Questions About JVL Orion

[Brian74]

So I got a Orion from my local operator. It had a piece of tape on it that said junk, so I got it for free  Needless to say, after tinkering with it, I got it to work. So I have two questions, how to I get into the setup screen? There is a button behind the cash door and another one in the door behind the marquee. I have tried both, with no joy. My second questions is, what version of itouch can I upgrade too? It has itouch 7 in it now. Thanks for the help!

[lilshawn]

if your key is itouch 7, then 7 is all you can load. with a new key, you can get itouch 11 as the last one.

be aware, to run it (itouch 11) you have to upgrade the processor and ram to make it run proper. (i believe it was you needed at least an 800mhz processor and 128mb ram.) I have some notes someplace and i'll confirm it. The original processors are Cyrix CIII 650mhz... IIRC.

just cruise ebay for a new procesor.

[Brian74]

Thanks for chiming in. I still cant get into the setup. I wanna change it to free play.

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[lilshawn]

Thanks for chiming in. I still cant get into the setup. I wanna change it to free play.

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try pressing and holding the setup button while it boots, (quite a while) it should come up with a screen to do a restoration. give that a try and see if the button works after it boots.

if not, you may need to re-install. sometimes the installations get glitchy and all kinds of things go wrong.

also check the battery voltage on the IO board...a low or dying battery can cause all kinds of issues.

[Brian74]

So I found the rest button, here is a pic of the setup screen.

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[lilshawn]

looks pretty vanilla. 64mb ram, 600mhz processor. 128mb compact flash card.

if i recall correctly, and you can manage the space (not sure about the space for the computer in the orion... vortex and retros are a nightmare cramped in there) but you should be able to swap that processor out for a standard Pentium 3 processor. (socket 370 i believe it was) or as i mentioned before a cyrix (zia) 800 mhz processor. heck, you could probably slap a tualatin celeron in there and get her up to a gig and a half...

you'd need to install some kind of better cooling solution which may be difficult, but if you can hack something together, you'll definitely see an improvement. if they jammed the board in there, i'd stick with 800 or 900mhz tops with that stock cooler they supply you with in there.

as well as dropping some more ram in there. some nice 128mb 133mhz sdram (i believe that 64mb stick is 100mhz) I don't recall if it had 1 slot or 2.

[NoRefunds]

Be careful swapping memory on that board.  I hated those JP20 boards and sold every Vortex that had them.  I don't know if they did the Orions like the Vortex, but on the Vortex that JP20 has hot glue applied on the memory stick.  Brilliant.  As the machine sits there and cooks the glue seems to get way down in those pins and if you looked at it wrong those pins stop making contact with the memory.  A nightmare to fix.   Many weren't fixed.  Only other trouble I remember with those are bad caps everywhere and loss of audio due to failing caps as well.  JP30 seem better, for now at least.

JVL's are a different animal.  I/O board problems can shut you down, low batteries on I/O, low battery on main board, etc. I've even had to install itouch9 software with an itouch10 key, then re-install the itouch10(I think I remember that right) to fix a Vortex once.   
 
Get more cooling on there as lilshawn said.

Not sure how far you can update.  As stated earlier you can probably go to the 11 with just a few tweaks. 

For a real treat call JVL tech support.    Do it with a cheap flip phone as you'll be throwing it against the wall in no time. 

[Brian74]

Thanks guys!

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