Most of my time this past week post-VCF was spent toying around with my new-to-me Amiga 2000, and quickly finding out that it has some serious stability issues, perhaps stemming from the clock battery corrosion getting to some of the CPU pins. The fact that I don't have a PLCC extractor for the Fat Agnus or a desoldering gun for the 68000 socket (some of the pins in there are clearly corroded) is driving me crazy, as the former demands I wait for snail mail while the latter is hideously expensive.
Also, I finally got my Gotek on Friday, so I just took it apart, flashed the FlashFloppy firmware (I already had the necessary serial adapter from needing to run WinDAS on FD Trinitron monitors), slipped on an OLED screen, and sure enough, it works, making whichever Amiga I install it in a heck of a lot more usable. Too bad I don't have an external floppy adapter for the A500 for making physical DD floppies out of my ADFs, and the A2000... well, see above.
However, I still can't actually do much with the A500, because the replacement keyboard membrane I ordered still hasn't arrived from the UK yet. I'm guessing it'll suddenly show up in the middle of next week, but if it's like the A500 itself, it'll probably wind up taking three weeks for some stupid reason. It wouldn't be too hard for me to circumvent this if I just had a DIN-5 female socket; this way, I could connect my A2000 keyboard to the header on the A500 without much fuss, since the keyboard protocol's the same.
With my wannabe-Amigan efforts at a standstill, I turned my efforts to the Power Macintosh 9600, which was a bit quirky. Having an XLR8 ZIF adapter with a G3 at 400 MHz in a Tsunami board without the cache enable resistor jumper removed and no system extension to disable the G3's speculative execution/branch prediction/etc. would seemingly do that, but it also turned out that of the six 64 MB DIMMs, two were bad, just not coming up at all, and sadly, they weren't a matched set of failures. That leaves me with 256 MB that doesn't seem to be going into interleaved mode.
This system was also a hell of a time to get running properly, because as it turns out, I can't just pluck the IDE HDD I had in the Power Macintosh 6500 it just replaced, hook it up in the 9600 with an ATA controller, and expect it to mount. In fact, the installed PATA DVD drive (not the original SCSI CD drive) wasn't bootable, either. I had to break out an external SCSI drive just to install the Mac OS properly!
Except even when booted from CD, the HDD connected to the internal drive controller wouldn't mount. Apple System Profiler saw it, it just didn't want to mount it for some stupid reason. The DVD drive would mount discs just fine, but it still wasn't bootable no matter how many times I held down that C key upon startup.
I could have tried initializing an IDE drive connected to the PCI Acard controller that was installed, but I had a different idea: slip in a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA card that I also got at VCF and use a SATA drive, thinking that would be the way to go with my MDDs not having much space to route SATA cables around the optical drive cage. I was right.
One Hitachi 80 GB SATA drive later (which has the handy perk of retaining a Molex 4-pin connector for power, sparing me the need for one of my SATA power adapter cables), and I had Mac OS 9.1 up and running on the 9600. It still won't permit SATA optical drives to be bootable, though, so I guess I'm gonna have to keep that external SCSI CD drive for now, even if 4x is painfully slow on a Power Mac.
As for the 6500 HDD issue, I luckily also got a FireWire IDE drive enclosure with the rest of the stuff, so I could just throw the drive in there, connect it via the OrangeLink FireWire/USB combo controller card that was installed, probably be good to go - NOPE. The system just locked up in mere seconds every time I connected the drive, responsive to the mouse but little else. Forced me to try some Zip 100 shenanigans with the iBook G4 (which didn't act up with the same drive and enclosure, so it was known good), 100 MB at a time...
...until I thought to rearrange some cards in there. I had this Sonnet Tempo Trio card that came in the MDD, presumably for USB 2.0, but seemed like a waste in that machine compared to chucking it in my 6500 bereft of USB and FireWire. Well, I pulled it from the 6500 prior to putting it up on consignment, knowing how valuable it is for adding modern interfaces to an old Mac like that, put it in slot A1 in place of the old Acard IDE card since the Tempo Trio is also an IDE adapter, and pulled the OrangeLink card entirely.
Now the FireWire enclosure with the 6500 HDD in it just works - no hangups, no fuss, just fast file transfers. What the heck? If it were THIS easy before, I would've saved myself a lot of time getting this system up and running!
So here I am, moving everything I can over to the 9600 so I can put it through its paces as my new Classic Mac OS gaming machine. Sure, I have an MDD (actually two MDDs; I scored another one at VCF as a parts unit for my FW800 1.42 GHz system, but it turns out that this second FW400 2003 system just needs a new PSU to work) to use for the more demanding games like anything Unreal Engine 1-based (UT and Deus Ex really demand a lot from the CPU and GPU to maintain 60 FPS), but the MDDs also lack an ADB port for my Thrustmaster FCS/WCS/gameport pedal setup - something that Flying Nightmares and A-10 Attack!/Cuba! support directly, while also being too old for InputSprocket (which is required for USB controllers).