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My Pentium I Build Thread

hunterjwizzard said:
We've kinda gone off topic but I have an SB AWE32 for the build. Came with the case.
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Don't forget to chuck a couple 16Mb SIMMs into the memory slots on it so you can use the *biggest* sound fonts that exist for the synth. I mean, there's absolutely no point to it other than bragging rights, but if you've got it, flaunt it.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I mean, there's absolutely no point to it other than bragging rights, but if you've got it, flaunt it.
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Bragging rights are the entire reason I wanted that card. The SIMM slots on the daughterboard just look so frickin cool.

Dumb question: there's no special RAM for it, right? You just pop in any 16mb SIMMs and it works?
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Don't forget to chuck a couple 16Mb SIMMs into the memory slots on it so you can use the *biggest* sound fonts that exist for the synth. I mean, there's absolutely no point to it other than bragging rights, but if you've got it, flaunt it.
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Oh man, I remember when I got a card that could do sound fonts. I spent a few days locating them and installing them to the card and playing around with it. Then restored it all back to normal and never touched the functionality again. So I completely agree that there is little point (at least for me) in doing anything with sound fonts.

hunterjwizzard said:
Dumb question: there's no special RAM for it, right? You just pop in any 16mb SIMMs and it works?
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I don't think there is anything special about them, no matter what creative's marketing team would like us to all believe.
 
Lutiana said:
I don't think there is anything special about them, no matter what creative's marketing team would like us to all believe.
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I filled the sockets on mine with a couple of 1MB SIMMs pulled from an old 486, they worked fine. Just make sure it's a matching pair, sizewize.

FWIW, the upgrade to 2MB from the 512K directly on the card was *probably* worth it, but most of the discussion I've heard about it makes it sound like there were rapidly diminishing returns after that. I still have the card in a box somewhere, I'm kind of thinking I *may* have put 8MB into it before I retired it, but that may be a false memory.

(I was kind of doing that "they can have my ISA sound card when they pry it from my cold dead hands" thing as late as 2000 or so because having a "metal" soundblaster was still useful for Linux and other more oddball OSes, and I did also once-in-a-blue-moon boot into real DOS; for a while I was even had both the Soundblaster and an Ensonic AudioPCI installed at the same time, but once CPUs started getting into the 1Ghz range it didn't really add up anymore. Whatever you were saving in CPU cycles not having to run an emulation layer were getting wasted blocking on ISA I/O. Obviously this doesn't apply to an original pentium build.) ;)
 
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If anyone is looking for a justification for 32(28)MB of soundfont memory, may I suggest Masterpiece.sf2. I use it by default and think it sounds fantastic.

In the 8MB department MonoGM2 and Fantasy2 are also both pretty good.
 
I don't have AWE32 but GUS PnP is sensitive to SIMM modules, 3.3V ones work initially but will fry the AMD chip.
 
Zare said:
I don't have AWE32 but GUS PnP is sensitive to SIMM modules, 3.3V ones work initially but will fry the AMD chip.
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The AWE32 uses 30 pin SIMMs, not 72; I don't think 3.3v 30 pin SIMMs are a thing, but I suppose I need to be careful saying that because there's always that one counterexample.
 
Well I'm finally bac to work on this project. I just sort of ADHD'd out of it for a while there. Actually I was working on my novel and playing Minecraft.

Anyway, motherboard is installed and booted right up! Real excited about that. Have not gotten to the OS installation. I am at present deep in the weeds in the ZuluSCSI documentation learning about that.
 
So the ZuluSCSI proved way easier to use than I expected, but also harder due to a weird problem only I seem to have: all my disk images are, for some reason, stored as generic files with no extension. I tried renaming one to .img and that did not work. So far my best idea is to write the image back to a CF card, then read from and this time try and make sure it gets a proper filename extension this time.
 
Well I'm dead stuck on this project. I cannot get the zuluscsi to boot anything for love or money. I am relatively sure it is NOT the zulu itself that's the problem.

So far I have tried:

-A known good bootable disk image. This gets to the splash screen for DOS 7.1 and then just sits and spins forever
-A known good win98 startup floppy image, this gives me a disk I/O error
-An MS-DOS 6.22 ISO, this gets detected properly but never passes Updating ESCD... SUCCESS.
-An MS-DOS 7.10 ISO - this gets further, there's an INT13/42h Read error, error loading image

The SCSI drive appears to "see" everything without issue, but can't seem to boot to anything on the zulu.

I then decided to try a good old fashion IDE-to-CF adapter and one of my trusted PATA CF cards, 2gb just in case. No joy, gets me a disk I/O error

Finally in desperation I tried a good old fashioned GOTEK with a win98 boot image. With the SCSI card and zulu plugged in, stops at Updating ESCD... SUCCESS. Without it? I get a disk boot failure.

Since I hadn't tried everything in the entire world just yet, I grabbed an old IDE CDROM drive off the pile(a 4x4x20 burner I figured should be old enough to play ball) and still got the disk boot error with the bootable MS DOS CD. Tried again with a bootable Windows 2000 CD just for grins, same error.

I don't think I've ever had this much trouble getting a system to boot. It posts like a beauty, but won't boot!
 
Back in the day I built an all SCSI PC and it was a pretty good box. I still have the 8-bit controller and one of the SCSI drives running in my 1000SX.

Why not park that Zulu emulator for while and run a true SCSI controller. I've seen them on Ebay for < $30.

Back to your Zulu; does it require termination?
 
Without rereading the whole thread, you've at least had it booting before through some other means, or no?

If RAM or cache timings are too aggressive, you could see symptoms like that.
 
Quagmire said:
Back in the day I built an all SCSI PC and it was a pretty good box. I still have the 8-bit controller and one of the SCSI drives running in my 1000SX.

Why not park that Zulu emulator for while and run a true SCSI controller. I've seen them on Ebay for < $30.

Back to your Zulu; does it require termination?
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I have a true SCSI controller, the Zulu is only a drive emulator. I have tried a physical CDROM with the Zulu. I will try it alone next(one of the few things I never got around to).

The Zulu does require termination but I configured software termination via the INI file.

Makefile said:
Without rereading the whole thread, you've at least had it booting before through some other means, or no?

If RAM or cache timings are too aggressive, you could see symptoms like that.
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Not as such, no. I bought the board a few months ago and only just started to set it up. I've not gotten it to boot free and clear yet by any means.

Not sure if this matters, its a 166MHz CPU but its showing 200MHz on boot. This is factory defaulting every time because I haven't got a CMOS battery.
 
The CPU clock detection code in the BIOS should be pretty good on these, so it's possible you've overclocked. The multiplier is set using jumpers and should be 2.5X
 
So after much swearing I managed to get the jumpers fixed and its now properly posting at 166mhz. One of these days I plan to grab a 200mhz mmx CPU eventually for this thing. For now I am looking forward to life at 166.

I deleted the HD image from the zulu so it would act as just a terminator. No dice. Then I unhooked it entirely, now we're trying to boot off of nothing but the SCSI CDROM drive all by itself. No joy.

It does get as far as "Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter"

Just for fun I also dropped an old ERD Commander disk in there. No dice.
 
Its not detecting anything on the IDE channels.

Also, as a fun fact: I can't change CMOS settings! When I change a setting and click save, it reboots, and says "CMOS defaults loaded". So whatever I'm going to do, I need to have it work on the defaults.

If I can only get that darned SCSI to work I'd be fine, since it looks like everything should work if the SCSI works.
 
I fixed it!

Apparently this whole time the CDROM drive has had a terminator on it. Once I took the CDROM out and tried to boot off of just the zulu, my original boot image worked. Then I checked the CDROM and found the terminator jumper, removed it, and the system now boots to DOS with the CDROM drive in place!

Whew. That sucked. And was fun. I'm tired.
 
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