Turn an Ultra66 into a FastTrack66 ???

[techman2]

Just checked price watch and saw the Ultra 66 for as little as 27 bucks... Is there a revision of it that I should be looking for or is any promise ultra 66 going to do the trick?

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Techman2 Dual Celery 366@458 marvel g400 64 meg 20 gig scsi CDR and 5 disk changer sb16 audio win 98 and win 2k

[Askalon]

This is great! But I am a newbie to soldering and was wondeing where the best place to get the tools are at?

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Clayton

[Bear]

All prices Cdn.
15w Soldering Iron - Radio Shack $7.99
Magnifying Glass - Drug Store $2.00
32 pin EPROM Socket - 5 for $2.99
Solder vacuum - Radio Shack $9.99
Solder Clean Flux Cored Wire - $1.99
Vice/clamp to hold Mag. Glass
Medical Tweezers to hold/move SMD-resistor
Plus...
A couple of glasses of wine to steady your solder hand!

[rbb]

For pictures of the operation and text (in English (?) try http://www.nrw-online.de/~darmon/promeng.html I would not solder the chip back in and instead use a socket...

What is more interesting is a thread in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage titled promise ultra66 to fasttrack66. A Hiroyuki Hikita wrote: "You don't have to remove the ROM. First Flash it with the new BIOS, solder a jumper wire on the ROM from PIN 16 to 23. And volla.... " Does anyone know anything about this? It sure seems a lot easier than the chip removal route.

RBB

[Askalon]

I had seen that someone else had done this jumper wire techique and it did not work ... here is the thread link if you wish to read it <a target=new href="http://anandforums.gisystech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=40&threadid=124751">http://anandforums.gisystech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=40&threadid=124751</a> its on the fourth page of posts i believe.

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Clayton

[Patrick]

Wow, the fellas at that forum really went for this conversion big time!

[Askalon]

oh yeah! When you can save anywhere from 100~200 dollars, its a big deal.

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Clayton

[rbb]

If you take another look at the Anandtech thread, the latest is to "place an 100 ohm resister between pin 23 and pin 16 of the bios rom, " Still have not seen anyone verify this. I found some links showing it, but I have no clue what they were saying since they were in Japanese

RBB

[Askalon]

Kool that was one of my suggestions, figured that it had to be something like that since the original method used a resistor

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Clayton

[arklab2]

Gee, what a great idea ... esp. since I still have a Ultra66 OEM in the bubble wrap
I like the idea of a switch, too.
But I just had a thought (my annual allowance).
Why not (at least at first) just solder the 100 Ohms resistor to a pair of test probes (or even allagator clips), and clip it on. Anything goes wrong, no marks left on the board and warantee still OK.
Maybe I should feel guilty about that, but then I haven't been charging five times more for the same hardware!
Any thoughts to this (the clips, not the "guilt trip" thing!) ?
Lets here more results and ideas, too.

[Elie]

Hmmmmm, very interesting thread

Now I have a spare FT33 doing nothing at this point, so how would one convert it to a FT 66?
I guess it's a bios thing the cicuitry should be the same no???

Regards,
Elie

[Askalon]

Ah Ha! Here is another, more simpler than the original, mod for the Ultra to Fasttrack method. Simply solder a 100 ohm resister from pin 23 to the ground screw. All pin 16 is is the ground anyways. see a picture <a target=new href="http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~niwaka/images/ok66kai.jpg">here</a> about what I am talking about.