Been awhile since I've messed around with my retro system due to aggravation getting Windows 98 to work correctly. Today's project revolves around me killing my Trigem Lomita motherboard as a result of flashing a bad BIOS to it's soldered on PLCC32 BIOS chip. I have been using Pheonix BIOS editor to attempt to solve an irritating resource conflict issue I have had on this board by removing the option rom for the i810 chipset integrated video and changing some Plug and Play settings, that seem to have been successful finally. Anyways, I pushed the limits of what I can do with a cheap 30W Weller soldering iron today and it worked.
I cut the legs off the soldered on chip to remove it from the motherboard, then cleaned up the soldering pads and got them ready for a new socket.
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I then took a new 3M PLCC32 socket and cut the bottom out of it carefully so I could access the pins from inside the socket, and tinned all the socket legs with solder.
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And then with my high powered magnifying eye glasses on and plenty of light, managed to solder each individual socket pin to it's corresponding pad on the motherboard by hand.
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Turned out incredibly well, and I was able to flash my modded BIOS into a new SST PLCC32 chip and get system up and running after months of it sitting here with issues. Device conflicts are all gone installing Windows 98 in non ACPI mode and so far system is working nicely. I like it much better then my previous Willamette P4/RDRAM retro system which was simply too fast for many DOS games. Those same games work fine on the P3 though.
It consists of a Trigem Lomita i810 motherboard, a Pentium III-S 1266 Tualatin CPU, 512MB of PC100 memory, EVGA Geforce FX 5200 128MB PCI (bios overclocked) w DVI to HDMI adapter, Sound Blaster Live PCI card, a WD 80GB IDE HDD, Samsung IDE CD-RW drive, a Dell 250W power supply (recapped), in a cheap Rosewill case. I'm running Windows 98 SE, the Nvidia 45.23 driver, and so far it can even play UT2004 acceptably well at 800x600 resolution which looks best on my old Samsung 32" 1360x768 TV/monitor. I must say that so far the DOS sound capabilities of the Live card aren't bad, it sounds far better then the terrible FM emulation done by my previous Ensonig AudioPCI and I'm currently replaying Chasm the Rift and The Incredible Machine.
Here is a picture right before I crashed the BIOS and had to take it all apart.
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I lurk here more then I post, but certainly enjoy seeing what everyone else is doing with their 'oldies but goodies'!