Newb with Bridgeport BMDC/motherboard issues

[ralph@nes]

Hello! I'm totally new and close to totally lost.

My shop has four Bridgeport/ROMI EZ-Path lathes. We've had motherboard issues before and I've successfully replaced them, but this latest one is beguiling me.

First, the machine is a Path II which came with a Cyrix 486DX2-66 processor on an older Vesa deep green board. Everything was peachy until I lost display; tried a new video card to no avail, and came to the conclusion the motherboard was needing replaced. Located a similar older board on ebay, tried it, but that board had its' own issues and wouldn't recognize the drives thru the IDE adapter card.

Ended up with a newer board; brand new leftover with a celeron 500 and 32mb of RAM. PCI video card and the BMDC in an ISA slot and all the other stuff--IDE, etc, on board. Machine boots and loads the EZ Path software just fine, even runs the machine just fine--but I've lost realtime feedback from the BMDC board! The tool position only updates when a key is pressed on the keyboard rather than a constant feedback as the machine is running and I can't have that! The bmdc apparently is giving the position info, as soon as I touch a key on the kb it will update the position info, but ONLY when a key is pressed!

This is a known good bmdc card that checks out fine on the other machines. The problem, I'm assuming, is something to do with the way the newer board reads the ISA slot or perhaps a conflict in hardware. Does anyone have any ideas on this? I've got so much time tied up in this right now I'd like to be able to either make it work or scrap the project and call in an expert. Any input it appreciated!

Cliffs Notes: new motherboard, bmdc card is controlling machine correctly but not giving realtime tool position info; tool position updates when the user presses a keyboard key; bmdc board is known good and works on other machines.

[NC Cams]

Dump the Celeron - way too fast and too new of a techology to work with the BMDC.

The BMDC will NOT run on a PC motherboard that is faster or newer than a Pentium 133mhz. Just about anything SLOWER should run just fine.

Forget adapter cards or other ginger bread. Find a simple motheboard with ISA sockets and this should get you back up and running.

WHile you're at it, get several as computers of this vintage are NOT easy to find. Fortunately, they're dirt cheap but a PITA to locate.

You may also have a chipset issue. SOme DOS software and programs (BMDC is DOS based), are sensitive to the chipset used by the OEM to link the processor to the rest of the world. Keep in mind that the BMDC was created BEFORE the PCI standard evolved. It would not surprise me if a PCI interface MIGHT not be friendly with the BMDC software.

Revert back to a Pentium 133 or lower motherboard, with ISA slots, and you should be back in touch with real time operation.

[ralph@nes]

OK will try that. I just got a pile of AT 486 mb's from a friend, with a little luck maybe one of them with the original cyrix will work out.

[ralph@nes]

Ended up using a 486 board with my original processor and on-board IDE and all is well. Thanks for the input, guys.