What's new
By:
Filters

Flaky Lindberg Yellow Multi - games sometimes crash on start

notsonic

notsonic

Champion
Joined
Oct 23, 2019
Messages
1,011
Reaction score
1,252
Location
NJ
I have a Lindbergh Yellow with a multi. The menu says it's v9.60 by J&J. Searching for Lindbergh multis just seems to dig up a lot of drama and butthurt rather than useful information so I'd rather avoid any of that.

When I first got it it wouldn't post at all. It got really banged up in shipping. I had to reseat the CPU to get it to post. Initially the video card was bad. I tested with a GeForce 4 to get it to boot, and then a 6800 got games running ok at 640x480. I've since replaced it with an ebay china special 7800.

I'm using a modern ATX power supply. I've tried a cheap 300 watt and an EVGA 750 watt. The cheap ones specs meet the original PSU. I've got CPU, HDD, and GPU hooked directly to the PSU and the ATX connector to the external connector. I've found I get more instability if I only use the ATX connector.

Even still, I have a lot of problems getting VF5 Final Showdown to start. It seems to crash when it tries to initialize X after loading the GPU driver.

I'm not sure if this is hardware, software, or power related. Any ideas?

View: https://youtu.be/C1rEz5cTifk
 
Maybe bad RAM? GPU not getting initialized properly?

I know the Lindbergh i worked on from a Rambo refused to boot anything, telling me the JVS board was bad all the time.
But swapping the Lindbergh completely fixed the issue once the owner went multi on it.

But i would wager bad RAM honestly, i've seen Pump it Up streams on Twitch where the game would lock up because of bad RAM in the MK6.
And this kinda looks like what i've seen on the bad Lindbergh running a multi, game would boot and get stuck on that same screen
 
I had VF5 Final Showdown running for a few hours yesterday with no issues (once it finally booted that is). I turned it on this afternoon and it crashed on start like in my video again.

I swapped the ram and it still crashed. I reset the cmos and then it worked.

I noticed on the cmos reset screen that the bios and vbios are shadowed in ram. I'm not too familiar with how and when its written, but I wonder if a low battery would cause issues, unless the shadow copy is made on every boot then it wouldn't really matter.

Either way I've got it running on the new ram right now. I'm using 4x256mb sticks instead of 2x512mb, it's all I had on hand. After its on for a while I'll let it cool down and see if it still has problems on cold boots.
 
I have a Hotd4 Lindbergh that used to crash at random times, noticed that 5v was reported around 4.7 on the bios menu, once I calibrated this to 5V the game hasn’t crashed in a few months.

Also regarding the Lindymulti info it would be ideal to have a single point of reference for info on the matter.
 
What power supply are you using?

I noticed that the 12v on my cheap 300w pc power supply would drop to 11.9v while initializing the gpu driver, which I assume is a possible cause for crashing. A lot of common knowledge suggests you only need to hook up the one external connector to power everything but I think this is pretty bad advice. Connecting the CPU, HDD, and GPU directly to the power supply (or through the 18 pin connector) is really the right way to do it.

I ran VF5 FS again for a few hours and it still never crashes once started. I powered it off and let it sit for 30 mins. Tried loading VF5 FS again, crashed the first time the GPU driver loaded. Rebooted and it worked.

It really would be nice if the multi information was more available. I feel like this is a software issue at this point but I don't really know where to begin.
 
I've also got a J&J multi (I think it's a newer rev though) and do not have any of these crashing issues.

I would second that there could be power issues. usually random crashes on PC hardware are either unclean power or failing power caps on the mobo.

I'm using an official Lindbergh PSU which has adjustable 5V and 3.3V
 
I wonder if it's worth hunting down an original PSU to rule that out. I don't believe that a modern ATX psu with double the ratings (even on 5v) can't power something from this era. From what I've read the 7800 draws mostly from 12v too, so it shouldnt be an issue like with older pc hardware and modern psus.

I thought it was at least working second time every time, but no, it's not. I'm going to try letting it "warm up" next.

I've also got new ram and batteries on the way.

I'd really like to reimage the drive to rule that out but I haven't been successful finding anything. Googling for "lindbergh j&j multi" only brings up this thread.
 
The forum that multi was originally sold on has been offline for a number of years, and likely the only other place it was ever listed was ebay, so not surprising that it's been nearly completely erased from the internet.
 
I finally put some effort into reading a French thread about the multi. It looks like everything is on archive.org if you try hard enough. I'll try rewriting the CF and HDD and report back.
 
HDD should be a straight re-image

IIRC I switched from a magnetic drive to an SSD by simply imaging and redumping it... CF card may have some additional protections on it tied to the Card ID though. (I could be wrong about this but I recall there being other things involved)
 
notsonic said:
I finally put some effort into reading a French thread about the multi. It looks like everything is on archive.org if you try hard enough. I'll try rewriting the CF and HDD and report back.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah the Crediar multi, i know exactly which thread you're talking about.
 
I have good news and bad news.

The good news is I replaced the two batteries, CF card, and SSD. I was able to recreate the entirety of the CF card and SSD with stuff on archive.org except for `vf5c_rom.dat` which was on my original SSD but not on archive.org that I could find. I get less errors about checking the filesystem, so there is something stateful about the contents of the CF or SSD.

The bad news is games, especially VF5FS still crash on start. I did find out something though. Games start reliably when using VGA. I think this is either because it picks a lower resolution or is having a problem with my modern monitor and a DVI->HDMI adapter. I suspect that either there's a hardware or software fault when trying to set the resolution that may or may not be related to the monitor EDID or some other shit like that.

Anyone know if there's a way to force a set resolution with the multi? I have all my dip switches set off like the readme in the multi recommends.


Also as an aside, one problem I have with this monitor (LG 32GP750-B) is it takes forever to turn on so it needs to be on before the Lindbergh is turned on or it'll never get a signal. I think this has to do with how you cant hot swap DVI A/D.

I still have ram coming but I don't think that'll change anything. I also just bought a consumer 7800 GT card to try out.
 
Oh shoot! Yeah you gotta use VGA, if the game and monitor supports it then its gonna run the HD version instead of VGA.

But once the game's up and running you can absolutely use a DVI to HDMI cable to capture gameplay
 
I got an active DVI to DP adapter, and now it seems to work every time. What a stupid fix.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077FYJTDL

I also modified my ATX psu adding an 18 pin connector for the Lindbergh's external CPU and GPU power connection. I know 5V and 12V are tied together on the filter board and you can get away with an over specced psu and just the ATX connector, but this just feels like the right way to do it.

connector:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/molex/0039012180/276134

pins:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/molex/0039000038/413211
 
But now its booting up games reliably or some games are still crashing when you boot them up?
 
It's working reliably with the dvi->dp adapter. I haven't seen a game crash with that or VGA.
 
Interesting. So games can crash if the monitor doesn't responds with the EDID request quickly enough.

I'm guessing its that way so that if a game is left running but the monitor fails, it doesn't put unneeded strain on the GPU if the game can't be played
 
I think it's probably less intentional than that. I suspect it's just shitty old nvidia linux drivers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top