I've sporadically scoured various places for a few years looking for one of these....and I finally found one on ebay pretty cheap. It came in an AT form-factor case with a bunch of perifs of the same era (buslogic scsi3 controller, S3 GPU, 10BT nic with bnc connector, toshiba 12x SCSI cdrom)...and may the mystery board please sign in...
Tyan Tomcat IVD (S1564D) dual socket 7 supporting a blistering fast pair of 233MHZ MMX processors and 512mb RAM. Only a handfull of these were made, as this design was on the tail-end of the Pentium 1 era (430HX chipset), soon to be replaced by the slot-1 Pentium2 LX and then the legendary BX chipset....so yea, not an easy one to find....and hope like hell it works.
It came with a matched pair of retail 233mmx processors and 128mb of ram. 2 of the SIMM's were bad, so its down to 64mb now....but I found 512mb worth (8 @ 64mb) 72-pin EDO SIMM's for $25 shipped.
Now it was a matter of tinkering with hardware and seeing what's good and not-so-good in order to find that 'hardware happy place'. S3 GPU, no....doesn't support squat. I did manage to muster up an ATI 9200 128mb, one of the fastest PCI GPU's I've encountered. It was in a junk system that was given to me a couple years ago by a retiring realtor. Well supported from Win98/win2k and up (possible dual boot machine)....so yea, I'll give that one a try. I also removed the buslogic scsi controller and replaced it with an adapted 2940U2W. I stuck an ESS 1868 ISA sound card in it....I have an AWE64 around here somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. I'm also on the plextor hunt to scare up some more opticals. Those bastards are expensive on ebay...wowza!! I have no idea why they're priced so out there for old ass scsi burners. I guess I should appreciate the 4 that I have already!
Getting there...
I loaded win2k onto a test hdd to see how and if things would play with eachotehr. Win2k on 64mb of ram isnt terrible....but yea.... At idle (untweaked with unofficial SP5.1 installed), has 7mb free, so install anything on there, and its all done!! I installed a PCI USB card, as any system today without USB abilities is pretty useless, even for a retro box. Upon installing the drivers for the card, I was getting strange code-10 errors on the USB controller. After researching it, it was a BIOS issue. Of course the board had v1.00 on it. I downloaded the latest one from Tyan, v1.02, released in 1998...lol... I knew better than to do this (I was already having a Ratdude day, everything was going wrong), but I flashed it from a floppy rather than my standard procedure of copy it to a HDD first and flash it from the HDD....anyway, about half way through the flash, I heard the illustrious 'read error' grinding from the floppy drive, and the system hardlocked and rebooted....and of course no POST. Well POO!! Just bricked an extremely rare board. The BIOS chip itself is an ancient v4.51 ATMEL 128K ROM. As if by some miracle, I had a client's AOPEN Pentium 133 in here for recapping, with an award BIOS. ...so yay, hotflash coming up. The flash board had a 256k ROM, so I had to play around with a few versions of awdflash before I found one that would write to the 128k one without bitching & screaming...and finally got one that would....even though I had to use forceflash switches. I put the chip back in the Tyan, hit power and it still wouldn't post...and a couple seconds later, I started smelling something....well my dumbass put the chip in backward.....jeez, I'm batting zero today. I did not have another 128k chip, so I tried a 256k one. It actually flashed the 128k BIN (bitched about the size mismatch), I put it in the Tyan (correctly this time), and the board POST'ed...but it was behaving really strange, with all kinds of BIOS-related issues. After a few minutes of diddling around with that, I took the original ROM that was installed backward. I didn't let the magic smoke out, and I put a meter across GND and Vcc, and it wasn't shorted....so I said screw it, I installed it the right way, and hit power, half expecting it to finish it off...well, it didn't. It POST'ed with the latest v1.02 BIOS for the board.... It baffles me how that ROM got that hot but didn't fry...ohh well, not going to argue with it. System booted normally, and the BIOS update fixed the code-10 issues with the USB, and all hardware is happy!!
I do not like this case at all, its very cheap, shoddy, and flimsy...and every edge inside is a razor blade. Whoever initially built this thing (its an unbranded home-brew) wasn't too concerned with case quality...so I am on the prowl for a high-end AT case from yesteryear, which is proving to be easier said than done...but I'll keep at it. This build may take a while to complete to my standards & liking...
Tyan Tomcat IVD (S1564D) dual socket 7 supporting a blistering fast pair of 233MHZ MMX processors and 512mb RAM. Only a handfull of these were made, as this design was on the tail-end of the Pentium 1 era (430HX chipset), soon to be replaced by the slot-1 Pentium2 LX and then the legendary BX chipset....so yea, not an easy one to find....and hope like hell it works.
It came with a matched pair of retail 233mmx processors and 128mb of ram. 2 of the SIMM's were bad, so its down to 64mb now....but I found 512mb worth (8 @ 64mb) 72-pin EDO SIMM's for $25 shipped.
Now it was a matter of tinkering with hardware and seeing what's good and not-so-good in order to find that 'hardware happy place'. S3 GPU, no....doesn't support squat. I did manage to muster up an ATI 9200 128mb, one of the fastest PCI GPU's I've encountered. It was in a junk system that was given to me a couple years ago by a retiring realtor. Well supported from Win98/win2k and up (possible dual boot machine)....so yea, I'll give that one a try. I also removed the buslogic scsi controller and replaced it with an adapted 2940U2W. I stuck an ESS 1868 ISA sound card in it....I have an AWE64 around here somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. I'm also on the plextor hunt to scare up some more opticals. Those bastards are expensive on ebay...wowza!! I have no idea why they're priced so out there for old ass scsi burners. I guess I should appreciate the 4 that I have already!
Getting there...
I loaded win2k onto a test hdd to see how and if things would play with eachotehr. Win2k on 64mb of ram isnt terrible....but yea.... At idle (untweaked with unofficial SP5.1 installed), has 7mb free, so install anything on there, and its all done!! I installed a PCI USB card, as any system today without USB abilities is pretty useless, even for a retro box. Upon installing the drivers for the card, I was getting strange code-10 errors on the USB controller. After researching it, it was a BIOS issue. Of course the board had v1.00 on it. I downloaded the latest one from Tyan, v1.02, released in 1998...lol... I knew better than to do this (I was already having a Ratdude day, everything was going wrong), but I flashed it from a floppy rather than my standard procedure of copy it to a HDD first and flash it from the HDD....anyway, about half way through the flash, I heard the illustrious 'read error' grinding from the floppy drive, and the system hardlocked and rebooted....and of course no POST. Well POO!! Just bricked an extremely rare board. The BIOS chip itself is an ancient v4.51 ATMEL 128K ROM. As if by some miracle, I had a client's AOPEN Pentium 133 in here for recapping, with an award BIOS. ...so yay, hotflash coming up. The flash board had a 256k ROM, so I had to play around with a few versions of awdflash before I found one that would write to the 128k one without bitching & screaming...and finally got one that would....even though I had to use forceflash switches. I put the chip back in the Tyan, hit power and it still wouldn't post...and a couple seconds later, I started smelling something....well my dumbass put the chip in backward.....jeez, I'm batting zero today. I did not have another 128k chip, so I tried a 256k one. It actually flashed the 128k BIN (bitched about the size mismatch), I put it in the Tyan (correctly this time), and the board POST'ed...but it was behaving really strange, with all kinds of BIOS-related issues. After a few minutes of diddling around with that, I took the original ROM that was installed backward. I didn't let the magic smoke out, and I put a meter across GND and Vcc, and it wasn't shorted....so I said screw it, I installed it the right way, and hit power, half expecting it to finish it off...well, it didn't. It POST'ed with the latest v1.02 BIOS for the board.... It baffles me how that ROM got that hot but didn't fry...ohh well, not going to argue with it. System booted normally, and the BIOS update fixed the code-10 issues with the USB, and all hardware is happy!!
I do not like this case at all, its very cheap, shoddy, and flimsy...and every edge inside is a razor blade. Whoever initially built this thing (its an unbranded home-brew) wasn't too concerned with case quality...so I am on the prowl for a high-end AT case from yesteryear, which is proving to be easier said than done...but I'll keep at it. This build may take a while to complete to my standards & liking...
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