What retro things have you done today?

LewisRaz · 9 May 2020 at 14:11

I was watching that! thought it looked fairly good value although there wasnt any standout parts and I need to try and stop hoarding

I have only tried Simms in it and 2x CPUs K6-3 400 and pentium 120.

The strange power behaviour and lack of any error beeps led me to think it was deeper than a memory problem so I didnt even consider trying dimms.

The CPU was not even getting warm which is odd on my other broken s7 board the cpu does in fact warm up (And I get memory error beeps)

paradigm · 9 May 2020 at 14:29

LewisRaz said:
I was watching that! thought it looked fairly good value although there wasnt any standout parts and I need to try and stop hoarding

I have only tried Simms in it and 2x CPUs K6-3 400 and pentium 120.

The strange power behaviour and lack of any error beeps led me to think it was deeper than a memory problem so I didnt even consider trying dimms.

The CPU was not even getting warm which is odd on my other broken s7 board the cpu does in fact warm up (And I get memory error beeps)

Yeah there’s nothing really in that lot that I “need” other than wanting to try the USB card, but the plan for this lot is to try and make a small profit on it whilst keeping the Audigy and a GF2 MX.

paradigm · 9 May 2020 at 17:52

@LewisRaz this board is odd. It immediately takes power as soon as the PSU is hooked up to the mains, the power switch input does nothing. As soon as the board takes power my POST diag card shows - - - - which is essentially that the board is braindead. But the fact that it turns on without any interaction is odd.

LewisRaz · 9 May 2020 at 18:06

paradigm said:
@LewisRaz this board is odd. It immediately takes power as soon as the PSU is hooked up to the mains, the power switch input does nothing. As soon as the board takes power my POST diag card shows - - - - which is essentially that the board is braindead. But the fact that it turns on without any interaction is odd.

Yea it did that for me with the K6, but with the pentium it would at least wait for the power switch. I figured it was dead but its just so odd as I flashed the bios and cannot see any physical damage!
Shame as you dont get ATX socket 7 systems everyday and the seller did say it worked before posting. Perhaps some internal traces have cracked during shipping? No idea now

paradigm · 9 May 2020 at 18:10

Did the seller say what kind of CPU it had when it worked? Also your CPU was an original ceramic Pentium, yes? So if I try my MMX in it then that’s something new?

So far I’ve only tried my K6-2 333 (and tried it in the interposer I have too).

LewisRaz · 9 May 2020 at 18:12

It was the k6-3 that im now using my my other board that he had working. The cpu I tried was a ceramic p120 yes. An MMX would be new!

paradigm · 10 May 2020 at 10:13

Morning @LewisRaz!

I had another look at the board this morning, first changing to the P200 MMX I've got here. The first time I powered up the PSU, as you said the board required the power switch pins to be bridged momentarily to start up. POST card indicated that all the rails were fine, and that there was no clock signal and that reset was being held high. I noticed a lot of what looked like sharpie marks near the northbridge so powered on again and felt around that area, my god does the northbridge get hot fast. Nothing else gets warm at all, no CPU heat, no RAM heat, not really any VRM heat, but the chipset was like an oven within seconds. To double check I soaked the chipset area in isopropyl and turned it on again... SECONDS is how long the iso lasts on the chispet.

Conclusion at this point is that either the chipset has shorted internally, a bypass cap for the chipset has shorted out, or the board itself has shorted between the layers. I'm not sure it's worth going down the rabbit hole to fix, and without a schematic it would be pretty difficult anyway even assuming the chipset itself isn't dead.

Sorry

EDIT: I've checked all of the nearby caps for shorts to ground and they all seem to have acceptable resistance to ground. The chipset only gets hot if there's a CPU present, if you remove the CPU then the chipset stays stone cold. At this point it's either the chipset itself or the board, likely making it either irreparable or at least uneconomical to repair. Perhaps send it to a youtuber with more electronics knowhow than me and see if they want to mess about with it

LewisRaz · 10 May 2020 at 10:44

@paradigm Honestly mate I expected that but thanks for the time you put into looking into it!!

Did you get your voodoo going yet?

paradigm · 10 May 2020 at 10:47

LewisRaz said:
@paradigm Honestly mate I expected that but thanks for the time you put into looking into it!!

Did you get your voodoo going yet?

Not yet, no. I've not spent any more time on the Voodoo yet, had other things to tinker with like my new Synology RackStation.

paradigm · 10 May 2020 at 14:58

Success, the Voodoo3 lives. Turns out it wanted a 32kb BIOS not a 64kb one, the 40kb size of the BIOS I dumped from the card confused me, I assumed it was 40kb of data and 24kb of padded zeros, but it now seems more likely that the dump software has padded the 32kb ROM out to 40kb.

Whatever, we’re good now.

hohum · 10 May 2020 at 17:38

Good stuff, would have been a shame if bricked!

LewisRaz · 10 May 2020 at 17:45

Nice to hear that mate. Good repair!

LewisRaz · 10 May 2020 at 21:53

Dont like having cases without parts in so... With the pentium 3 now pronounced dead there is a PSU and case spare.
Enter MSI MS-6511, Athlon XP 1600+, 256mb ram, geforce 4 64mb and an audigy 2 for sound. Time to install my 99p windows XP pro...
No reason for this build other than using up parts and avoiding social media tonight.

Uncle_Gravy · 11 May 2020 at 14:25

Was going to buy one off the bay, but a friend sent me his which came today, so happy boy this morning.

LewisRaz · 11 May 2020 at 16:54

Uncle_Gravy said:
Was going to buy one off the bay, but a friend sent me his which came today, so happy boy this morning.

That is the best way to play the "original" pokemon games for me! Love the SP and the QoL features in leafgreen make it a nicer game for lazier days.

The auctionn ended.

Won for £10.50!

cee-S-dee · 11 May 2020 at 17:13

Nice! I removed it from my watch list when you mentioned you bid on it. The Awe-32 is worth that alone! Great score.

paradigm · 11 May 2020 at 17:29

cee-S-dee said:
Nice! I removed it from my watch list when you mentioned you bid on it. The Awe-32 is worth that alone! Great score.

Same, I was ready to throw in a bid, but I don't want to be fighting OcUKers!

My bulk PCI and AGP bundle arrived. The video cards are a "Diamond Stealth 64" (S3 trio 64 DRAM PCI even has the upgrade RAM slots populated), an S3 Virge/DX (PCI), a Radeon 9200SE (AGP), a Rage 128 Pro Ultra, a Geforce2 MX200 64MB and a Geforce2 MX400 64MB. There's also the VIA VT6212L USB 2.0 card that I hope plays nice with my VIA MVP3 SS7 board. TWO terrible ES1373 chip based Compaq branded Sound Blaster PCI cards (the worst FM synth known to man), the Audigy 2 ZS, an SB Live 1024, and the ForteMedia FM801-AU based Terratec promedia.

LewisRaz · 11 May 2020 at 17:41

Thats a good bundle for the price really! Rage 128 is nice!
Have you tested them yet?

I had spoken to the seller quite a lot over the week. I initially asked he would mind wrapping the awe32 a bit more carefully if I won it and we ended up chatting. He did say the card looks extremely clean and without damage

I will endeavour to get that VLB card working too as long as there is no extensive trace damage.

paradigm · 11 May 2020 at 17:56

Well you know where to send it if it needs any soldering

Not had chance to test anything yet (the perks of a 2 year old). Will try and do that tomorrow (whilst "working" from home).

Uncle_Gravy · 11 May 2020 at 18:04

LewisRaz said:
That is the best way to play the "original" pokemon games for me! Love the SP and the QoL features in leafgreen make it a nicer game for lazier days.

The difference with the backlight compared to a DS for example is quite eye opening, makes me wonder how I managed all those years ago with that weak backlight, AND the lack of backlight with the previous GBs I had (I pretty much had them all as a kid)

Plan with this one is to eventually do that IPS screen mod that seems to be popular at the moment with them, And maybe a new shell as I don't like the idea of chopping up bits of the original shell to make it all fit, the shell for this SP is actually in decent nick.