Recent content by evanboonie

Well, I can't delete posts, but the ROM I found is incorrect. It is actually the "R9250_127_reduced.rom" modded Mac BIOS I found. I guess I had tried that one years ago before de-soldering and replacing it. That is why it looked different though. Funny enough, It is actually detected as the...

Thanks for the reply! That's actually wild about the ROM chip size, I did not know that. I've always just flashed a fresh chip dangling in a clip with flashrom and then soldered it to my cards. I actually ended up finding what I think was the original PC ROM chip for the black PCI card (It has...

Hey, this is really cool work! I thought about making this mod to one of mine a while back but it never made it to the top of my project stack. Is there any chance you have a dump of the original PC ROM on the black card? I've lost mine in a move and I want to convert one back to a PC card for...

Have you tried it in OS9? I have used it with 7455 CPUs in several different Macs without any issues. The OSX version isn't nearly as good in my own experience. It could also be an MDD thing, I don't own one myself to test it.

It was done by simply de-soldering the original oscillator, adding a socket, then putting a faster oscillator on the card. The sockets and oscillator chips are readily available on DigiKey and Mouser. Just be warned, you won't get beyond 55MHz on any system besides the Power Computing Power...

I think your AI assistant may have just gotten really lucky. This is awesome that you found the correct byte and checksum information though! The reference for the 7450 series L3 Cache Control Register (L3CR) information can be found in section 2.2.5.5.15 of the MPC7450 RISC Microprocessor...

I've also just finished mapping out all of the PCI pins on the chipset to possibly build out a custom FPC (think console HDMI mods) in the hopes of adding an adapter for low-profile PCI cards to the last two Apple PC Compatibility Cards...

I put it off because I don't really enjoy the work of toning out signals, but I finally finished the "XD Expansion" pinout! I should probably start another thread on these mods... But for now, I at least determined that while the connector only exposes a subset of the ISA connector, the correct...

I made up several BIOS mods containing the original and replacement VBIOS with the Mach64 and 3D Rage Pro Device ID's on each. No combination of VBIOS configurations worked with the 3D Rage Pro installed on the card. Just a black screen when attempting to boot the PC. I was also unable to find a...

My first attempt to get the Rage 3D Pro working on the P166 Apple PC Compatibility Card has failed. I found a PCI version using 40SOJ EDO memory that I thought would be a good transplant candidate. My attempt consisted of the following: De-solder and read the PCI card's BIOS chip Use a hex...

Okay, this actually describes a process for extracting the BIOS from the resource fork and replacing it with a modified version! After talking with some folks at VCFMW this weekend, I think it might even be possible to upgrade these cards with an ATI Rage Pro Turbo! From what I can gather, the...

I am also under the impression that the BIOS is what is restricting IDT and AMD chips from running on these cards. There doesn't seem to be a way to get into the BIOS from the software though. The Apple cards inject the BIOS at startup time from the resource fork (similar to how all but the very...

It was extremely tedious, but it didn't seem to risk much damage to the board itself. I actually got a lot of 4 of these cards missing their heat sinks which I did the same mods to. Only one of the Pentium 166 CPUs survived the process; one of them actually split straight in half! 3 of the 4...

Its time for more PC card shenanigans! This time I've modded the final Apple PCI model card that shipped with a Pentium 166. The first task at hand is a re-cap. The original capacitors on these cards leak like crazy (I've seen 5 so far, all 5 have had very leaky caps; especailly the ones near...

I just performed an L3 cache and CPU swap on my 800Mhz Sonnet card. My 800Mhz came with a 7451 installed on it, so there were at least some of them made that way by Sonnet. I started by swapping on 2MB of 250Mhz cache memory chips from a Quicksilver upgrade. The 2MB of cache showed up...