01/05/07

Disaster Strikes:

It was a good run, but for reasons beyond me, my IIcx decided to give me the finger. For awhile it had the issue where it wouldn't shut down. If you tried to power it off, it sprang right back to life. And yes, the power button on the back was *not* in the server position. But that wasn't too big of a deal - I just left it on, and if it had to be powered down, I simply unplugged it.

Unfortunately, it got worse, and now whenever it's plugged in it just cycles between on and off about twice a second or so. Sometimes it'll 'catch' and turn on, but it got worse and worse to the point where I can't get it to stay on anymore. I did everything I could think of, and because I had a working IIci, I could swap out all the components until I narrowed it down to the motherboard itself. I even disassembled the power button to see if that was the problem, but to no avail.

Since I don't have enough time to procure another IIcx motherboard, I'm gonna cut bait and use a backup system for the warmup challenge. I have both a IIsi and a IIci, and decided on the IIsi as the replacement. It's newer than the IIci of course, which this being a retro contest isn't A Good Thing, but it's closer to the IIcx in performance. The IIsi, like the IIci, is capable of System 6.0.8, so it was a simple matter of dropping the IIcx hard drive into the IIsi, and I was off and running.

My IIsi has 17 megs of RAM - 1MB on the motherboard and another 16MB via 4 4MB 30-pin SIMMs. Of course System 6 will only recognize 8MB of this, although I'm thinking of using Maxima to create a 9MB RAM disk. In the meantime though the computer acts exactly as the IIcx did. It's got the same hard drive, so disk performance is identical, and according to my benchmarks, the onboard graphics are pretty much the same speed as the IIcx's 8-bit Toby card. The processor and FPU are a little faster, but not enough to notice, at least with the stuff I do.

So I'm now running a IIsi, but in actual use it doesn't feel any different than the IIcx. I'm bummed about my bad luck, but in reality it doesn't change much with regard to the warm-up challenge.