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my "new" computer

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linuxlove

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Joined
Jan 11, 2009
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Location
Auburn, AL
Well, my dad brought home a computer he thought was dead. After drying it off, i checked all the calbes to make sure there wasn't water in them. only the floppy cable has water in it so i removed that and replaced the FDD, for good measure. Then, I started up the system and it came on like a charm! Odd thing is, it buzzes while counting RAM, dunno why it does that. It had an old 8GB drive in there and after fixing some problems in the BIOS, it booted right up. Of course, then the hard drive messed up... So then I popped in a network card, upgraded the RAM from 128MB to 256MB and put in a 10GB drive (60GB is over kill for a pentium based system, no?) and loaded Windows 2000 (seeing as Pwnux (linux) wouldn't load). So, here are the specs...

AMD K-6 (may replace it with an Intel Pentium)
256MB RAM
10GB HDD
Windows 2000

On the case, it says "ProSERIES" and "Tiger by SysteMAX". Anyone else encounter one of these systems before?
 
Systemax is still around with several subsidiaries such as Tiger Direct, CompUSA and they bought the Circuit City name. They got started in 1995 so you probably have one of their early machines from the beginning before they bought the other companies.
 
linuxlove, run CPUZ from www.cpuid.com ...... it'll give you detailed info on the processor, then go to google and see if it's the "little foot" core.
 
lol.. that's always a trip to see folks use internal code names for products. I worked there during those development days so yeah, the CEOs grand kids loved the movie "The Land Before Time" and hence the code names for all the current chips we were working on. Little foot being the K6, Chomper being K6-2, and Sharptooth being our badass super secret K6-III.

Then the secret I think I've let out of the bag enough times is the disappointing benchmarks of the K7-550/600 vs the K6-III 550/600. That's because the K6-III 550 was actually a prototype K7 before the stupid move to slot processors occurred. So if you're a collector look out for 'em .. and find me one ;-)

But yeah, keep the current proc in there. It's fine and on all my friends and my systems we were able to overclock them 2 steps and be stable vs Intel we could only overclock one step, and cyrix none.
 
well, i ran CPUZ and it didn't tell me the CPU code name. Are there any markings on the chip itself i should look for? the clock speed is 233MHz...
EDIT: Popped off the heatsink/fan assemply, compared the metal plate to the one on wikipedia and confirmed that this is a model 6 K6.
EDIT II: maybe this is a little foot? http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=579996
 
Last edited:
linuxlove said:
well, i ran CPUZ and it didn't tell me the CPU code name. Are there any markings on the chip itself i should look for? the clock speed is 233MHz...
EDIT: Popped off the heatsink/fan assemply, compared the metal plate to the one on wikipedia and confirmed that this is a model 6 K6.
EDIT II: maybe this is a little foot? http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=579996
Click to expand...

no i said get more detailed info with CPUZ and then google it
 
barythrin said:
lol.. that's always a trip to see folks use internal code names for products. I worked there during those development days so yeah, the CEOs grand kids loved the movie "The Land Before Time" and hence the code names for all the current chips we were working on. Little foot being the K6, Chomper being K6-2, and Sharptooth being our badass super secret K6-III.

Then the secret I think I've let out of the bag enough times is the disappointing benchmarks of the K7-550/600 vs the K6-III 550/600. That's because the K6-III 550 was actually a prototype K7 before the stupid move to slot processors occurred. So if you're a collector look out for 'em .. and find me one ;-)

But yeah, keep the current proc in there. It's fine and on all my friends and my systems we were able to overclock them 2 steps and be stable vs Intel we could only overclock one step, and cyrix none.
Click to expand...

oh man, tell me about it... cyrix and overclocking DO NOT MIX!!! they run pretty damn warm at their intended speeds even. i tried overclocking my 250 MHz MII one step and it worked for about 20 seconds.
 
<necromance>

I found out something very interesting about this computer.
When there's nothing the computer can boot from, it brings up this error message in lovely 40 columns:

NO ROM BASIC
System Halted

Interesting how this system supports ROM BASIC...
 
Starshadow said:
I ran into that error a few times. I don't think its talking about IBM Basic though.
Click to expand...

Well, in a way, it is. Entry to ROM BASIC, whether it's PC Microsoft BASIC or something else is done via INT 18H (and has ever been that way since the 5150). Most BIOS makers simply plug the interrupt to a little routine that gives this message. The default action is that if the INT 19H boot loader fails to find a bootable device, then control is given to INT 18H.

Boot XP, open a command prompt box and use DEBUG to issue an INT 18--Windows will respond with "NTVDM does not support a ROM BASIC. Choose 'Close' terminate the application."

Yup, humble 5150 cassette BASIC lives on...
 
Code: 
C:\>debug
-a100
13F1:0100 int 18
13F1:0102 int 3
13F1:0103
-g=100

AX=0000  BX=0000  CX=0000  DX=0000  SP=FFEE  BP=0000  SI=0000  DI=0000
DS=13F1  ES=13F1  SS=13F1  CS=13F1  IP=0102   NV UP EI PL NZ NA PO NC
13F1:0102 CC            INT     3
-q

C:\>

In between the "g=100" and the register display, XP brought up the "ROM BASIC is not supported" message.
 
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