hopefully legit or at least as fast) I'll bench again and then it's time to pester Anton from complang.tuwien.ac.at with another Doom score.
The fastest 486 on his list was able to claim a score of 70.1 fps(Am5x86 160/40 + SiS chipset) and having the second bank of the Hot433 filled may boost the result one notch towards this meaty score(being able to set cache wait states from 2-2-2 to 2-1-2).

We'll see.
Playing Blood and Doom on said machine is a total joy. Ultimate Doom's E4M2 is, of course, not steadily "gliding" at a 35fps but the best I have yet seen on a 486.
Only missing thing is an AWE sound card and a CRT screen, although later may never materialize due to space problems and really big monitors(24") being sparse.

Playing with a new PSU tester. Easy and quick PSU tests FTW.

Final touches on a restoration of a basic 2.4GHz P4 system running XP SP3. Notice the difference between using the supplied SiS AGP XP driver (2003) that came with the board and the last and latest SiS AGP XP driver released in 2004. Quite a jump in performance with the newer SiS AGP driver. ASUS P4S8X-MX paired with a basic EVGA 6200 512MB AGP card.

Trying to run Carmageddon on W98/Dos with Voodoo2 😜

More updates on the IIcx:

-While I'm not ruling out the hard drive's reliability just yet until I've had a recap done on the controller board, since the actual spinning platter/head part seems to be fine (disk utilities aren't complaining about bad sectors or anything), it turns out that even if it's warmed up enough to boot, there's a chance that it'll stop working correctly later, resulting in weird freezes when running the OS from the HDD. I'm definitely blaming the electrolytic caps there. FDD-based operation is pretty rock-solid as long as you don't mind swapping all the time and the drive heads stay clean.
-Also speaking of the IIcx auto-inject floppy drive, I realized that this little spring-loaded arm on the left side that pulls in the floppy by a little notch needed to be bent up a bit. Now I don't have problems with the disk coming down early and not being in proper read/write position; it seems like what happened was that the arm wasn't clearing the notch as the disk carriage came down, and it sorta stayed underneath the disk and propped the whole thing up until pushed in the rest of the way. Just gotta bend it up a little more, real carefully, and now it works more or less how I'd imagine a new auto-inject FDD to work.
-I still haven't figured out what's up with the SIMM slots on this board, and it'd be much easier to diagnose if I just had a proper schematic.
-I'm getting increasingly concerned about the 6500's manual-inject FDD, like the top-side head comes down too hard and rubs off against disks, leaving marks that the IIcx's FDD doesn't despite having been cleaned. If I'm lucky, it's just a sorta smoothening and no permanent damage has been done. If I'm unlucky... well, remember what I said about disk scraping? I still haven't figured out why it's more likely to happen on the Power Mac's drive to begin with, as it looks fine, aligned, and nothing's protruding past the head.

All in all, I have a usable 68030 computer here. It's just not the most usable until I figure out how to get it to see the other SIMM quads so I have more than just 4 MB of RAM, not to mention recapping the HDD so I don't have to go scrambling for a SCSI2CF adapter right off the bat. Oh, and before I forget, gotta get a 50-pin SCSI terminator so I can use that CD drive.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

More updates on the IIcx: […]
Show full quote

More updates on the IIcx:

-While I'm not ruling out the hard drive's reliability just yet until I've had a recap done on the controller board, since the actual spinning platter/head part seems to be fine (disk utilities aren't complaining about bad sectors or anything), it turns out that even if it's warmed up enough to boot, there's a chance that it'll stop working correctly later, resulting in weird freezes when running the OS from the HDD. I'm definitely blaming the electrolytic caps there. FDD-based operation is pretty rock-solid as long as you don't mind swapping all the time and the drive heads stay clean.
-Also speaking of the IIcx auto-inject floppy drive, I realized that this little spring-loaded arm on the left side that pulls in the floppy by a little notch needed to be bent up a bit. Now I don't have problems with the disk coming down early and not being in proper read/write position; it seems like what happened was that the arm wasn't clearing the notch as the disk carriage came down, and it sorta stayed underneath the disk and propped the whole thing up until pushed in the rest of the way. Just gotta bend it up a little more, real carefully, and now it works more or less how I'd imagine a new auto-inject FDD to work.
-I still haven't figured out what's up with the SIMM slots on this board, and it'd be much easier to diagnose if I just had a proper schematic.
-I'm getting increasingly concerned about the 6500's manual-inject FDD, like the top-side head comes down too hard and rubs off against disks, leaving marks that the IIcx's FDD doesn't despite having been cleaned. If I'm lucky, it's just a sorta smoothening and no permanent damage has been done. If I'm unlucky... well, remember what I said about disk scraping? I still haven't figured out why it's more likely to happen on the Power Mac's drive to begin with, as it looks fine, aligned, and nothing's protruding past the head.

All in all, I have a usable 68030 computer here. It's just not the most usable until I figure out how to get it to see the other SIMM quads so I have more than just 4 MB of RAM, not to mention recapping the HDD so I don't have to go scrambling for a SCSI2CF adapter right off the bat. Oh, and before I forget, gotta get a 50-pin SCSI terminator so I can use that CD drive.

Have you tried kicking it?

Have you tried licking it?

Have you tried it with green eggs and ham?

kicking it will only work if you have the Fonzie touch.

liqmat wrote:

Playing with a new PSU tester. Easy and quick PSU tests FTW.

PSUtester.JPG

My experience with those is that they're only slightly better than doing a loopback test with a paperclip and connecting a really cheap multitester. They don't stress or put any significant load on the PSU, about all they are really good at is allowing you to power it on. Therefore I've had PSUs actually fail, that pass with this tester with flying colors. Your mileage may vary, of course...

Stiletto wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Playing with a new PSU tester. Easy and quick PSU tests FTW.

PSUtester.JPG

My experience with those is that they're only slightly better than doing a loopback test with a paperclip and connecting a really cheap multitester. They don't stress or put any significant load on the PSU, about all they are really good at is allowing you to power it on. Therefore I've had PSUs actually fail, that pass with this tester with flying colors. Your mileage may vary, of course...

I find these very useful and they have saved my ass a few times in the past. They are a clean, easy solution as well. One time had a strange issue with my video having snow like feedback on the screen, but only in text mode. Quickly hooked up my PSU tester and sure as shit the PSU was shoving too much voltage out on the 12v rail. Immediately replaced the PSU and no more feedback on the video signal. These were never intended for load test scenarios. They have their uses and is just one tool in my arsenal. Needed a new shiny one that had pretty lights.

Decided to install the ATAPI drivers for my LS-120 drive in MS-DOS and unfortunately, my CD drives letters were changed from D and E to E and F with the SuperDrive as drive D. And there aren't any parameters for the driver to force the SuperDrive as drive F.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Have you tried kicking it?

Sounds like a great way to cause a head crash and damage the old SCSI drive beyond repair, and besides, no Apple III "drop it to reseat the chips" fix is going to work on a system where almost everything is soldered down.

It's gotta be a broken trace somewhere for the RAM issue. I just can't figure out where, particularly as all the other suspect traces I've found pass the continuity test with my multimeter (save the two in the startup circuit I already bypassed with wires to fix up the soft power functionality). I need a schematic that goes beyond the startup circuit for that; just knowing what actually handles the DIMM slots on this thing would help a lot, between the 68030 and the various ASICs. One of 'em might be some kinda northbridge for all I know.

As for kicking the old Mac out to the curb? We'll see about that if I ever get my hands on an Amiga, or if I'm really lucky, an X68000/X68030. Vastly superior 68k machines for sure, just can't really find 'em without paying way too much.

While logged into an ssh session on my file server, I had an interesting set of error messages pop up.

[Hardware Error]: CPU:0 MC4_STATUS[Over|CE|-|-|AddrV|CECC]: 0xd47c4001e3080813
[Hardware Error]: MC4_ADDR: 0x000000008d76fb18
[Hardware Error]: Northbridge Error (node 0): DRAM ECC error detected on the NB.
[Hardware Error]: cache level: L3/GEN, mem/io: MEM, mem-tx: RD, part-proc: SRC (no timeout)

First time I've ever seen that happen. I guess if enough years go by, some day ECC does something for you.
Checked the logs and as far as I can tell this is the first and only time it's happened.

I just resurrected an old Tekram P6B40-A4x motherboard that was sitting on a drawer in my attic for at least 12 years or so 😀

Two bulged capacitors replaced and it's alive. I even found on a website a patched bios that enables it to support 128Gb HDDs. Of course that using a SATA PCI card would be a much more sensible option, given the board's pathetic ATA-33 interface, but hey, I just had to do it 😁

Just mucking around with a Dell Dimention L733r. Installed Xandros 2.0 on it just for jiggles.
It runs very well indeed

Playing around with my Dx2-80, 16mb Ram, S3-805-vlb and 128kb cache. No luck with the new controller, so I went back to the old vlb controller. Swapped the 512mb CF card for a Seagate 16gb platter drive. Detected as a 8gb, so I installed a drive overlay. Ran a couple of benchmarks on this machine for the fun of it.

3D bench 1.0c gave 53.6
Speedsys gave 3.3 megabyte read speed and 8ms seek time.

What a nice little system. Good scores.

Added Adaptec AHA-1510 ISA SCSI card + Nakamichi 16x 5 CD changer drive to my 486, and after a bit of fussing with the drivers I've now got 5 CD drives 😀 (E: through I: )

The Nakamichi drivers in DOS just use a modified Oakcdrom, but in Windows it adds two simple programs, a CD player and a CD viewer that lets you view the size and volume label of the cds in the drive (s).