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| Booting and gray screen... |
Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-02 10:58:29
Hi,
I'm trying to boot a prototype mac - PowerMac 9700 - and I'm trying both OS X and OS 8/9.
In terms of trying to boot OS 8/9 and the main issue so far is that when I boot using the apple rom (APPL) I only get a gray screen (no happy or sad mac). No cursor or anything else.
In terms of normal macs has anyone seen this behavior before. For example I've seen something similar when SCSI termination was set incorrectly on a PowerMac 8500 with a frozen gray screen but at least this had a cursor on.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
James.
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Posted by: z180 on 2009-03-02 11:25:32
Where did you get a "Power Express" ?
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Posted by: LCGuy on 2009-03-03 14:59:48
Ahh, the infamous Power Express. Very few of these actually boot...if you can get yours to run, you'll have an extremely rare, sought after, collectable machine.
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Posted by: ~tl on 2009-03-03 15:13:25
Captain Z used to have a fair amount of information about the PowerExpress machines on his website. It seems to be down at the moment, but it's on Archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060621035412/http://www.captainz.net/
There is also some information on the DigiBarn website:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/mac-powerexpress/index.html
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-09 15:02:15
Hey,
Thanks for your replies guys.
I got the PEX from a guy who had it originally on the applefritter forums.
I solved the gray screen issue (the mouse/keyboard doesn't work) but it was down to having a CPU installed that the Mac OS ROM didn't recognise (a G4).
Putting a 604e CPU in got Mac OS 8.6 booting.
Full past thread here: http://www.applefritter.com/node/23597
Thanks,
James.
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-10 14:01:28
I'm very interested to hear the strange boot chime of this Mac.
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Posted by: istar1018 on 2009-03-13 10:50:21
Very cool that you got your Power Express working!!
So are you using the digibarn ROMs, or did you make your own SIMM? Do you have ROM dumps somewhere?
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-14 21:24:44
Do you have ROM dumps somewhere? YES, good question - because we could then pull the startup sound from the appropriate ROM dump so we could hear it!! I've never found a single recording or extraction of this sound on the internet.
Please share the ROM dumps if you have them!
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-16 15:32:22
Very cool that you got your Power Express working!!
So are you using the digibarn ROMs, or did you make your own SIMM? Do you have ROM dumps somewhere? Thanks, I'm using the Digibarn ROM SIMM, which I've borrowed for a while. I've dumped the ROM and will be trying to make my own ROM SIMM.
I've e-mailed 'Denis Nedry' the ROM SIMM dump.
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-16 15:33:14
Do you have ROM dumps somewhere? YES, good question - because we could then pull the startup sound from the appropriate ROM dump so we could hear it!! I've never found a single recording or extraction of this sound on the internet.
Please share the ROM dumps if you have them!
Hi,
I've now dumped the ROM and can e-mail it, if send me a PM with your e-mail address.
James.
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Posted by: LCGuy on 2009-03-16 23:54:01
This is very cool...now with any luck, the maybe....5 other people who have Power Expresses will be able to get them up and running. People have been trying to get these things to boot for years. Very awesome. 🙂
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-17 02:36:05
This is very cool...now with any luck, the maybe....5 other people who have Power Expresses will be able to get them up and running. People have been trying to get these things to boot for years. Very awesome. 🙂 Yeah - if anyone knows whose the other people are - please make them aware of the latest developments!
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-17 02:37:02
If people would like to have a play around with the ROM files - I've made available the following:
* PEX ROM SIMM Dump
* Original OF 2.0a9 Flash Chips Dump
* Digibarn OF 2.3 Flash Chips Dump
* OF 2.3 Device Tree listing (from Digibarn's Flash chips)
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-17 03:10:48
I'm also borrowing from Digibarn the SCSI HD which were in their prototype - however they both don't work:
1 x Quantum Viking 3.5 series 455 68pin SCSI-2. Drive spins up but never becomes logically ready
1x Seagate Barracuda ST34371W 68pin SCSI-2. Drive spins up with lots of vibration but then cuts out.
Due to the way they were arranged in the case I suspect that the Quantum Viking would have been the boot disk, and the Seagate the additional HD.
I was thinking of getting a HD specialist (www.xytron.co.uk) to try and resurrect the system HD to see if there were any interesting files on this. I've found a reliable place that would charge £195 ($274.238) if data could be recovered.
Would anyone be prepared to chip in to enable this to happen?
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Posted by: jimjamyahauk on 2009-03-17 06:45:04
I thought I'd heard the unusual second boot sound the PEX makes - it's the same as the one that had been previously uncovered by Applefritter members: http://www.applefritter.com/node/3376
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-17 07:07:48
BOTH STARTUP SOUNDS are in the digibarn flash dump. The normal one and the one nobody has ever heard.
The original flash dump contains YET DIFFERENT startup sounds. The first one is the 6300 sound on the left channel with someone saying "I know that I rescued this company" on the right. The second one is someone saying "Kill me!" I'm working on figuring out exactly how to interleave these files together so I can then figure out exactly the attributes of the audio, after which I can extract some good samples for everyone to hear!
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-17 07:40:20
I believe you may not have dumped the Digibarn flash chips properly. It appears that in every single byte, bit 8 is stuck on. i.e. if you did "AND 0x10" to each byte.
Please tell me you haven't sent them back yet!
Note: The original flash chips do appear to be dumped properly, just not the Digibarn ones.
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-17 08:22:02
Here is an AIFF audio extraction from the original flash chips:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporary/OF_2.0a9.aif
And here is an extraction from the Digibarn chips:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~bold0070/temporary/Digibarn.aif
NOTE that the sound is problematic due to the stuck bit.
I believe that the interleave is configured as 4 bytes from even, 4 bytes from odd, 4 even, 4 odd, etc.
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Posted by: Dennis Nedry on 2009-03-17 10:08:36
I thought I'd heard the unusual second boot sound the PEX makes - it's the same as the one that had been previously uncovered by Applefritter members: http://www.applefritter.com/node/3376 Aha - I obviously had not read this post.
It appears that I have chosen an incorrect sample rate for the second PEX startup sound from Digibarn. It still would be interesting to extract the original sound directly from ROM if you are able to re-dump it.
Also of interest, it seems the PEX startup sound is cut short. I'm not sure where the rest of the samples are; maybe they just don't exist in this particular ROM. This is a prototype so it seems feasible that they may have cut it short. The only way to know for sure is to listen to the actual PEX starting up and compare to the sound that I extract.
Perhaps the ROM chips are larger than you calculated and you didn't get a complete dump?
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