Nucore is everything I was hoping for!

CHUCK!!!

You have made me very happy. I see now that most of the info for
Nucore has been from the perspective of a group marketing a commercial
product. I understand why you have presented these ways to build your
platform.

I, however am a hardware hacker. If it blows up in my face, well it
was probably just a bunch of cobbled together junk parts anyways. I
have built lots of mame cabs using linux and advance mame that boot
through a vga screen until the video TSR loads on a cga monitor. In 4
or so years, I haven't had a monitor problem. I have used K4600, K4900,
GO7 and newer Wells. So using FB in linux will be the way to go.
Obviously you can't tell people to do this. A lot of the newer computer
based arcade games do this.

The original case will be easy to mod to take a Micro ATX board, just
have to cut a rectangle for the port cover and maybe cut out and replace
a standoff or 2. Piece of cake. Case modding is fun.

Yes I understand that the sound card is in the Prism, I was referring to
the sound (?)amp board that is in the corner of the case and has the
molex plug on the outside. It seems to me you deal with technical
people who are very specific about terms. I work for people who operate
games and count quarters. I pull the entire computer case and tell them
I have to fix the board ;)

So I solder a stero mini jack to the sound amp and plug it in to my
onboard sound. Beautiful.

Hopefully your custom board has no surface mount components so I can fix
it if it pukes.

I cobble this all together, load up the software and RFM is back on the
route, making my paycheck.


I understand all about the failing Cyrix motherboard/chip combo.
Replacing all the blown up caps on those boards is a pain. I bet there
were some WMS bean counters laughing their asses off buying these crap
boards for pennies and knowing if the platform was successful, everyone
would have to buy a new cpu in a year or 2!

I already have a linux platform in a mamecab. I am thinking I could use
a front end and launch mame in the pin cab. With a minipac interface, I
have 4 buttons and a start button to play with. Space Invaders in RFM,
Yeah.

Bill

BTW Can I have my spare CPU case back? It has a date with a dremel.




If you system works fine and you see no value in the enhancements
maybe it's not for you. Let me clarify some of the things you said:

"requires me to modify the mounting hardware" - There is no
requirement to modify anything.

" does not interface with the existing sound system." - It will
interface into the existing sound system in two ways. One, if you buy
the audio amp your existing speakers and wiring will plug right into
that amp. Two, if you want to hack your existing amp you can solder a
cable to the original board and plug it into the computer.

"I was hoping to be able to fit a micro atx board in the existing
case" - The original case is not at, atx, or btx compatible. If you
wanted to put a micro atx board in you could certainly hack something
but I wouldn't recommend it.

"interface to the original sound card" - you realize the original
sound card is the prism board right?

" Why do I need to buy a Arcade vga? I can use FB in linux to run a
mame cabinet with a full GUI on a cga monitor." - You don't. You
could go this route and that's what I did for 1/2 year. The problem
is that this solution does not work during bootup or loading. If you
have the vga connected to the original monitor you risk blowing a
number of components on it. If you want to go this route you could
wait until the system boots and plug the vga cable in when it's
booted. Just make sure to unplug it before you restart it the next
time.

"What happens in 10 years if this custom board craps out? Am I in the
same boat as needing a Prism today?" - Our board uses off-the-shelf
components (see no custom asics) and really provides one main
function. Going forward it will be very easy to replicate the boards
functionality with newer parts. This is assuming the old parts are
available.

"I don't want to sound negative, but I just want to fix the computer
problem" - I'm glad you asked these questions so I could clear up the
confusion. The computer problems is not just one problem , there are
many problems. The cyrix cpu is no longer made and never will be
again. The motherboard used a custom chipset just for the cyrix (no
replacement.) The prism obviously. So assuming Joe public needs to
find a computer (many people have machines with no computers at all)
how much do you need to spend to buy one? Can you even find it? What
happens if lightning hits your house and takes out the prism card and
motherboard? Our total solution (with all options) is prices less
than I've seem the computers sell for on ebay when they are rarely
available. Again, this is assuming you see zero value in any of the
additions.


--
Bill


.

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