What's been happening you say?
Well, Get yourself a beverage of your choice, perhaps put some Kraftwerk on whichever music medium you use for aural excitement, and let's begin..........
Last time I covered a bit of history of the NeXT Cube, and its influence on the web, and Apple.
I've been soaking up more information as I've come across it, and as mentioned in the last post, I'm broke this month and desperately awaiting payday!
I got in contact with Rob Blessin of Blackhole Inc directly, and we had a discussion on upgrade parts for the cube (hence why I'm now broke!), but there is now a lot more story to tell with trials and tribulations expected of retro obsolete hardware.
It's a good thing I have a lot of patience, and have done a lot of work previously one my number one favourite hobby the Commodore Amiga, which also uses Motorola chips, so the NeXT is kind of a similar hardware platform in a way.
The original spec of the cube I have is as follows:
68040 CPU @ 25Mhz
8MB RAM
600MB SCSI Winchester HDD
2.5MB Floppy drive.
OS 2.2
Since speaking to Rob, I managed to acquire the following upgrade parts:
32MB in 4MB SIMMs
Slot loading SCSI CD-ROM drive
New factory sealed floppy drive
NeXT Step OS 3.3 upgrade kit
SCSI2SD adapter with 4GB SD *
* A fantastic new product on the market from Michael McMaster, that has an old school 50pin SCSI connector on the board one side, and a micro SD on the other (dark magic happens in the middle to allow you to use the micro SD as your HDD).
Onwards to upgrade-vile.......
Right, I said more pictures less talky and I've not done very well so far! So, I'll start that now.
Just one last thing, I mentioned customs being snail paced, well glacial paced really, I ordered the parts and they were sent the next day from Colorado, it took them 4 days to pass through the US postal services and outgoing customs, and then arrive in the UK, pretty damn quick!
However, they managed to wait an infuriating 8 days in the UK customs before I got them! Grr.
Here's the upgrade parts:
Minty fresh floppy drive.
8 x 4MB (32MB) 30 pin SIMMs.
NeXT OS 3.3 Upgrade kit.
Slot loading SCSI CD-ROM.
Super duper SCSI2SD adapter.
Right, best get to work...
The power supply was a bit noisy, I expected that this was caused by dust buildup on the fan, I was right.
This took a whole 2 screws to get out! Yet another hat tip to the designer.
The other side of the PSU
Winchester
While we're at it, let's see what an empty cube looks like inside:
How a Borg see's the world
After a little research, I found that I needed to make sure I had at least a 2.4 v65 ROM, and as luck would have it, I did. (I will probably update this to 2.4 v66 at some point)
A la ROM
Time for the RAM upgrade methinks, lets crack on.
Before the RAM
Aaaaand after.
Alrighty then, that should provide me with a nice boost to 40MB in total W00T!!!
Ok, so I've increased the RAM, let's power it up and feel that warm fuzzy feeling that more RAM can provide.
Power, ON
Ohes Noes :(
It didn't boot, there must be a RAM issue.
Damnit, these things are never simple are they? well at least they weren't before we had plug and pray.
So what to do?
Why Google of course......
Hmm, not a lot of useful information there, let's try taking out the BIOS battery (well it's not really a BIOS, but it's easier to get the concept over this way)
Reset BIOS, Reboot.......
More oh noes.
Hmm I've had a problem similar to this on one of my Amiga memory upgrades, Now what did I do to fix it, and will the same thing work in this scenario???
Coming up
Join me next time when I attempt fire magic and incantations to resurrect the non working cube.
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