Always one step short... I/O board Help?

[Darien]

Browsing around and I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for...  Sorry if it was mentioned elsewhere. 

Sob Story:

I've got arcade and pinball down but I'm a total noob at Megatouch.   I bought a ... 5 (6?) off Craig's list a few years ago for my mother.  Single board Classic cabinet. Easy.   Well since then she's been begging me for a better setup.  I ended up reusing her classic cabinet/touchscreen with an itx,  a vga crt, and windows/Simpletouch.  In the meantime I thought peice by piece I could make up some kind of Authentic since they seem to be so expensive at auctions.  So  I've got a legit cabinet, a legit key, a legit enough HD, an I/O... So, I'm no pirate! if merit still has employees to spy...


Well, today I had some vacation so I thought I'd try to put it all together but I'm still coming up short. ...

I've got:
A "2005" key (SA3083-09 R00)
The square I/O board
a black and a white touch controller.
a motherboard with an i810 video chipset

I bootup to a "MAXX" screen no matter which controller is plugged in. and then get a message that I have an "Invalid Key  for PG3002-01 V15.02 !!!"  I get the same notice without the IO board plugged in at all.  Should there be more wires to it than the USB cable? (J6 looks like it might take power.)

  I have the USB in J5A, Jp5 & 6 are towards it. JP1 is shorted. The tech manuals don't seem to describe the other pins (possibly because I should have a self-explainatory wiring harness to plug in)

[Darien]

Booting the hard drive: USB Video Sound and network pass ....  I do get two failures. One for "health sensors" and one about error opening mixer.

Tried burning the 2005.5  (which says it's 15.10) software to CD to see if I could reload the drive (maybe 2005.5 ISN'T on here?) but after I tap "Yes, I agree" (so the controller works, obviously) it ejects the tray and gives me  'Error detected (#-514) Please reboot to perform entire upgrade again."  I've tried burning three times. The drive is on secondary master IDE.... Am I missing something there... perhaps despite their size they should be on DVD (since that's what merit implies?)

[mahkeymike]

Wont work with just any "i810 chipset" Mobo. It will just keep reboot looping. The problem is your SuperIO is the wrong chip. And is the reason your seeing [FAILED] when the harddetect script is checking Health sensors to make sure its a ITE chip and trys to load the it87 driver module. I am guessing your Mobo has a intel smsc chip and needs the smsc47m1 driver module. You need to patch the harddetect script to load that module. Also the oss mixer Failure is your sound card "oss" (open sound system). Again, you need to patch a script to load the correct driver module.

And by the way, just because you have a legit IO board and key doesnt mean your no pirate matey. Merit considers you a pirate even if you bought the official mobo used in force from someone else like newegg. I dont agree with them, but its no wonder Merit went out of business and stopped all megatouch operations. Being too greedy has its disadvantages i suppose. Anyway....I need more details about your mobo to help you.

[Darien]

Ah, just who I was hoping would respond. Thanks.  I narrowed the board down (from my giant stack) based on something you said in a thread. I figured worst case scenario I buy an Asus TUW-LA off eBay ($20 with chip) and PM bug you for details.   

This is the ONE I found so far I already have with a compatible-ish video set... I was excited when I passed and it didn't say video unknown! apparently it's a lot pickier about video than network (always "passed").  Technically I'm past the reboot loop and sitting at the key screen  but I see what you're saying those are going to be I/O problems. 

I can find next to nothing on the motherboard  MS-6351 v1 because it's a really weird form factor out of an old slim case (MSI-6215 NetPC). Looking at the Manual for the whole PC: The chipsets are Intel 815E & Intel ICH2X 

So *looks around for black helicopter* patching the script... Throw it in another PC and edit the script to load different driver modules? I'll admit I haven't actually "looked" at the drive yet just tried booting it. 

Thanks again for your assistance,
Darien

[mahkeymike]

Im not sure why but the harddetect script looks for and i815 chipset even though they never used an i815 mobo for force. Basically it checks the pci bus for the ID of the chipset. In your case "Intel Corp.*82815" and if it matches its happy and passes. The problem is the north/south bridge chipset revision doesnt match during the booting of the main binary and it defaults to Maxx and now gives you invalid key because it wants a Maxx key and you have a force key. I have not done much peeking around in the 2005 software so i dont know exactly how to get around this. Its possible a 2005 maxx key would work with what you have but those keys are actually expensive on ebay and i would suggest you get a cheap ion key (they are cheap on ebay) and an asus A7N8X-LA  mobo (also cheap on ebay). You can use that square force IOboard so dont worry about that. You can also use the force touchscreen controller aswell.

[Darien]

Route A: Tripping my way through linux still hoping to find a solution involving the force stuff...  I loaded up a live linux cd.

Looking at sbin/Harddetect.sh on the (2005.5) drive.  It has lines for "video: i815" which loads the same module as "video: i810"  :Shrug: So it has modules for network eepro100... ac '97 sound... i815 video is loaded as i810.    Is there somewhere I could look and replace the IO module it loads?  and would the module go in usr/X11R6/lib/modules/?

Module.conf had sound as via82xx I thought about to changing it to ac97 but I looked at ac97.conf and it was just an alias back to the via conf....

RC5.d/s55setmodem is a shortcut to Setmodemsound in etc/init.d  ...Which only contains the line aumix -c50.   Commented out it doesn't stop me but that's burying my head in the sand.

If it's possible,  I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty to save ~$50 and use what I have. I'm just not sure what script I need to add to.


Route B: I could upgrade that easy? (Again, i'm new to the 'touch so forgive me)

The A7N8X-LA is an Nforce2, that's a drop in replacement on IONs. complete chipset compatibility.

An ION Key:  Let's say a ION 2006 (SA3505-01) ,  wouldn't need a "titan" I/O (#SA10068-01) or a secondary OSD?  It would work perfectly fine with my SA10055-01 Original Force I/O board from 2002. (which now that look is 2001-2003? according to Board ID.PDF)

...And I'll just format the drive with 2006.5 ION software.

Really, That easy?   


Out of curiosity what Force revision, did you get working with the ASUS LUW-LA (which has an SMSC LPC47M102?)?

[mahkeymike]

First. Route A: The problem is the software's main binary (not a script) has a check "/proc/pci"  that checks the hardware ID of the south/north bridge. Your mobo has a different revision number so it basicly is failing. There seems to be a bug in the software that defaults to Maxx. So at that point it thinks you are using a Maxx mobo, and expects to read a Maxx key. Theres no way around this for me because i have only peeked around with force 2008-2011.

Now. Route B: Yes the asus A7N8X-LA is a in a way, a direct replacement. The software thinks its one of the official boards. Its not, so one of the sensor modules loads incorrectly but this has no effect in how the software runs and is fine to use. And if it bothers you , all you have to do is edit the harddetect script to load the it87 module instead of the default winbond module.

I dont know about 2006 ion, but i know for fact 2008 and higher works with that asus a7n8x-la. I would have to peek at 2006 ion and see if theres modules for nforce4.