it probably doesn't help that my CPU fan died.
it's for a pentium 1, so it's slightly old
OH MAYBE THIS IS WHY
this is not how 3 pin fan connectors work! This is going to try to undervolt your fan backwards while putting +12v down the tach-out pin
amazingly it turns out I didn't fry my fan. after adapting to the Weird Pinout here, it works fine.
well, relatively "works fine". the fan spins.
I still haven't managed to get this computer to respond to any keyboards and when I boot it, it's started looking like this:
the weird part is that this wasn't doing this prior to the whole fan issue.
So... did I somehow damage the RAM trying to get my fan working?
but the PS/2 pinout in the manual (both of them) seems to be wrong, since the voltages are in the wrong places and it doesn't work.
theoretically this motherboard has early USB keyboard support, but, uh... it's a non-standard header. and I don't trust it in the slightest
you'd think I could use one of my many scratch keyboards, but unfortunately they've all gone missing in my last attempt at cleaning my office
you should count your blessings every day that you don't have to live with Foone. I do.
That is my crime, it is also my punishment.
after testing the voltage polarity, I risked a real keyboard on it.
no luck.
I think I'm gonna have to just mark this board as "totally fucked" and give up on it.
I tried switching to this WinSystems SAT-DX, but it's got no VGA out (and I don't have a PC/104 VGA card on hand) and it's beeping an impossible pattern for the award BIOS it supposedly has.
WHY DO NONE OF MY QUARTER-CENTURY OLD ELECTRONICS WORK
Fuck it, go big or go home.
So, two things about this you may notice:
1. it doesn't seem to have a CPU
2. it seems to be slightly floating off my desk.
These two things are related.
The silliest era of SBCs, the time we just bolted Slot 1 Pentium IIs to the back!
It lives! Although it won't boot, because I didn't attach a SCSI drive.
@foone my burning question is who the fuck makes a 1998 computer on a... Is that a VLB card??
@elfi It's a PICMG single board computer. You plug it into a backplane and it runs the other PCI/ISA cards from this, and if it breaks you can just swap this card out individually, not replace a motherboard.
@foone okay, that makes a lot more sense, and it's a clever way of utilizing the shared busses on those
@elfi same reason those are included on motherboards: it means you get more use out of your limited expansion slots, since you don't need to use them on common things 99% of computers will need