>Has anyone determined whether or not the 72-pin flash simm can be replaced with a standard simm? <
I found a 72-pin simm laying around and gave it a shot. The monitor acquires a signal, but nothing displays (just a black screen). The 3 lights (red, yellow, green) go solid for a few seconds, and then flash off for about a second every 5 seconds.
I seem to recall it being necessary to plug some 72-pin simm's in in pairs. Is this RAM-stick specific or motherboard/chipset specific? How can I tell if I used a 72-pin SIMM that was supposed to be used in a pair? In all likelihood, I have other SIMM modules laying around and would be willing to give them a shot if someone would direct me on what to look for.
I don't know how much MB this SIMM contained and I don't have any machines laying around that use 72-pin SIMMs anymore.
>If a valid boot image were latched to the IDE device, without the simm in there, would it boot, or is there not enough low-level support to handle a boot without it?<
I will be trying this soon. I'm not knowledgeable about Linux so I was just gonna start with an MS-DOS disk and see what happens. (Yeah, I know, it's not an x86 cpu).
Did anyone notice the "button" sitting near the IDE header and (I assume) a floppy header? The label "SW2" lies between the "button" and the CPU. I played with this, too:
If you press and hold the button before applying power, the unit fails to boot - the monitor does not acquire any video signal, either. The green light turns on, but nothing else. If you let go of the button, the red button goes solid and the green stays on. The unit still doesn't seem to do much of anything (no boot, no video acquire.)
Pressing the button while the unit has already powered on in a normal configuration doesn't seem to impact anything.
I rather wondered if the "button" had to do with diagnostic/booting routines.... maybe if you press it when an IDE drive is plugged in, it'll act differently?
Codeman mentioned lifting or cutting pin 11 of U2. I am willing to try this if someone were to give me advice. I think I have located the U2 "chip" (forgive my ignorance on terminology) but am unsure which pin is #11. How do you start counting, at zero or one? And do you count pins in a clockwise manner, or like reading a book from left to right, every line?
Oh yeah - someone said they received a unit with 8MB instead of 4. How could they tell?
-hj
, this has the potential to do MP3. About one order of magnitude difference in capability - but as a hack, it's much more involved and therefore probably more fun.