Booting and gray screen...

[Dennis Nedry]

If you have your own custom sound that is the same length of time, we could insert that into the flash dumps and reburn them. Wouldn't THAT be cool - a Mac that you could customize the startup sound.

I don't know of another Mac with such easily-modified ROM.

[Temetka]

Right, I think I've got a proper dump this time - selected the slowest speed and it worked fine for the even ROM chip and was a bit more flakey on the odd ROM chip - but eventually got a successful ID check, read and verify.

The latest dump is here: http://www.jkalittle.co.uk/jkalittle.co ... _dump3.zip

The even dump now starts with 0x 4800 0008

James.

Dump 3 was successful!

Original, de-interleaved into one file:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporar ... ed.bin.zip

Dump 3, de-interleaved into one file:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporar ... ed.bin.zip

Dump 3 sound 1:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporary/digibarn1.aif

Dump 3 sound 2 (PEX sound):
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporary/digibarn2.aif

Original sounds (same as before):
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporary/OF_2.0a9.aif


The PEX sound is cut short, but it also has a subtle fade-out at the end which clearly indicates to me that this was on purpose. I believe these dumps are all good now.

For some reason I can't get these files to play under OS X.5.6.

What gives? I really want to hear them.

Thanks.

[Dennis Nedry]

Option-click the links to download, then open the files in QuickTime player. These are ordinary AIFF files.

[Temetka]

The movie file could not be opened.

The end of the file was reached.

I re-downloaded them and had the same problem.

They originally d/l with .AIF, i changed them to .AIFF and still no go with quicktime.

10.5.6, everything up to date.


EDIT:

Massive FAIL!

Not really.

The file digibarn.aif is 263 bytes.

The others files are fine.

[Dennis Nedry]

The file digibarn.aif is 263 bytes.

The others files are fine.

Digibarn1.aif is 256k
Digibarn2.aif is 256k
OF_2.0a9.aif is 512k

These are the only 3 files. I just downloaded each of them and they play fine for me. There was another audio file from a bad dump earlier in this thread which was the same as Digibarn2.aif, but it sounded bad. I may have deleted this file from my web space, you may actually be downloading a small 404 HTML file which QuickTime Player can't play.

[Temetka]

Weirdness than.

I must have done something to d/l a 263 byte file, what it is I don't know.

I have all 3 working files now.

Must say that new startup sound is awesome.

Wonder if I could hard code it into my PBG4.

That'd piss Steve off good.

[Dennis Nedry]

Weirdness than.

I must have done something to d/l a 263 byte file, what it is I don't know.

That's probably because of the minimum block size on your hard drive. Often times files will show up a few kilobytes bigger than they actually are.

Wonder if I could hard code it into my PBG4.

That'd piss Steve off good.

If you can edit the ROM you can.

Beware that the normal startup sound is 22kHz stereo and I think this PEX one is 44kHz stereo so you may either have to downsample the audio to 22kHz or hack the actual playback sample rate somehow.

[iMac600]

I'm going to dig up this thread. I can't honestly believe that I missed it during the original post cycle, being such an avid Macintosh PowerExpress fan myself. I still have copies of CaptainZ's MP3 audio dumps from years ago:

Macintosh PowerExpress (9700) Boot Chime (60kb)
Macintosh PowerExpress "Manhattan" Death Chime "Kill Me!" (116kb)
Macintosh PowerExpress "Manhattan" Boot Chime "Gil Amelio" (128kb)

Unfortunately that's all I can offer since the rest of my knowledge is all up there in the ol' brain. Interesting thread though, and congratulations on getting the mythical beast to boot.

[trag]

If you have your own custom sound that is the same length of time, we could insert that into the flash dumps and reburn them. Wouldn't THAT be cool - a Mac that you could customize the startup sound.

I don't know of another Mac with such easily-modified ROM.

Well, I wish I hadn't missed this thread before.

Now that James has found sockets for the PSOP-44 chips, it would actually be pretty easy to modify the ROMs on the entire x500 and x200 family--oh, and probably the x100 family as well.

Remove the existing ROMs, install the sockets, then program/reprogram PSOP-44 8 Mbit Flash chips with ROM code.

I've done some work where I've desoldered and replaced the ROM chips with Flash chips with the Kansas ROM. My Umax S900 which is my main machine at home has Kansas ROMs installed.

The original soldering job might be a little challenging (routine for me), but after that you just need a programmer which will handle the 44 pin PSOP flash.

If you have a Power Computing ROM SIMM it can be a little more interesting. Replace the ROM chips with PSOP-44 sockets again. Find the 1Kohm resistor which ties pin 116 of the ROM module to GND. Remove the resistor and connect the pad which connects to pin 116 to 5V.

In the x500 (and 7200) family of Macintoshes, pin 116 of the ROM DIMM socket is connected to the CE_ (chip enable) pins of the logic board ROM chips. These pins are active low and they are weakly (~4Kohms) tied to ground. If you tie pin 116 of a ROM module to 5V and then plug in the ROM module, it will tie all the CE_ pins to 5V and disable the logic board ROM chips, allowing the chips on the ROM module to take over.

So, once you have such a module, you can plug it into an x500/x600/x200 family machine and reprogram the socketed chips as desired.

Here is the pinout for the ROM module. The PS stands for Power Surge which is the x500/x600 family. The Beige, PowerSurge and NuBus Power Macs all use the same pinout. The Beige uses the 3.3V pins for power supply, while the others use the 5V pins.

http://www.io.com/~trag/Apple_pinouts/Firmware_Module_Pinout.txt

I've had the hardware ability to modify the ROMs for about seven years, but I'm not much of a programmer/hacker.

[mkc9700]

I have had one of the PowerExpress prototypes for 4 or 5 years, so I thought I would provide a link to my page about it:

http://www.isellmacs.com/macsystems.htm

[Outlander]

Oh man this machine I had forgotten about.

I have an ES 275mhz G3 card sitting around somewhere that I got off of eBay a while back. All it said was G3 275mhz on the side but the stupid card wouldn't work in my 9600. I'll have to find that card now and see if it's anything special or just a dud G3 card.

[Bunsen]

That woulkd make sense for a development prototype. Presumably the flash was used for the part of the ROM which was not considered finalized.

[closeddoors1559]

Sorry to bump this topic, but did someone made the rom work in SheepShaver?

[Quadraman]

Does anyone still have the files linked in this thread? The links are all dead.

[Dennis Nedry]

Do you want the startup sounds, ROM dumps or both? I don't have them handy at the moment but I will next monday.

[jimjamyahauk]

Hi 'Dennis Nedry',

Hope you're well.

I was wondering if you could post/e-mail me the de-interleaved rom file for the Power Express 9700 as the old link isn't working at the moment.

Many thanks,
James.

[Dennis Nedry]

Here is a link to all the files from this thread. I have removed the bad dumps, so everything is good.

http://rapidshare.com/files/371319320/P ... s.zip.html

[techknight]

yea, i really like that startupsound. going to have to start hacking ROMs now. hehe.

[balrog]

None of these dumps seem have valid checksums. Could they possibly be redumped?
When dumping, always take multiple dumps and verify that they match. If you've done this and they do match, then something weird is going on.

Thanks!

[Dennis Nedry]

None of these dumps seem have valid checksums.

Where are you getting the correct checksum with which to compare? Are you using the first group of bytes of the file or something? I do not believe that the first bytes of the flash dump are a checksum because a startup sound is located there.

If you haven't already, have a look here for Mac ROM checksum verification:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/projects/checksum/

Being that this is from a prototype, they may not have bothered with checksumming, or it may be done a different way.

[Dennis Nedry]

Also, the ROM SIMM dump was done with a software dumper running on an actual PEX Mac, so it's highly unlikely for it to have an error.

[balrog]

The structure of this ROM is as follows:

3 MB on ROM SIMM
1 MB on flash chips

The ROM SIMM is not supposed to change, but the Flash chip can and did during development. This was the reason for only 3MB being checksummed: the last 1MB, which resided on the Flash chips, could easily be changed.
Therefore, the fact that only 3MB was checksummed was NOT a bug, and was completely deliberate!

What utility was used to dump? We usually recommend CopyROM from http://www.emulators.com/freefile/MACUTILS.ZIP because many other dumpers only grab the first 3MB or otherwise scramble the dump. Would it be possible for a re-dump to be taken with this version of CopyROM, as well as a screenshot of the CopyROM window? This would establish whether the ROMs actually are weird, or that the dump was bad.

Thank you!

[jimjamyahauk]

Hi,

I've done a comprehensive dump of the ROM SIMM using 3 different utiltiies and 3 times per utility. I tried copy rom, but this didn't launch properly. I've also included a report from TattleTech about the ROM SIMM and the Apple System Profiler report.

Interestingly, the Tattletech report shows the full rom as being just over 3MB - i.e. the 1MB on the flash chips doesn't show up at all to the OS.

In this zip file are further zip files for each set of ROM SIMM dumps, which contains the program used and the dumps themselves. Dumps from the Flash chips are also included (which were done via a USB chip programmer)

http://www.jkalittle.co.uk/jkalittle.co.uk/digibarn.zip

James.