4400/200 - dirty to clean

[68kMacx86]

So is an Apple CD-ROM required?  I'm having a similar issue with mine.

 

[jessenator]

So is an Apple CD-ROM required?  I'm having a similar issue with mine.

I think any ATAPI standard CD-ROM should work. I never got around to just testing other ATAPI CD-ROM drives I have sitting around to see if they read—I just shortcut my way with an OEM, yet faster drive that I knew would work.

My issue was that it had no OS to begin with, and the floppy was bad, so I had to get it to boot, and finding the correct disk image proved a challenge. The only two (of many tested) that would native boot was the 4400-specific restore (or the small-business variant), and the retail Mac OS 9.2 disc. There may be others, but out of the ones I tested, those were it. Most surprisingly, the retail 7.6/7.6.1 image I had didn't boot either. I want to say I got it to install the OS on a CF card I had, but no booting.

 

[68kMacx86]

My 4400 rarely recognizes cds. It sees the drive on the bus but doesn’t mount the discs. Usually. Could be I don’t have a PRAM battery installed

 

[jessenator]

My 4400 rarely recognizes cds. It sees the drive on the bus but doesn’t mount the discs. Usually. Could be I don’t have a PRAM battery installed

Interesting. The 4400 shouldn't technically boot without a working PRAM battery. The Tanzania and a couple other Apple/AIM architectures are designed that way IIRC. The Performa 6xxx I think were that way.

You could try carefully cleaning out the CD-ROM to see if you have some increased readability that way. If a cleaning doesn't work, it might be worth getting a new drive. Others might have differing opinions.

 

[68kMacx86]

I had to adjust the potentiometer on the laser of the Apple drive. It reads discs now. But sure enough the 4400 only sees Apple ide drives. Maybe could it be that my other drives were IDE DVD burners?

 

[jessenator]

Could be. I did try my ATA/IDE SuperDrive spare from a Mac Pro 1,1 but since I didn't discover it was the image not booting till after I already got a 24x ATAPI drive, I didn't bother to test it further.

It could be a good excuse to fire up my 4400 again, I guess…

 

[68kMacx86]

You need excuses to fire up machines?  Oregon Train, Museum madness, the fact that computers today are cloud based and suck.... take ur pick

 

[jessenator]

Heh, it's more time for me than anything. I'm super late to the game (literally) and am really deep into Skyrim, so it's eating up whatever spare time I have, which isn't much.

 

[68kMacx86]

Heh, it's more time for me than anything. I'm super late to the game (literally) and am really deep into Skyrim, so it's eating up whatever spare time I have, which isn't much.

AAH, I don't get into many modern games except for Watch Dogs, I like the open world driving based games where you can do as you please.  The only reason my desktop has a good video card is to run Mac OS.  Otherwise it would just be onboard video.

 

[jessenator]

Time to dust off these cobwebs…

Well, I think I'm going to mod the back I/O panel to accommodate my Starmax board. And thankfully I've remembered the classic maxim: "measure twice; cut once" or "drill" in my case.

I went through with my micrometer to measure the holes in the metal chassis itself, then measure the gaps, thinking the gaps would be universal down to the extra 2 mini-DIN ports:

Then I thought, hey, I should actually measure the board I'm going to put in. Lo and behold, there's some variance  

So I'll have to redraw my marks tonight, but I'm glad I caught myself. Bought a 17/32" (13.5mm) HSS bit, so it should fall within spec by .5mm for the holes. I'll also widen the video port hole as well. I'd rather it stick out slightly than get caught.

I guess I should point out that the Starmax board, though mostly identical to the 4400 board, does not fit with the current mounting solution: the pegs don't align, most reasonably  because the additional PS/2 ports push against both the chassis and the I/O shield just enough. I think the HD-15 output also presses against the video cutout. The solder points are further forward from the DB-15 contacts, so there might have been a small margin of error there as well.

I also will need to do some troubleshooting on the Starmax board, starting with a re-install of the Sonnet drivers (probably an older version, as referenced here. I'm getting a boot crash as it tries to load the Sonnet extension, and although the instructions may be behind the last version of the drivers Sonnet wrote, it might not hurt to try just an older version first. I also thought about installing MacOS 9.

On my 4400, I was able to get the G3 Sonnet driver working on 7.6.1 as well, so once compgeke uploads his newly-acquired Starmax 7.6.1 CD image, I'll download that and give it a whirl.

I wonder if there are any MacOS drivers for the PS/2 ports on the Starmax CD as well. Or were they're intended just for CHRP spec to run Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, or AIX? I did notice that one PS/2 port was more worn than the other. It would be great to have an actual two-button PS/2 mouse for my PC Compatibility card as well.

 

[jessenator]

I'm getting a boot crash as it tries to load the Sonnet extension

installed an older driver (v2.3.1) and I'm now up and running at 500MHz  

now to mark-up the case...

 

[jessenator]

Also I went back to my old model badge designs and came up with this b*stardized name :3

Also, the type hinting was being all weird in illustrator today...