Storage

I was thinking what to do with storage and it looks like I have a plan! For now, I've used two CF-IDE adapters. I have many 512MB CF cards and this way, I can have one card with an OS (DOS/Win3.1/95) and the other with a bigger game or just with some installers or some other stuff to transfer around. And with this setup it's a pleasure to use the PC, it's dead silent and works great! But a DEC simply has to have something more substantial, so I've managed to find a few Fujitsu SCSI 37GB 10k RPM hard drives. So when I'll get them, I'll move the CF cards into the top of the case and will install an Adaptec SCSI controller card. It would be fun to install something more modern onto a SCSI drive, like OpenBSD 😄 Will see how that goes.

totoro wrote on 2022-10-24, 07:49:

Oh, by the way, on my motherboard, just below a CPU, there is this socket, do you happen to know what it is and what it's for by any chance?
socket.png

Looks pretty much like a VRM socket, I'd say ...

Looks like it. I bet, those would be impossible to find. So I wonder, does it have to be a DEC specific module or could I use something else :?

Let's think about it. To wrap or not to wrap, is the question.

It's me, so obviously I just have to wrap it! Haha. The case covers are two part, so it would be nice to do a two part wrap. Plus I like that vinyl not only covers all the scratches and scars, but also protects the surface. It's easy enough to remove and looks nice, so why not? I though while finally going to sleep and the though just would not give me rest. And thus went the wrapping spree 😸

The removable case access cover got wrapped by the black wood grain. Which won't be seen much as the case opens from a wrong side. But the non-opening side I'm going so see, so let's try something new. I've never done a comic wrap, so yes, it's kind of nice to have something to focus attention to when spacing out. Anyway, here it is, let's wrap this love boat!

Few more updates on the Venturis. Since I kind of like it and used it all this time almost exclusively, I think, it would be nice to expand it a little storage wise. First problem stems from the fact, that I am using not one, but two IDE-CF adapters. There for one shared PCI/ISA Slot is lost to these adapters and I already had some ideas to use some SCSI stuff here, more on that later. What matters now is that I need to move these CF adapters somewhere. A cool way would be to somehow obtain/print a 5.25" mounting bracket so that it would be possible to change CF cards without reaching out. But that might be more expensive than I would like. So what to do?

I've noticed, there are these two weird holes in the top corner of the case. I have no idea what they are for, however, that seemed like a nice enough potential solution for my CF problem.

All I've had to do was to cut CF mounting brackets to fit and then drill four 3mm holes so that I could mount them with screws. So I went and did that.

I was pleasantly surprised, that power cables could reach new location just fine. All that was needed was to find much longer IDE cable and it all went together perfectly!

Looks like a pretty nice compromise, cards are now much easier to reach and I've got a free place for another ISA or PCI card. Yay!

All was not that well, when I've started to gather some SCSI stuff. Firstly, I'm not at all familiar with SCSI world, so mistakes were made...

Anyway, the idea was simple, to learn some SCSI stuff while trying to actually use it. I thought, it would be cool to put an SCSI hard drive and maybe a tape drive (always wanted to try one of those). And I've already had an Adaptec PCI SCSI controller card laying around, just no actual SCSI hardware to pair it with. So I've went shopping! And this is where things went horribly wrong...

Firstly, I've found a Digital Tape Backup Drive! So I've just bought it fast and ... Turns out it does not fit my controller. Which has external port that fits the connection at the top. Then the one at the bottom connects into the drive and this one feels slightly familiar, yet I could not tell what it is. And the one in the middle is at the other end, I have never seen any hardware using this one, yet here it is, smiling at me with that evil smile! Got ya!

Anyway, the drive it self seems nice and seller guaranteed that it will be a working one.

Then I went and bought some hard drives. I was able to find a few Fujitsu ~37GB SCSI drives that are in great condition (according to the seller) for very cheap. Actually I've just took all server to increase the value of the deal, but that's another story...

The trouble is, of course, they use yet another SCSI connection yet gain... Oh boy, it's great to have many standards, there is always something to chose from 😆

Well, at least I was able to order an adapter for this, so hopefully it would work eventually. Will have to wait and see. In the mean time, I've went and installed the SCSI card into Digital Venturis. It does work, but PC BIOS does not seem to be able to boot from add-on cards. Great. This should not be a show stopper I think. When trying to install OpenBSD I should be able to get away by just installing a boot loader into some CF card. Will see. Important thing is that I am still keen on having some SCSI stuff in here.

Let's do something fun with MS-DOS while waiting for those SCSI adapters and cables, and stuff. In my opinion, if one were to use DOS, then the CRT monitor is almost a must. There are all kinds of reasons for this. For me, it's mostly the warmth of a CRT tube, an occasional crackling sound caused by speck of dust getting electrified on the tube and the smell of it makes up large part of the romance. But really, when it comes to games, stuff just look best on CRT. There for, I've stole the CRT monitor from my Compaq build. And had a few great nights!

And here I've realized, it does look a lot better paired to the DEC, than placed on top of the Compaq... Great, I might have to hunt for another CRT 😄

That gaming session might have stepped slightly out of appropriate time, so I was feeling a little bit guilty. At my age, it does seem kind of immature to spend so much time on games... So yeah, let's make up on that by doing something more interesting with it. So I went on searching the web in hope to find some interesting DOS program or two. Ran into a few. Namely a Links browser and an SSH client, both patched by community quite recently (like 2021 or so). It looked promising and it certainly was. A browser with TLS 1.2 and SSH client with Sha256 on a Pentium 150Mhz DOS computer? Sign me up!

And thus, after finding the right Packet driver for my LAN card and a little bit of reading few README files here and there it was up and running. I was able to SSH into my laptop and could do quite a lot of console stuff from there, like get into my server, use IRSSI to chat on IRC (with SSL). It would be kind of cool to find a native DOS IRC Client with SSL support tough. Anyway, it worked flawlessly and sure was a pleasant evening poking around via SSH! I was pleasantly surprised, that SSH2DOS client even allowed to use DOS Shell occasionally without breaking active SSH session!

Pretty much the only annoying limitation was that MS-DOS does not support UTF-8 and I could not interact well in my native language. The same is true for browser also, but links is pretty good at transcribing characters it can't display in to something similar so yeah. It was readable. And I was very impressed that my humble pentium 150Mhz non-MMX could handle all the encryption just fine. Yeah!

P.S.
I am actually using MS-DOS for my personal journal. There is this excellent little text editor called PEDIT, it has an auto-wrap feature and thus feels great to yournal! Just like, or even better than, my typewriter! And I can even type in my native language, when using some non-official language/keyboard driver. It's just that I have to do a charset conversion if I want to export my writings into a modern world. So yes. Great little OS the good old DOS is, still useful and very resilient, also very simple.

Garrett W wrote on 2022-10-22, 10:09:

I have a very similar desktop machine called the Digital Venturis FX-2, which I've fitted with an MMX 233, 64MB RAM, Voodoo Banshee, 10/100 Ethernet Card, and a noise-free Vibra 16. My system's based on the 430TX, though instead of the SiS 5150.

Would you mind sharing your config? Based on the manual, the maximum multiplier is x3, so 200mhz. I have 233 but now clocked as 200mmx. I would love to see it clocked as 233mhz.

sndlbn wrote on 2023-01-13, 21:14:

Garrett W wrote on 2022-10-22, 10:09:

I have a very similar desktop machine called the Digital Venturis FX-2, which I've fitted with an MMX 233, 64MB RAM, Voodoo Banshee, 10/100 Ethernet Card, and a noise-free Vibra 16. My system's based on the 430TX, though instead of the SiS 5150.

Would you mind sharing your config? Based on the manual, the maximum multiplier is x3, so 200mhz. I have 233 but now clocked as 200mmx. I would love to see it clocked as 233mhz.

IIRC the 233 interprets 1.5 multiplier as 3.5

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-13, 22:17:

sndlbn wrote on 2023-01-13, 21:14:

Garrett W wrote on 2022-10-22, 10:09:

I have a very similar desktop machine called the Digital Venturis FX-2, which I've fitted with an MMX 233, 64MB RAM, Voodoo Banshee, 10/100 Ethernet Card, and a noise-free Vibra 16. My system's based on the 430TX, though instead of the SiS 5150.

Would you mind sharing your config? Based on the manual, the maximum multiplier is x3, so 200mhz. I have 233 but now clocked as 200mmx. I would love to see it clocked as 233mhz.

IIRC the 233 interprets 1.5 multiplier as 3.5

Correct. Set it up as 1.5x jumpers and you get golden 233MHz for pentium mmx processor.

Cheers,

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-13, 22:17:

sndlbn wrote on 2023-01-13, 21:14:

Garrett W wrote on 2022-10-22, 10:09:

I have a very similar desktop machine called the Digital Venturis FX-2, which I've fitted with an MMX 233, 64MB RAM, Voodoo Banshee, 10/100 Ethernet Card, and a noise-free Vibra 16. My system's based on the 430TX, though instead of the SiS 5150.

Would you mind sharing your config? Based on the manual, the maximum multiplier is x3, so 200mhz. I have 233 but now clocked as 200mmx. I would love to see it clocked as 233mhz.

IIRC the 233 interprets 1.5 multiplier as 3.5

Thank you so much. It’s working like a charm.

Just in case you don't already have it, these may be of interest for your FX-2:

• AG-R4STD-BH - Venturis FX-2 System Software CD Version 1.3, August 1997
• AK-R3RTD-CA - DIGITAL Startup DISKETTE, Intel Based Systems, Disk 1 of 1

More FX-2 drivers are here: https://www.zx.net.nz/mirror/h18000.www1.hp.c … tal/epid51.html (some of these may be newer or older than whatever is on the v1.3 system software CD)

I've got the bigger brother to this, a Venturis GL 6200.

It's pretty much the same case, and same 'split' upper/lower motherboard layout, same S3 Trio onboard VGA, same slot layout etc. The difference is the GL 200 has a Pentium Pro 200, and I think there was a model with dual PPro as there's empty solder pads on the motherboard for a second socket.

It's nice kit, but as others have said, by this time DEC was really already in the decline. Their heyday was much earlier.

It's been a while, but I think it is time to bump this little tanker!

It so happened that I have stumbled into this interesting Youtube channel called Necroware and the guy did amazing job on designing VRM module for all those older Socket 7 motherboards which feature a VRM connector. Apparently, the connection is the same on all motherboards. And even more amazingly Necroware published his desing on Github, thus I was intrigued enough to try and build one for myself. And here it is!

Admittedly I am not that great with a soldering iron, yet managed to somehow assemble the thing. And the thing is great! It allows to have any voltage between 1.6V and 3.2V it seems to be pretty efficient and remains very cool. Thus I've dug out an Intel Pentium MMX 200Mhz CPU (would be nice to get a 233Mhz one day).

Low and behold, it works!

Nice and stable, along with pipeline burst cache it performs pretty well and so my DEC is now FX 5200M according to the BIOS!

Just for fun, I have tried to install a few processors which this board would not support. Namely an AMD K6-2 400Mhz and Cyrix MII 233MMX:

The VRM module did a good job of powering both CPU's, yet, as expected, BIOS does not support them. System started, tried to initialize and then hanged:

I suppose some BIOS modding would be required for them to work properly, but I am not sure that I want to mess with this stuff. It might be cool, but for now it was just some fun to try! Amusingly in the case of Cyrix MII, the POST screen was garbled with some missing letters. And AMD CPU seemed to behave slightly better but it was a total ??? for the system 😀

The board feature multipliers of 3/2, 2/1, 3/1 and 5/2 which translates into 1.5x, 2x, 3x and 2.5x thus I thought that 200Mhz was a maximum CPU frequency it could support. Apparently, if I set multiplier of 3/2 (1.5x) on a MMX CPU, it then treats it as 3.5x and thus I can run my Pentium 200Mhz MMX at 233Mhz

Which does provide a nice performance bump. Interestingly the BIOS still thinks it is a 200Mhz CPU 😀

You mention

totoro wrote on 2022-10-21, 21:04:

The motherboard actually has three chips of 128k so total of 384KB of Cache which is reported as a "Shadow RAM". I

Looking at the photo of the motherboard, I can't help wonder which chips you are referring to.

Shadow Ram is the part of ram that lies between 640k & 1024K. ie It's part of the main memory simms.
It's the part in the address range where video ram, option roms & bios reside.
Option roms & bios can be transferred to this ram by the bios. This speeds up any access to it, which is most noticeable in DOS.
Any Shadow ram that isn't shadowing a bios or option rom can be used as an UMB Upper Memory Block, which in dos allows TSRs and device drivers to be loaded high.

weedeewee wrote on 2023-10-13, 21:13:

Any Shadow ram that isn't shadowing a bios or option rom can be used as an UMB Upper Memory Block, which in dos allows TSRs and device drivers to be loaded high.

That is useful to know, thanks!

As for the chips, they are these three little buggies right by the CPU socket I thought they were here:

Those aren't memory chips, those are bus transceivers. 74F245 octal non-inverting bus transceivers to be specific. To be more specific, *probably* SN74F245 given they're labeled as being from TI.

If they had been unlabeled, then aside from being very small they also don't have enough pins to address 128Kbytes per chip and still have an 8-bit data bus. You'd need 17 address pins (2^17 bytes) per chip, plus power and ground, and a handful of random other pins, and those are 20pin chips, not nearly enough pins.

Your system was indeed very cacheless before you added the cache stick.

I'm curious what led you to believe those were SRAM, and specifically 128K per chip.