And here's the back side of the Pentium 100 and the Pentium 166 cards compared:
Comparison image here.
I think I didn't want to scan the 166, because by that time I had already put the heatsinks on the Opti and LSI chips (because they need them IMO) and didn't want to get new adhesive pads for them.
Whoa, that's slick. Makes perfect sense but I hadn't thought about how relatively easy it'd be to run custom BIOS on these. I appreciate your offer to share it, whenever there's time.What this really means is that I have a patched version of the OrangePC application that in it has a patched BIOS grafted into it.
Interesting notes on the 660/PC!fx ROMs... and especially awkward that the CPU lock is purely software; they can't justify the limitation as any sort of hardware cost-saving.Part of the reason I think this check is happening in the OrangePC app is because I'm pretty sure it's the OrangePC app that identifies the special PC!fx version of the card (a cut down 660) that was the only card that explicitly didn't support users swapping out the CPU and was "locked" to using the God awful WinChip CPU (a real bummer for a thing that was supposed to be a "gaming" card). The BIOS image for that card in the OrangePC app is one and the same as the one for the 660, so something else in the chain has to be checking for the CPU type and locking it down on the PC!fx.
I don't think the Houdini Vibra module will fit on the 7100/8100 DOM cards. I've only seen one with a daughterboard, and it does have a Vibra chip, but I'm not sure if it's combined with a serial/parallel card or what else those ports would be for.As a separate matter, if anyone has any of those little add-on Vibra16 daughtercards for the Apple/Reply cards handy, I actually need one or two of them. I think both my 7100 and 8100 PDS cards are missing them. At least one of them is for sure. The 7100 and 8100 cards actually have two sockets seemingly for some other daughtercard too, but I have no idea what for.
I'm getting hits for "High-Performance Multi-Mode Parallel Port Super I/O Floppy Disk Controller."Oh, that daughtercard seems like it is a combo card of some kind? What's that SMC chip for?
I recently saw a picture of the 7100 version of the card with what looked like a Vibra16-only card exactly the same dimensions as the one on the 6100/Houdini card attached to it.
If you crack open the OrangePC applications in ResEdit, or some suitable alternative, you'll find a resource fork entry called BIOS... might have been ROM, but I'm pretty sure it was BIOS. In there you'll see the various flavors of PC, VGA, and even Orange Micro BIOS "extensions" that are provided to the card at initialization time. ResEdit having a fairly dumb limit of only being able to copy and paste 16k or 32k at a time (whatever it is) made dealing with grafting in patched BIOSes larger than that a massive PITA. Eventually I switched to some other resource editor tool that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.This comes back around to a different issue I'm having with my Orange386 in the IIci. The OrangePC application software is v1.3.2, which seems about as mature as it got, but during POST I see "Extension V.1.2" and I wonder if this refers to the version of Orange's BIOS image. My issue is that the keyboard only responds for a split second after booting. It works long enough to enter CMOS setup but won't accept any input afterwards. It's already timed out by the time I see the option to hit F1. In the dev notes, this issue is described as related to the IIci and fixed in v1.23, though I'm confused as to whether this refers to the application version or the Extension[BIOS] version. I'm also not sure if the versions are supposed to match, though they came off the factory floppy diskette this way...
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When convenient I'll try in something other than a IIci and see what I get...
Yeah, I think there's a way to get a proper gamut of PC I/O ports (Serial, Parallel, etc.) exposed on that thing with that flavor of daughter card. The default octopus cable only has video passthrough and MIDI/gameport (which is inactive if you don't have at least the Vibra16 board). If I'm not mistaken it connects to your PDS card using both the top and bottom sockets at the same time, whereas the Vibra16 card only attaches to the socket closest to the top edge of the card... I think.I'm getting hits for "High-Performance Multi-Mode Parallel Port Super I/O Floppy Disk Controller."
Interesting. Definitely not on the Houdini or its Vibra module.
Thanks for the tip. Unsurprisingly a bit happened between 386 and Pentium MMX, so while I don't see it exactly I'll poke around and see if I can find it.If you crack open the OrangePC applications in ResEdit, or some suitable alternative, you'll find a resource fork entry called BIOS... might have been ROM, but I'm pretty sure it was BIOS. In there you'll see the various flavors of PC, VGA, and even Orange Micro BIOS "extensions" that are provided to the card at initialization time. ResEdit having a fairly dumb limit of only being able to copy and paste 16k or 32k at a time (whatever it is) made dealing with grafting in patched BIOSes larger than that a massive PITA. Eventually I switched to some other resource editor tool that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head.
This makes sense, though I still wonder if there's a version 1.3.2 I'm supposed to have. The Release Note says:That "Extension V.1.2" thing is an extended BIOS thing that OrangePC bolts on during boot in order to do things like map drives, network interfaces, etc. It's similar to the OpROM extensions that PC drive controllers, etc. would load at boot to make sure they were configured and detectable by dumber OSes and or busses that lacked proper probing support (basically anything and everything in the PC world before ACPI was a widespread thing).
Perhaps I'm misattributing the issue, because my Orange386 program doesn't freeze, and neither does the blinking cursor on the PC side, just communications to the PC side. I can still switch back to Mac OS and interact with the program. Doesn't seem to make a difference if I start in B/W, though I haven't installed Macsbug yet. Same on System 6.0.8 and 7.1. Could be the card is borked in a weird way. I also can't seem to use emulated graphics, it looks garbled; ISA card works fine though.BUG FIXES (1.23)
1. On Macintosh IIci computers, the keyboard emulation would get caught in a communication loop with the Orange386 BIOS, hanging the program at startup. This could be fixed by starting in B/W mode or by entering a debugger (like Macsbug) and then exiting again. This has been fixed.
I wonder if there's an even more filled out card; this one seems to have quite a few unpopulated headers too. The 71/81 DOM will be a much cooler card with some hardware I/OYeah, I think there's a way to get a proper gamut of PC I/O ports (Serial, Parallel, etc.) exposed on that thing with that flavor of daughter card. The default octopus cable only has video passthrough and MIDI/gameport (which is inactive if you don't have at least the Vibra16 board). If I'm not mistaken it connects to your PDS card using both the top and bottom sockets at the same time, whereas the Vibra16 card only attaches to the socket closest to the top edge of the card... I think.
Wait, what?! That's a detail worth mentioning in the top post too if I could edit itSide note: it irritates me to no end that the 7100 board has a proper Socket 3 socket, but the 8100 board has only a Socket 1 socket. I wanted to use my 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive chip in the 8100, but I had to put it in my 7100 instead. It's no big deal, I just don't like the PC in my Mac being noticeably faster than the Mac itself .
Probably so. I wonder what else *could* be implemented beyond that.Oh! Those ribbon headers on that daughterboard look like they're for a parallel port and a serial port, respectively. I bet if you had a PC/AT bracket with those ports on it and stuffed the other end of the ribbons into those sockets, you'd have your proper hardware I/O.
It might require some BIOS hacking to properly support a K6-2, but I have no OrangePC 530 to find out for sure.I hate to jump in with a question but I have some questions about my 530. Does anyone know if I can upgrade from the Cyrix chip to a K6-2 I have laying around.
I still have to get my 8500 set up so I can even test to see if this 530 even works.