Camera speed, yes.

I think it halts on e8 or something.

It does that with any non intel processor I believe. I would have to run test again.

Well,

I guess I can physically install the socket. Won’t hurt to try right? At least it will look cool.

And look into that battery holder posted earlier.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-12-07, 02:55:

I played with some bios settings:

Not the external cache setting though oddly,

And….

Time to do CacheCHK to see how much of that 512MB can be cached 😀

Shouldn't have surprised me, Intel has done this lots of times. Just bought 2x 8GB DDR3 for m'n SO's i7-860, which supposedly does max 4GB per DIMM, 16GB total. Nope, she now has 24GB and can upgrade to 32GB if needed.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-12-07, 02:26:

Tried a winchip.

Yeah, this bios is definitely doing this on purpose 🤣. Gonna have to hack it or ditch it.

Given all the unusual onboard stuff (SCSI, sound) that might be a challenge. MR-BIOS is amazing, but I'm not aware of any i430NX boards supported, let alone one with an unusual NCR Super-IO chip. Might make it all the more interesting if you're able to hack it.

Yeah, I've come up with zilch on that ncr chip. Maybe a separate IO card would work and allow other BIOSes to be used?

Installing a second socket probably won't hurt, although I don't know what controls CPU access to the bus and both trying to write to it at the same time sounds like it'd do bad things. Incidentally, you may have already read the wikipedia page on APICs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Progra … rupt_Controller but after reading that then I'm wondering if a board with the 82489DX APIC chips would allow non-Intel CPUs to do MP as all the APIC stuff is then external and it doesn't rely on the bits Intel built in to later CPUs. Only problem is I can't just find any board with it.

I don’t believe that two cpus in a board with unsupported/missing apic would be a dangerous scenario. Would probably just not work bus collisions don’t seem to do damage, and intel chips I believe would by default be working in tri state anyway. But mps would probably just not work with no apic. Guessing.

I have to admire your chutzpah - you treat known limitations as challenges, which could be described as foolish or worse, but you just chip away at it and discover stuff like the K6-2+ cache unlock by ignoring other people telling you what's not possible. That one alone earns you a place in the annals

It's called intellectual curiosity. Often laughed at and/or faced with "we've always done that way and it's always worked". That's how you learn new things.

Not sure I can contribute much more on this thread to be honest as I am 100% unfamiliar with that board! 😀

Today’s project was the socket.

You may have noticed that my socket (primary) was in bad shape.

I didn’t want to go through the trouble to replace it but I did take it apart and replaced the lever and slider. Which is good enough for now.

I also installed the second socket. Which is kinda a pain. Bur I have practice. It took two hours I think? Anyway. It still works and continues to act buggy as hell and be very picky about cpus

But still working is a win for now.

Have been unable to confirm function of second cpu suspect no dual is ocuring.

That’s a problem for another day.

For now I want to figure out what that IC was that I removed from the socket pad to install the socket?

I reinstalled the part in question.

Seems to be a 1nf capacitor.

No change noticed

It seems to be between vss and reset.

getting these soon.

Looky, one has the scsi populated!

Are those all Zeos boards?

7F20 wrote on 2022-12-27, 19:34:

Are those all Zeos boards?

It seems so

Got some more zēos motherboards today unfortunately not in the best of shape. But might play with the vlsi dual at some point. Can anyone tell me anything about the vlsi chipset? Is it rebranded intel?

Truly VLSI.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-02-17, 19:34:

Truly VLSI.

Cheers,

Excellent! Makes me even more curious to play with it!

Finally got around to playing with the vsli dual socket mobo in the pile of mobos I got.

It has a vrm socket which might be a non standard pinout as I can’t seem to get it to post without overloading my atx-at protection device

At first I wasn’t able to get the motherboard to post at all until I installed these jumpers

I did try a non intel cpu in the motherboard and on this one, it does work! Woohoo! It however shows as a pentium 133 even though it is a k6-2 400 which I believe is actually running at 400 66x6

But on to the big question, will dual k6 work?

A quick test for bus collisions showed they are happening. Unfortunately test was as follows: k6-2 as pictured, pentium 200 in secondary socket. I only had one fully functioning interposer at the ready at time of test.

I could try two 400s and may later but it seems the k6 and pentium were talking at the same time. And they shouldn’t be. Ergo no post.

The setup

Hmmm, only sees one core under ME. Is that normal because single core os? Or should cou-z see the other core?

Dual 200 p54 installed

Sphere478 wrote on 2024-01-22, 22:22:

Hmmm, only sees one core under ME. Is that normal because single core os? Or should cou-z see the other core?

Dual 200 p54 installed

Yes that's normal for dos/9x they have no idea that second CPU is even there.

Did some more experiments

Seems the board works with FPM and EDO

And seems to support up to at least 512mb of ram.

I transplanted the amd scsi chip and it seems to work without any other transplants.

Can’t seem to get it to register any cpu speed above 133mhz

Either the bios doesn’t support displaying speeds above 133 or they didn’t route bf1

Can confirm it seems to have 50 and 66mhz fab option. Have been able to get speeds 75, 100, 133 to display.

I also tried the coast stick from the other zeos motherboard but it immediately triggers a over current event. Not good. Seems zeos used multiple coast standards? As well as a odd vrm standard.