|
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
 
Location: USA | Strange for the caps to have been cut off as the board appears like it was in regular use at some point. Maybe someone used it for parts, or those caps blew off the board. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Any luck getting it to work yet? |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | The possibility of them having blown up in the past did cross my mind, them being tantalums and all. I did wonder if maybe they'd blown and someone had cut the remains off with the intention of repairing the board, but that the repairs were never gotten around to before it found its way to the scrap pile.
I don't have capacitors of the correct value to hand and the ones I have that are close are really busted up, but things do get warmer than they did before as if an actual clock is being fed to them now, everything acted as if it were 'halted' before, odds are the caps I've hastily stuffed on there aren't good enough and need replacing with the correct values and less mileage. Wish I had the proper tools to analyze boards in depth, like a scope and shit, but they're too expensive.
I do think the prognosis is generally good though. It seems both Soyo and EDOM sold a version of this design with roughly the same component placement, so finding someone with one of those or another PI4 who can get me the values and a few things to compare with won't be impossible, the EDOM even has the same jumper labels aside from their alterations to the voltage regulation.
One interesting discovery I made is that the clock generator (same used by MS-4144) can be programmed to run at 80MHz and the board does have a hardware PCI divider onboard, may have to do some reverse-engineering and see if the MSI has such a divider too as it may be possible to start a DX-50 at these speeds, or maybe force a POD into 1x mode and have it run at this speed. Turns out another board I have which uses a Cypress PLL would be able to do 100MHz if the jumpers were present, but that one has no divider onboard.
The Jetway board isn't happy, but has proven useful for debugging this ABit, because that one does appear to have a busted chipset, nothing gets warm on that one. The 386SX board blew a tantalum but should otherwise work once I replace it as it was starting the VGA card when that blew, the PSU shut off at that point. The 286 board has been on fire in the past, but was also repaired for this in the past, it should work fine with some tweaking as the logic seems to be doing what it should, just need some 30-Pin slots to stuff in those SIPP holes. All but four of the included RAM sticks seem to work, including the big 32M sticks - haven't tried that weird one with the little voltreg looking thing on it as I don't know what that is, almost looks like it'd be out of a sampler or something.
Otherwise I have a script nearly done for a video, so hopefully I can get onto that in the near future. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Recieved an MeanWell RT-65b Power Supply and installed it into an empty Amiga-500 power supply shell.
 (MeanWell-07.jpg)
Attachments
----------------
 MeanWell-07.jpg (341KB - 410 downloads)
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Wrote a blog post about the PSU... |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Finished up my Amiga500 Turbo Edition the other day. Now it is not a stock Amiga500 model anymore. I have beefed (or souped) it up to the levels of an expanded Amiga2000 machine. And except for two rocker switches and and VGA output in the case, you can not see that it has been modded at all. I don't think that I can do it any better. Well.... Perhaps I can add some more in the form of an PC bridge board. Yet that would make me loose around 512k of ChipMem, unless I can find a PC card that can deliver 1mb of its ram as ChipRam, when I am running it in Amiga-mode.
Here is the final machine....
Yet I am pretty happy with this result, and I have the other 500, that are just a stock machine. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Going through boxes of non-computer, I mean absolutely non-computer related stuff. I found my old Asrock K7S41 that I thought I had thrown out because of what I believed to be a botched recap. And it struck me, that I had missed one single bulging cap at that time. We are talking some 3 or 4 years ago. Why it was sitting there not in antistatic bag, between picture frames and old dinner plates, I had no idea about. I must have had a hurry, cleaning up at that time. Well... Who knows. Anyway.
I thought that I should give it one last go, at bringing the board back to life. It is Win98, Win2000, WinXP and Os/2 compatible after all. So I found one cap that had the correct fahrad rating, yet 10 volt and not 6.3 volt. Volts do not really matter, as long as they are at least what is specified. On the other hand, 10 volt might be a bit over the top. After a quick solder job, I managed to bring it back from the grave. I only had it posting. Now I need to find drives and stuff, in order to test it through. A job for the next couple of days.
 (K7S41-01.jpg)
 (K7S41-02.jpg)
 (K7S41-03.jpg)
 (K7S41-04.jpg)
 (K7S41-05.jpg)
Attachments
----------------
K7S41-01.jpg (411KB - 411 downloads)
K7S41-02.jpg (487KB - 410 downloads)
K7S41-03.jpg (654KB - 440 downloads)
K7S41-04.jpg (646KB - 435 downloads)
K7S41-05.jpg (564KB - 424 downloads)
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I had a K7S41GX once, in fact I think it's still around. Honestly, it was one of the worst motherboards I ever used, very unreliable and the slots never lined up properly - in fact the AMR/CNR, whatever it was, had been positioned so far off spec that it was impossible to use. Strangely spiders seem to love the thing though, so at least it found a use in some way.
Congrats on finishing the Amiga.
Edited by DXZeff 2019-03-27 9:17 AM
 (vlcsnap-6729-06-07-18h40m55s905.jpg)
Attachments
----------------
vlcsnap-6729-06-07-18h40m55s905.jpg (350KB - 416 downloads)
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| My K7S41 is rock solid. The K7S41-GX model is the one you need to avoid. Besides the obvious bad, bad, bad, BAD chinese caps, it is a decent board. Mine is from 2005/06.
Thanks. Yeah. The old lady spins and purr's like I want it. So nice a machine, and the one year and one month upgrade process totally worth it. I only need to get an external Gotek drive now.
Today I recieved a breadbin in the mail. I made sure that it was one with one of the most sold motherboard revisions. It is assy number 250407 and to my knowledge one of the most sold versions. Picture is ultra sharp on my machine and it has the old SID chip. It is somewhat yellow, yet nothing really bad. So I am really happy with my purchase. It came with two joysticks, a datasette deck and just over 25 tapes. |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | I spent more money. After doing some Trump like negotiations, I acquired this for a reasonable $35, compared to the hundreds of dollars people think this system is worth.
I also enjoy the model number, even though there is nothing 686 about this system. Small and in nice condition, proper 286 system. 286 is a 286 no matter who made it. Comes with a CGA/VGA combo card from the looks of it which is worth the $35 in itself. Says it won't power on, sure it won't be too difficult to make it right.
Capture box is down again. Tried to stream tonight, motherboard just hung at bios screen. Put in the "new" Intel Extreme board, found, most likely due to the 1 broken off pin in the socket, that the first 2 memory slots hang the board with code 21 ( slots 1,3 technically ) and only 2/4 work, so no dual channel probably but not needed anyway for capturing video. Has a bios password, asked the seller, had no clue about that, so he is asking the guy he bought the board from about what it might be. Intel's password clear procedure won't work on the board either ( thanks Intel for that ) and I am not alone with that fun little fact. So if I have to, I will get physical with the bios chip and reprogram it myself ( Intel's flash recovery also did not clear the password )
Code 69 when hung at password screen, ha ha! Love the lit skull thing. It stayed lit until I reset the bios. Got an interesting PCI video card but have not unboxed it yet.
Edited by waybacktech 2019-03-31 6:34 AM
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| waybacktech - 2019-03-31 8:31 AM
I spent more money. After doing some Trump like negotiations, I acquired this for a reasonable $35, compared to the hundreds of dollars people think this system is worth.
I also enjoy the model number, even though there is nothing 686 about this system. Small and in nice condition, proper 286 system. 286 is a 286 no matter who made it. Comes with a CGA/VGA combo card from the looks of it which is worth the $35 in itself. Says it won't power on, sure it won't be too difficult to make it right.
Now that is a sweet looking case. By the looks of it, then the plates are thick and heavy. Trump negotiations you say? So you "forgot" to pay the seller some money then? Naaa.... Just kidding. Don't want to go into politics here. It might get really ugly and we are here for hobby and not politics. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Bought one low power consuming SocketA processor.... |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #DXZeff
I am actually qurious as to what OS you had running on your K7S41-GX board. I had my K7S41 tested today. And I chose Win98 for it. Eveeything is stable, except for the USB controller. If I enable it in the BIOS and try to install drivers, then it becomes unstable. If disabled, the board is butter smooth and issue less in Win98se.
I need to say this, that when I build machines at a company (now long gone) I did these aprox 6 to 8 K7S41 based low budget machines each day. And we used XP exclusively. And I never had any board fail on me, except those with production errors. They were few however. They were nice office machines, using XP at that time.
Another thing, is that you need to enable spread spectrum and compatibility option in the BIOS. Else it is quite picky on memory quality. Just use kingston and enable those two. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | @WaybackTech - Oh, no, a Packard Smell! Hey, whatever works.
My brain can never quite seem to contain the fact that Intel make boards like that, memory always returns them being green and boring.
@Brostenen; That motherboard was running Windows XP and the CPU was a Sempron 2200+ with some amount of RAM. The experience was horrible, it was sluggish, it crashed and the board died in short order. One strange thing about it, that system booted really fast despite having a slow Maxtor hard drive installed, no idea why.
-
Haven't had much time to do much of anything lately, but I did build a NAS that I might post pictures of at some point. It isn't an interesting machine, just some PCI only Celery 600 that my old neighbors gave to me before moving here, it has a SATA RAID card installed and two 2TB RAID1 volumes with some hard drives I was never going to use either. It works well enough and it gets around the slow networking issues with Windows NT6+ and older systems, but for newer systems it is sluggish because the RAID card is extremely slow - we're talking slower than early 2000s Promise cards, like single digits slow, it's bad, might have to change that down the line, it does send e-mails to me if something breaks though.
Otherwise I bought one of these which I have rather questionable plans for, as well as some crappy (not really crappy) Socket 5 AT system solely for its parts;
It is unremarkable as all hell, Pentium 100, some Epox motherboard with a slightly odd Award BIOS. On the other hand the parts in it are worth more than I paid for it now, it has an AWE 32 which is a card I've never owned, a Video Blaster MPEG decoder that isn't currently working, an S3 Vision 868 and a rather nice Creative branded Panasonic CD drive which will replace the busted one I have.
But also, that case;
I like it, that's gonna house something special. Actually I might move the P66 into there as it would negate a cooling problem most cases have with that board.
Edit: Oh, server might go down for backup tomorrow, probably won't take very long.
Edited by DXZeff 2019-04-03 7:40 PM
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Yup... The same combination that we had trouble with, back in the mid-00's when building low budget office machines. I really do not understand why people think the GX is such a nice board. It is all over youtube for some reason. I give you right, that the GX is a really shitty board.
That P100 is build in a way that I would do. More or less. For a Pentium One system, I would prefer a nice S3-Pci card and some kind of MIDI/WaveTable card/solution. For the video decoder card, then it is not really what I would put into it, unless it is MPEG2. I am not really a fan of MIDI/WaveTable on anything 486 and older. Well... Perhaps 5x86-133 or DX4-120. My 5x86-133 have a DreamBlaster-S1 daughterboard installed, and are using an S3-Virge325 PCI card. Such a nice setup. Looking forward to see what you might get out of that P-100 system.
EDIT:
A P-One still only deserve MS-Dos 6.22 if you ask me. :-D I will never install Win9x on such a system, that is for P-2 and up. :-)
Edited by Brostenen 2019-04-03 10:29 PM
|
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | That is a proper setup there. I also like the case, with the dark grey around the buttons is a nice touch. Looks to be in great shape. Sometimes buying a complete system is the best, if not only way to get certain and rare parts. I sure hope it arrives in the condition pictured. I would consider making it a Cyrix 686 box myself already having a few Intel Pentium machines, but I am a bit partial to Cyrix even though their FPU was lacking and some ran hot.
The Packard Smell 286 has arrived, I have not unboxed it though as I am planning to do that on a live stream, and hopefully get it working as well. Still waiting for the slow boat from China american postal system to get my bios clip and new USB programmer delivered so I can try reprogramming the bios on the Intel mobo but I have my laptop setup for temp streaming duties.
Epic April fools video this year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIFF1OVic4 Last year he did the Voodoo 5 9000 card which was epic as well.
Also just arrived is a Diamond Speedstar 64 https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/2D4AAOSwHkBclwpQ/s-l1600.jpg I had one ( more accurately was in my dad's 486 back in the day ) and I had the card for a long time but some how some way I haven't found it since before I started my channel so I finally found one for a price I was willing to pay, they don't turn up often. I have always thought of this card as the best ISA video card, being the newest I guess, and using a version of GD5434 that is used on the PCI cards as well. Sports 2MB of ram which for an ISA card is rare. Now that I have one again, I am looking forward to really testing it out, and is the major piece to that "all isa 486" build I want to do.
Edited by waybacktech 2019-04-05 6:26 AM
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | @Brostenen; On the plus side, I actually seem to recall that my K7S41GX was a gift, so at least it didn't cost anything. As for its sudden popularity, yeah, I think I remember a certain channel or two talking about the damn thing, but whatever, let people find out the hard way. Now if you want a really piss poor K7 board that was popular for some strange reason, try the K7S5A, it was a PC Chips design and unfortunately not one of their better ones, good luck even booting Windows on the damn thing.
Still just going to gut that P100 instead of keeping it as-is, I've no use for it in its current state. The Video Blaster will probably find a home for some amount of time as I do have an interest in old video hardware, it is only MPEG1 though and I genuinely think a P100 should be able to do that passably in software, so I've no idea why Orchid put one in here (I think it's original to the system) really. I do have wavetables in some older machines, but until you get to games with GM support they don't serve much purpose, the Maui in the P66 is probably the furthest back I'd go as anything older doesn't really have the balls to run any games which use it - incidentally the 486 equivalent would probably be a ~120MHz DX4.
@Waybacktech; Some day there will be a Cyrix running, but it'll probably be a 6x86MX in one of those ATX ECS boards I have a handful of (yeah, more white slots) instead, just like Time used to sell them. I did consider putting the 486DX-50 in this case as I think it wouldn't look out of place, but the temptation to move the P66 out of its current chassis is strong solely because in that chassis, and most chassis, the CPU fan is blocked by the hard drives, this is one of the few cases where it wouldn't happen that way. Cyrix machines will have to happen eventually as they are something I'd like to make a video on in some capacity.
Well hopefull it works, it wouldn't really be like a 286 to show up dead though, or at least not irreversibly dead. EEPROM programmers are hugely useful, couldn't possibly go back to not having one on hand.
Damn, that card is a quality fake, hats off to that man for the presentation.
Ah, now, I saw one of those cards for sale a couple of years back and didn't get it solely because it looked 'too good' for the target system, ended up with that ADDA AVer 2000 instead. That Western Digital card you sent over years back still lives in the ISA-only 486 here, still works.
Next thing on the list for me; Upgrade the P66 to 1M cache (from the current 512K) and install those 4 32M ECC sticks, doubling the current amount of RAM just because. Suppose it'll stop paging if it ever gets used for lengthy video projects again but otherwise it's basically just a case of 'because it can' really, had no time spare to do an April Fools video this year. |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | I am interested in hearing some input on a sound card for the 286. I am leaning towards throwing in a spare CT1740 SB16 as I am looking to use something specifically with jumper settings instead of software setup and this fits the bill, and being from 1992 also fits the era nicely as 286 and XT were still sold new at that time and would have been a common upgrade, but there are a lot of other options like opti and obviously MV. SB pro/2 would be my pick of choice if they were not so pricey. SB16 CT2230 seems to be a common response since it lacks the typical SB16 bugs and still uses a true opl3.
Edited by waybacktech 2019-04-05 7:19 PM
|
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | Had this very problem trying to select a card for a lower end 386 recently, oddly the one I intend to replace the guts of the 286. The older sound cards don't seem to be around much any more (basically anything pre-16-Bit) and eventually I settled on stealing the SB1.5 from the C&T so the spare PAS16 could go in there, not that this helps you any. However, I did consider throwing some coins at one of those Toptek cards, they're kinda cheap looking but they're supposedly Sound Blaster compatible and look the part for such machines.
Otherwise the CT1740 should do it, the 286 here started with one of those and it seemed to work fine. Most of the bugs on that card, like the supposed hanging note bug, only seem to affect games like Doom so probably won't rear their ugly head on such a slow system, something tells me it ain't gonna be running Doom any time soon. |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Quick look at the Toptek cards and ya, that would be dropping some coin alright. Looks like a nice card, usually Crystal chipsets did pretty well with SB emulation. Seems like ISA sound cards pre 1995 are not very common and everything you find is PNP to some degree. |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| waybacktech - 2019-04-05 9:18 PM
I am interested in hearing some input on a sound card for the 286. I am leaning towards throwing in a spare CT1740 SB16 as I am looking to use something specifically with jumper settings instead of software setup and this fits the bill, and being from 1992 also fits the era nicely as 286 and XT were still sold new at that time and would have been a common upgrade, but there are a lot of other options like opti and obviously MV. SB pro/2 would be my pick of choice if they were not so pricey. SB16 CT2230 seems to be a common response since it lacks the typical SB16 bugs and still uses a true opl3.
In my Unisys Pw/2 Series 300. I have installed a YMF-718 or was it 719 card? Anyway. One of those Audician32-Plus card that were sold cheap and brand new a couple of years back. Yet a 286 can mind as well run with an Adlib card. You know... The original ones, or one of the remakes that you can assemble as a weekend project. Sure SB are nice to have on a 286, yet you can get by, with just an Adlib or clone. Then anything between that and a SB-Pro 2.0 card. At least that is what I would pop into a 286 machine. |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Since the power supply in the Packard Bell 286 has turned out dead, I will have to either rebuild it or try to mod a standard AT to work as finding a working replacement is probably going to be tough / expensive. I also saw the Yamaha based cards were a recommended choice but I read they require some work with the drivers to get them going.
My programming clip and new USB eeprom programmer arrived-----
"Contents missing" on the USPS label. WOOO!! |
|
| |
|
TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #Waybacktech
What ratings are the output from the original PSU? I am thinking that you might be able to find a MeanWell PSU, that have these ratings. I have used one such, as a replacement in an original Amiga500 PSU. I know that MeanWell have at least one, with minus 5 volt output. And their webpage have a selection menu, in wich you can choose and select, in order to find a specific model. |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Not a bad a idea to use a Meanwell, they have a ton of options. The PSU, is at least color coded the same as a standard AT but with some of the wires reversed around. I need to try to do some further looking into that. The PSU appears to have a fried metal film / ceramic resistor down by the VR section which I believe is why there is no output at all from any of the voltages, so maybe replacing this will be all that is needed, but from my experience in repairing stereo amps, when those fry, that means some transistors shorted which in turn caused those types of resistors to go burn up.
Update on the Intel Extreme board. What a pain those bios clips are. I ordered a new clip and USB programmer from amazon, and got it yesterday. Spent most of last night screwing with everything including finding the correct version of software to use with the programmer. Those clips are so so so touchy that getting a good connection to the eeprom is tough to say the least. After spending most of the night unable to get a consistent read and detection of the chip, I ended up desoldering half of the eeprom from the motherboard as, I suspect, components on the board, various LED's lit up when I plugged the programmer to the bios, caused interference. This turns out to be the case and removing half of the chip from the motherboard allowed me to get a clean scan. Intel BIO bios update files are not a rom image as I found out, more like a container including other junk for recovery. After erasing the eeprom, and finding that the recovery no longer worked, as I figured would probably happen, I was trying things I was reading to at least get a bootblock back onto the bios so the recovery mode would work again, well this failed as well. Searching around some more today, I finally found an actual rom file someone uploaded for this motherboard, and is the correct 4MB and not 6MB like Intel's BS BIO crap. So I will be programming the newly found rom tonight and things should work again without bios being password locked. My luck will be that after going though all of this, the bios will still be password locked because that will be stored somewhere else on the board, and if that happens... Hammer Time! |
|
| |
|
IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | 
Suck on that Intel!
Edited by waybacktech 2019-04-10 1:21 AM
|
|
| |
Recently Played/Bought/Messed with
