[ale] Zapmedia Zapstation

Jay Finch horus at larp.com
Sun Aug 26 02:22:11 EDT 2007


I actually was one of the QA Testers for the Zapstation back in the day
(before I was laid off) - I seem to recall a bug in the kernel loading
process, but I am dredging my memory and not coming up with more than that.

Michael Hirsch & James would really be your best resources on this,
sadly.  I wish I could contribute more, but alas that was many years
(and 2 jobs) ago.

Sorry, and best of luck!  I loved the Zapstation and only wish I could
have gotten one of my own when I was laid off -- It was a great device,
imnsho. :)

Cheers!
Jay

aaron wrote:
> I believe Michael Hirsch still lurks on the list; I've CC'd this
> to the last known good address I had for him as well.
>
> Like James Kinney, he worked on code for the product. I know
> he was actively trying to get the code released as full OSS as
> recently as 2 years ago. He may be able to offer some advice
> if this hits his radar.
>
> peace
> aaron
>
> On Friday 24 August 2007 20:00, Brian Pitts wrote:
>   
>> James P. Kinney III wrote:
>>     
>>> Dead and gone with the dot com busts. If you hang a CD off the internal
>>> IDE connector you should be able to boot and load an OS (Linux only -
>>> please :)
>>>       
>> It has two ide channels, one with a black connector and one with a blue 
>> connector. When I got it, the hard drive was connected to the blue 
>> connector and the dvd drive was connected to the black connector. I 
>> placed an Ubuntu 6.06 cd in the dvd drive and got the the three 
>> behaviors listed below.
>>
>> 1) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
>> "please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again. 
>> After the second time, the monitor goes black except for a flashing 
>> cursor in the lower left. This occurs with if the hard drive is 
>> connected to the blue ide channel, i.e.
>>
>> a) blue: hdd, black: dvd
>> b) blue: hdd, black: n/a
>>
>> 2) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
>> "please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again, 
>> and again, and again, etc. This occurs if nothing is connected to the 
>> blue ide channel, i.e.
>>
>> c) blue: n/a, black: dvd
>> d) blue: n/a, black: hdd
>> e) blue: n/a, black: n/a
>>
>> 3) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
>> "please wait starting up." The lcd then displays "power down your 
>> zapstation" and the monitor displays a blinking cursor in the upper 
>> left. This occurs if the dvd drive is connected to the blue ide channel, 
>> i.e.
>>
>> f) blue: dvd, black:hdd
>> g) blue: dvd, black n/a
>>
>> Behavior #3 doesn't change if the drive is empty or has a different 
>> bootable cd. I've also tried booting from usb with no luck.
>>
>> I suppose my next step is to pull the drives out and test them in 
>> another system. Also, I'm worried that it might not recognize my usb 
>> keyboard, making my hit random keys and hope for BIOS setup attempts 
>> worthless, but since there are no ps/2 ports...
>>
>>     
>>> and make a multi-media box yourself with some MP3 jukebox code
>>> from freshmeat.
>>>       
>> That's my thought as well. If nothing else, I'm glad to have the case to 
>> stick another mini/micro motherboard in.
>>
>>     
>>> The built-in modem is/was a cheap hunk of crap that even
>>> with the custom driver was junk at best (1+MB kernel driver that crashed
>>> the system on unload - I did NOT write it just had to code around it).
>>>       
>> To think that only 6 years ago geeks actually had phone lines... I'm 
>> going to try to add a wireless card to the one pci slot, but I don't 
>> think the motherboard layout will make this easy.
>>
>> -Brian
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>>
>>     
>
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