VOGONS


First post, by Auzner

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I have an old beige pentium tower I got for $10 some years ago and IBM ThinkPads I've collected. I've just always taken my boxes of "PC Stuff" from apartment to apartment living with little space. It's all from fleamarkets since my original stuff is long gone. There are 10GB IDE hard drives which haven't been spun up since being labeled "tested good 2008." I'm lacking AT power supplies and cases. Drives, cables, adapters are plentiful and there's a 5 photo attachment limit. FX5200 isn't the AGP card I'd choose either but it's all I have other than a PCI GF2 MX and PCI TNT2.

I still need to find out more about the super socket 7 and 386 motherboards and this embedded socket 7 (almost like an itx) board not pictured.

I am cleaning up my ebay watch list now. 😀 I'm also happy that the smallest board is super socket 7 with ATX, AGP, and SDRAM. A compact Win98SE machine would be fun with all this stuff.

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Reply 1 of 12, by kixs

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This happens to me alot... every time I need something and I don't know where it is... I go searching through my boxes... and I'm always surprised what I already have 🤣

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 2 of 12, by dionb

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Recognizable...

I thought I had sold/given away all my old stuff before moving from a large(ish) house in a small town (with shed and cellar) to a small apartment in the big city over a decade ago. Now I'm getting an So7 system together again (excuse: to build one with my son) and just after ordering - of course - some SIMMs I was digging around in my old PC toolbox and found 4x 64MB FPM 70ns SIMMs 2x 64MB EDO 60ns and 2x 16MB EDO 50ns (and a couple of P54C CPUs). Looks like I didn't need those 2x 16MB EDO 60ns 😉

Reply 3 of 12, by Deksor

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Remove that varta battery from the 386 board before it kills it !

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 4 of 12, by Skyscraper

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I would be greateful if you could make a copy of that MR BIOS for the Forex 386 motherboard and upload it somewhere. To "VOGONS Vintage Driver Library" preferably if it's allowed (might be copyright issues).

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 5 of 12, by Auzner

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dionb wrote:

I was digging around in my old PC toolbox and found 4x 64MB FPM 70ns SIMMs 2x 64MB EDO 60ns and 2x 16MB EDO 50ns (and a couple of P54C CPUs). Looks like I didn't need those 2x 16MB EDO 60ns 😉

I had some socket 7 boards and PCI video cards on my ebay watch list--lo and behold! I have enough simms to post test at least. I didn't think I had any at all.

Deksor wrote:

Remove that varta battery from the 386 board before it kills it !

And I spot an EXT_BAT header! 😎

Skyscraper wrote:

I would be greateful if you could make a copy of that MR BIOS for the Forex 386 motherboard

Alright I'll tinker with the 386 board today. I don't have an ISA video card, is there another way to dump the BIOS? I have tools. So far I don't have a datasheet or know what kind of chip that is. Looks like I should be able to dump it with a pickit 3.

Here's what I'll try: http://danceswithferrets.org/geekblog/?p=315

Reply 7 of 12, by Skyscraper

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Auzner wrote:

Here it goes...

bios_dump.jpg

Good luck! 😀

I use another motherboard to do a BIOS dump if I can't get the motherboard in question to run. Boot with the original BIOS chip, switch to the one I want to dump while the system is running and then hope Uniflash can identify and read the chip correctly. 😀

That looks much more fancy and much safer!

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 8 of 12, by Auzner

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It worked!

Also I took the battery out, which also appears to still work! 2.9V?

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April 8, 2018 Correction:
Sorry this file is incorrect! The DIP28 is a 512k not a 128k! Here is a link to the proper BIOS:
Re: How about a MR-BIOS ROM file repository?

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Last edited by Auzner on 2018-04-08, 21:06. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 9 of 12, by Skyscraper

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Auzner wrote:

It worked!

Also I took the battery out, which also appears to still work! 2.9V?

battery_removal.jpg

Leave the battery out for now and if you want to use the motherboard later connect the battery with some leads soldered to where the battery was connected to keep it some distance from the board otherwise there is a risk the old battery will spill its guts and corrode the board.

If you get a new rechargable 3.6V lithium replacement barrel battery you can solder that directly to the motherboard as long as you desolder it again before putting the board in long term storage (as in many years). Connecting the battery with some leads or using a non rechargable battery pack using the battery header is always a better choice in my opinion though. That said I have soldered new batterys directly to the motherboards my self out of convenience.

Thanks for the BIOS dump!

With luck it will work with my Forex 386 board. My board is in storage now but sooner or later I will tinker with it again and I know that other Vogons members also want that BIOS. 😀

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2018-01-14, 00:57. Edited 2 times in total.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 10 of 12, by Auzner

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Skyscraper wrote:

Thanks for the BIOS dump!

With luck it will work with my Forex 386 board. My board is in storage but sooner or later I will tinker with it again and I know that others also want that BIOS. 😀

You're welcome.

While I have this setup to dump parallel memory DIPs, I wonder if there's any information on these chips. 12.75V, is that a logic level?

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I have modified the circuit to dump the dip32 eeproms. No clue what they're for, but they're dumping.

Reply 11 of 12, by gdjacobs

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12V is probably the programming voltage. Modern EEPROMs can be programmed with 5V or less.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 12 of 12, by Auzner

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Being short on AT PSUs, I've built an ATX to AT adapter. The ATX v2.2 to v1.0 socket was not that useful since the wires were mostly insulation to look like 16-18ga, but were more like 20-22.

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Since the SS7 board is ATX and I've powered that up first...

The BIOS date and time are ACCURATE 😲
It's been in my boxes for probably 7 years, who knows how long the last guy had it stored. All that's hooked up is keyboard and vga.