!!!
Well, there goes my working MAME machine. Things were going well, with Windows 2000 having been installed so that I could use the win32 binary of a new version of MAME. I wanted to change the BIOS logo, so I first ran the BIOS updater from MSI to get the latest BIOS on there (the version I was going to add a new image to), and things just stopped.
The damned MSI bios updater has killed this board. The on-board diagnostic LEDs simply light as all red, which is (supposedly) indicative of a defective CPU. Bah.
Also, I’ve noticed that for the last few days the power at my house has been running at 59.9 MHz lately, not 60. I find that odd.
UPDATE: I just remembered that I had another one of these boards here, but a bad one. I just swapped BIOS chips and poof, things work again. Damned MSI.
I’m noticing a trend here, you have a spare of everything you own don’t you???
Heh. It’s useful sometimes.
This is actually because I had set up computers for both my parents and grandparents at the same time, both with the same board. My parents’ machine now has some new hardware in it, and this past summer I replaced my grandparents’ machine with an iMac.
I’d originally tried dropping the board from my parents machine in the cab, but one day it just stopped working, so I set the board aside and went back to a trusty old Abit BH6. Today I stuffed the board from my grandparents’ old machine in the cab, and when the BIOS went south I remembered the old board and just tried swapping them.
Next will be attempting to flash the failed BIOS back to a known-good firmware, but I’m not sure if I have the hardware to do that or not…
…power at my house has been running at 59.9 MHz lately, not 60. I find that odd.
It’s not terribly odd (assuming you meant Hertz, and not Megahertz). When the electrical load on the grid increases, the generators will bog down and the frequency will drop a bit. If the load decreases, the generators will speed up a little bit and you might see 60.1 Hz.
I’ve been into the Detroit Edison operations center, and one of the largest displays they had at the time was for monitoring the frequency on the lines.