October « 2017 « modelrail.otenko

16Oct/1712

Power Macintosh Graphite G4 – ATI Radeon 9250

My recently acquired Power Mac G4 was originally spec'd with an Nvidia GeForce, but instead came with an ATI Rage Pro 128. I therefore started researching my options for a graphics card upgrade. Most 'apple-designed' items, that would work out of the box, would cost an arm and a leg, so I ventured deeper into the web and came to the understanding that PC cards could be flashed to work on Apples!

Which cards?

Good question. Some people have had luck with the NVidia GeForce range, whilst others have succeeded with the ATI Radeon chipset. There's a good compatibilty chart here at The Mac Elite which will show you the series and then any required modifications.

Sapphire ATI Radeon 9250 128mb

I happened across an ATI Radeon 9250 AGP with 128mb of RAM at trash and treasure on the weekend for a few dollars and my decision was therefore made for me. The VGA port was dangling and needed whatever screws I could find to secure it.. and well, it was cheap.

Quick research showed that the basic process is to first flash it in a compatible PC, disable pins 3+11 and then shift some resistors. The pin disablement is required as the Macintosh actually uses these to send 25v over it's proprietary ADC port to power an Apple Display. AGP 1x originally didn't require these pins and so Apple hijacked them. Plugging an AGP 4x/8x card into an apple expecting a 1x card will prevent the machine from booting and possibly cause other hardware damage.

Flashing with a Macintosh ROM

Thanking The Mac Elite once more, they have a great flashing tutorial here. Firstly, you'll need a ROM, so follow the links and agree to the disclaimers. Note that the 9250 driver is actually not 'official'. It's a modified version that has the device IDs hacked in to allow this card to work. You'll find 3 ROMs for the 9250 over there. A 'full' version and 2 reduced versions. The latter are smaller versions of the original ROM file, allowing it to fit on cards with smaller flash memory. Actually, there's a whole article on reduced ROMs here. I'd read on a forum of a success story with the 'Reduced TOME ROM', so I chose that.

Finding ATIFlash actually became quite a challenge... the tools available for ATI Flashing were all windows-based and the DOS version was nowhere to be found. I tried Archive.org, but the links were all dynamic and wouldn't give me an older version. Googling then provided me with a link to a newer version of the DOS ATIFlash tool. I managed to get it onto a bootable floppy, with both of the ROMs to test and ... well ... each attempt resulted in: Adapter Not Found. The tool couldn't find my AGP card!?!

At this point I had two options... Keep scouring the web for an ancient version of ATIFlash (v3.10 is the version everyone seems to prefer) or try the windows versions... I actually did try the latter, but my test PC only had Win98SE and the app needed Windows 7 at a minimum. I therefore kept digging and found other versions of ATIFlash! Finally, v3.10. It still didn't work... so instead of wasting hours to get Windows 7 up and running, I chose to force the flash. Using atiflash -f -p [CARD_IDX] [ROM_FILE], things started happening!

Finally, we have a successful flash and it's actually now listing the card and the ROM information correctly. NOTE: The screenshot above shows ATIFLA2.EXE... this is v3.10. ATIFLASH.EXE is v4.17, the first version I tried.

Disabling pins 3 and 11

The Mac Elite has a great write-up on this requirement. As mentioned, these two pins were used to provide power to an ADC monitor. Later on, AGP 8x came along and used these pins for something else. Since my card is an 8x card, the pins are 'in-use' and therefore the Macintosh wasn't happy with this at all. In fact, it wouldn't power up with the card inserted nakedly into the slot. Fortunately, the fix is simples... grab some sticky-tape and cut it into thin slices and insulate the pins.

To stop the tape from sliding when the card is inserted, wrap it half way around the edge. Don't go all the way around though, as you'll disable other pins on the other side of the connector.

At this point I tested it out... I was curious to see if the machine would even power up.

It did!... but the frequency was totally out-of-whack. That last shot is of me going back to the PC to check if I could write the other 'full' ROM as I'd thought a bad ROM write was to blame. It didn't let me and I was about to despair, before I remembered that I still had to hack resistors to switch this card into Mac Mode.

ATI 9250 'Macintosh Mode'

The 9250 needs a further 'Macintosh Mode' hack. It seems that the card has soldered jumpers to configure it as either Macintosh or PC. This link at The Mac Elite has an example of what resistors to change... but my card wasn't 100% identical. I took a flying leap and guessed that the resistors in the same area provided the same purpose. This, thankfully, turned out to be correct!

So, the card was on the workbench, the soldering iron was ready, and I had assumed that the 'block of three' resistors was the top 3 of 4 in that upper area and the '2 pair' was the obvious 2-pair below. Fortunately, the first 2 of 3 of the top block were already in the correct location; I just had to shift the last one. Removal was easy: I tinned the soldering iron and just heated up the SMD resistor until it lifted and stuck to the tip. After this I cleaned the pads ready for the switched resistors.

Of course, I couldn't be assed trying to put the tiny SMD resistors back; there's really no need. They're actually just jumpers or 0 ohm resistors providing links between two solder pads. I therefore just grabbed a nearby full-size resistor and bent its leg to act as a jumper.

I tinned the end of the resistor and then soldered it in place.

From there, a nice set of sharp snips removed the excess and the short was in place!

One done, two more to go...

Before I knew it, all were done and it was time to test it out again...

With the card in place, you really have no idea if the sticky-tape insulating the pins has succeeded... but just turn it on anyway! Meanwhile, look at all those spare PCI slots! I'll get back to them later.

Haha! It just worked!

Software

Well... it nearly worked. The second monitor was maxing out at 640x480 and controls seemed limited. I assumed I needed some form of a real ATI driver, so I went searching. ATI/AMD actually has the drivers right here and installing them was a breeze. After a reboot, I had full resolution and the monitor model numbers were even showing up!

Success!

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13Oct/170

Shin-Osaka Webcam – Timetable

I'll update this as I add more services, but here's a list of trains that you can expect to see on the Shin-Osaka Webcam. I'll try and get the freight timetable in there ASAP. Note that the current data below is sourced from Google Maps. It is very up-to-the-minute and therefore will only show future departures!

Regarding the times above... the video is on the east side of the station, so anything heading west will actually appear sooner than the time indicated. The time is the departure time from Shin-Osaka Station, so anything heading east will depart the platforms as indicated. Take anywhere from a minute to 10 seconds off the time for trains heading west.

Unfortunately, the video cannot be embedded, so you'll have to practice alt-tabbing when required.

Here's a post on what you can expect to see on the camera. And here's a cool sighting of Doctor Yellow. Send messages through if you see interesting trains!

Movements of interest

The list below has been collated from either timetables or actually watching the camera. From my thread here, you'll start seeing the correlations, and my comments regarding, the movements that happen regularly and to the timetable.

Description	Photos
DE10 Light Engine 0853, 0904 This timeslot allows a locomotive to travel light to fetch items from Kawasaki in Hyogo. See the next line for the return service.
DE10 with Kawasaki Consist 1358 (following above) This should be the same locomotive above (currently usually a DE10) returning with whatever it was sent to pick up.
Westbound Locomotive Balancing 1018 It seems that this freight train usually has two locomotives up front. Only one is needed, so it must be a balancing move.
Doctor Yellow のぞみ 166 - 1354 のぞみ 337 - 1420 のぞみ 386 - 1623 のぞみ 179 - 1613 This service only runs on very specific days... I've caught it both inbound and outbound at around the same time? Online timetables don't quite correlate to these sightings, so it's honestly just a fluke on my behalf!
Thunderbird dead-head to Osaka 0649, 0705, 1130 The EMU consists run along the Tokaido line and use the triangle just south of Amagasaki to get into Osaka station instead of crowding the line in via Umeda.
...more to come...

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12Oct/170

Virtual Train Trip – Osaka Station to Shin-Osaka Station

For those who don't know, suburban Japanese passenger trains, more often than not, have front windows of which passengers can actually see out of. This is very unheard of in Australia, as the driver's cabin is usually separated from the dangerous passengers by opaque walls.

Therefore in Japan, if you get into the front car of a passenger consist, not only can you see the driver and watch his every move.. you can see out the front of the train and watch as you drive along the tracks!

It's totally mesmerising. Of course, you can then also watch all the gauges and other instrumentation that the driver must control to keep the whole system functioning.

I hereby present a video I took by suction-cupping a GoPro to the front window inside a 223-Series EMU from Osaka to Shin-Osaka.

What you're seeing here is the view on the 'conductors' side of the cabin. When the train is running in the opposite direction, this is the area where the conductor usually works from as the doors switches and guard light controls are all on the wall. It's also a good shelf to store your work bag.

The trip starts with the curve out of Umeda, crossing the Yodogawa before quickly arriving at Shin-Osaka Station. If you want to then see the area afterwards, check out my Shin-Osaka Webcam sightings here.

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11Oct/172

AnyDrive – Use bigger drives than your BIOS permits!

I've mentioned this use of this Dynamic Drive Overlay software before, but I just want to go over some of its intricacies. Although 90% of it is totally straight forward, there's a few gotchas that you need to be aware of:

It only works when the MBR has been 'booted' first
This means that, if you have AnyDrive installed and you want to boot a floppy which can see the drive in full, you need to attempt to boot the HDD first, holding shift, to then boot the floppy straight after.
When installing, use the drive number, not letter
I first installed it on drive C instead of drive 0, this caused all sorts of strange issues.

Installation

The best way to do this is to format your 3 DOS 6.22 installation disks and then copy the ANYDRIVE.EXE file over onto the first disk. Boot your machine into DOS and then hit F3 twice to exit out to the command prompt.

From here, run the ANYDRIVE command to get an idea as to your current scenario. You can use ANYDRIVE S to check an installation, if any exists. Note that if you booted straight off your floppy then ANYDRIVE will tell you that it's not correctly loaded. This is perfectly acceptable if you have booted from a floppy and not let the HDD initialise first.

To get an old 840mb HDD running on my 386, I did the following:

Build 3 DOS 6.22 floppies
Copy ANYDRIVE.EXE onto the first disk
Install the HDD into the computer and then boot the first DOS disk
Hit F3 twice to get out of DOS Setup
Run ANYDRIVE [DRIVE_NO] [CYLS] [HEADS] [SECT]
(ANYDRIVE 0 1647 16 63 for my Quantum Trailblazer 840AT as C:)
Remove DOS Disk 1 and Reboot
Hold down LEFT SHIFT to tell ANYDRIVE that you want to boot from a floppy
Wait for ANYDRIVE floppy prompt and then insert DOS Disk 1 once again
Install DOS as per usual (it should format to the new size of your disk)

Usage and Boot-time quirks

Once it's installed, and your OS is installed, it's all happy days. Everything is fine until you try to boot from a floppy. As per every old BIOS, boot will be handed to the floppy drive prior to the HDD and therefore the HDD won't be initialised until later. If this happens, then ANYDRIVE wont be initialised correctly and your actual BIOS settings will be used.

This is a problem. As any attempt to then access C:, which has been partitioned and formatted based on ANYDRIVE settings, could cause all sorts of damage as the geometry will be wrong!

To prevent this, make sure your boot disks are ejected and hold shift when your machine starts... you'll instead see the ANYDRIVE boot line and then a prompt to boot from A:. Booting your boot floppy at this point will ensure that any software afterwards sees your ANYDRIVE settings rather than BIOS settings.

I hope this helps anyone trying to get more storage on their older dinosaurs!

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4Oct/170

Shin-Osaka Webcam – Twilight Express Mizukaze!

First it was Doctor Yellow, but today proved a more rare sight....

You'd better believe it, that's the Twilight Express Mizukaze. The link to the camera is here. It has been raining the last two days and the sound of the rain has actually been fascinating!

Update, here it is again on the 11th October 2017...