Messages

1

2003 / FrankenMac 9600

« on: November 11, 2003, 03:22:38 PM »

Hi Everyone,
 I been kinda busy with my 9600. I found a couple of folks from Texas Instruments, that were cerimoniously pink slipped, who remembered the chips that I was looking to change to affect the things I wanted to do to the motherboard. I also got hold of a couple of developement 9600 motherboards with no boot roms and it made things easier. But with my attention span the size of a nats naval I quickly jumped on powerbooks and ibooks and started messing with them to find out what could really be done to them. My FrankenMac 9600 is purrin along but I have to work out some more bugs in order to make it compatable with all of Mac OS. Learning all this software is a real pain I can think of a lot of things I'd rather be doing. This is however nessesary in order to get a real good upgraded machine. I took the advise of Kelly, I beleive, and joined ADC and have been tracking alot of developement stuff. I have also been beseiged with requests for impossible repairs for folks in last ditch efferts to save their comps. Had very very good results for just about everything from motherboard repairs to inverter board repairs for flat panels. I am getting ready to spend some serious bucks for a soldering station with all the impliments to do serioous surgery not for the faint of heart. I have to keep up with Mac OS X.x.x.x?? bugs and fixes too, because just when you think you got something figured out, bang!,  a bug gets you and it is back to square one, or is it the drawing board? Ahh whatever! By4now.

2

2003 / Scarf and Slash------Faster faster.......

« on: April 24, 2003, 01:44:00 PM »

Hi everyone,
 Well I have been making head way on the 9600. So far I gutted everything past the PCI bus on my mule system. Reconfigured the ram slots to run the newer PC100 rams. Offed the Grand Central I/O, and everything from there on. Then installed ATA/IDE card, ATTO scsi ULTRA WIDE 80 pin card, only had an Ati Rage Pro II video card lying around, NEC 8 port USB/Firewire card (5 USB ports, 4 external 1 internal, 3 firewire ports 2 external 1 internal), Couple of Seagate 9.1 GB HD, USB keyboard and mouse. I am still struggling with the Hammerhead ram controler to get to run faster than 200 MHz.  I am also finding it hard getting reliable clock chips and have had some real unstable units and man don't they screw up settings. So far the bus has run at 125 MHz but with all the other SMDs still on the motherboard I still have to iron out glitches and find out which ones are interfering with data I/O. The Bandit Bus Buffers and Translators have not given me any problems since I clocked them up to 66 MHz. There were 5 clock chips on the board (Mach 5 in this case) now there are only 2. Even though I think I have disabled the rest of the circuts it seems that those solder thru holes are coming back and bitting me. I am glad I chose to use the Mach 5 board because all of the sound and video SMDs on the other style boards would have been a real headache not that it has been easy anyway. I am running Mac OS 9.1 and have Linux ready to go once I have some real reliablity and repeatablity going on. I am also find that I need a real lot of info using assemblers and compliers as well as other code for testing out sub-systems. If any of you can help with this subject I suurrree  would appriciate it. Bye 4 now.           Jimi

3

2003 / Schematics and devices

« on: April 07, 2003, 02:30:00 PM »

Hi Everyone,
 Thanks Kelly, I am going to join. I appriciate the info on the power supply Krissel, Snuffysbluff I will pass along anything I learn from this experiment good, bad, indifferent. Bye 4 now.
                                                                  Jimi Scott

4

2003 / Schematics and devices

« on: April 06, 2003, 09:06:00 PM »

Hi everyone,
I really need help locating schematics, component locator for motherboard, device type, device manufacturer, pin out diagrams for all motherboard connectors, all power supply pin outs to motherboard. I am in the process of developing some 9600 machines to adapt the new line of processors through daughter card adaptor and modifing bus speed to work with next gen processors. Any info as to where get these sets of info would be greatly appriciated. I have all the necessary tools for dealing with any size and shape of SMDs and multi trace motherboards. Also have developer motherboard test modules to debug.