Hardware Overview

This MSN project comes in it's own handy box splattered with Propaganda. :) Here it is in all it's horror

From the outside this looks like a very plain jane box, It's dark grey with a light grey front bezel holding three lights, a red light for a mail waiting indicator, a yellow light indicating online status and a green light indicating Power status. The green "Power" light is a misnomer because the device doesn't actually have a power switch. Below that is a small speaker for various (annoying) sound effects.

Front and side panel of the device itself. A picture of the front head on.

The back of the unit has all the connectors, From top to bottom there is a 1/4 phono jack for speakers or headphones, a VGA-Out (800x600), a PS/2 port for the (included) keyboard, two USB ports (remember that arrow. I marked that for a good reason), a RJ-11 phone jack, and lastly a power port. Immediately I noticed that there is no network connection, virtually making this useless for anyone that has broadband. After all, the target audience for this device isn't someone that would have broadband in the first place ;p

On the inside, however is a diffrent story, for being a throwdown box this is pretty well stocked. It sports the National Semiconductor's .This link might not be the correct one for this processor.

Other things of note are there is a SuperIO Disk controller in here as well as a 16MB SanDisk ATAPI-compatible Disk on a Chip. Although SanDisk will not provide me with the pinouts of this chip (for developing my own IDE header) it shouldn't be too hard to get to the pinouts of the SuperIO controller and extract an IDE header of some sort. (this has yet to be done. If i can find a few more of these things in case of (ahem) screwups I might publish this as well.. :)) The motherboard also contains 32MB of RAM for the system, and also looks like it an support an additional SO-DIMM connector as well however the SO-DIMM socket is missing on my units. If anyone has added RAM to their units, please let me know!

There is also a modem in this unit that sits on a daughtercard off of the motherboard. This has a conexant chipset that if I recall correctly is not linux-friendly. If i am able to get Linux on this I will post my findings here.

The included mouse is a 3 button Scroll USB mouse that uses a generic PC mouse driver. I am not exactly positive on whether it takes a Microsoft Intellimouse driver or if it takes a Logitech driver however windows98-windowsXP support it just fine as is.

The keyboard is an impressive hackjob if I say so myself. Itlooks like a standard keyboard however there are a few things missing. The Number pad has been replaced with a "Post-it note" holder, the Function keys are marked various actions, email, Web, etc.. there is no ALT key and the Ins and Del keys are both AWOL as well, The Volume Up/Dn and Mute keys are the PrintScreen, Sroll Lock, and the Pause keys relabeled. This keyboard would be decent (kinda) to hand to someone that doesn't know too much about computers, after all, you can't reboot the machine by holding down Ctrl now can you?). I have also found out that the "Power key" is the hyphen "-" on the number pad which would leave me to believe that the green category keys at the top of the keyboard are also the various characters, (0-9 / * + and NumberPad Enter). I haven't tested this theory yet.

UPDATE! The keys aren't the numberpad like I had hoped. They reigister as a combination of various keys. I'll get a line anylizer after it in a little while.. :)

When you fire the box up, you are welcomed by the emachines splash screen, then again by the MSN Companion splash screen. After that you're taken straight into the software. The software section will be covered later. The reason why I mentioned this here is the emachines splash screen is what is of intrest to the hardware section. Hitting F2 rapidly while the splash screen is up will give you a BIOS screen where you can set up the hard drive and the boot order and things like that.

Special note! The Boot order listed in the BIOS does support booting from a zip drive, however it has to be an older self-powered zip100 drive. The newer bus-powered zip250's don't work nor do LS-120 USB drives. I have not attempted to use a USB-Floppy however due to the size constraint of a 1.4MB floppy this isn't the best avenue, unless you just want to see what's on the SanDisk.The Disk partitioning os also covered in the "Software" section.

Here are a couple images of parts I find interesting about thing. Perhaps there are uses for it yet.

1:	National Semiconductor SuperIO chip. PC97317. According to the docs this chip was DESIGNED for the Nat'l Semiconductor Geode chipset. I don't have the docs for it yet but I will soon.
2:	Winbond W49F002UP128 This is the EEPROM where the BIOS is suspected to be stored. This is typical for Award and AmIBIOS to store the BIOS on a small chip like this. The marks on the mainboard indicate that there was supposed to be a socket there.
3:	This is the modem header. The modem has a corresponding socket on it. I have not yet taken pictures of it yet.
4:	A SanDisk chip. Numbers are: 20-99-00022-3 // 0016EVA14 // SDCE I think this has something to do with the SanDisk on the back of the PCB.
5:	National Semiconductor CS-5530. This is the matching chipset for the Geode Processor. The link above is the correct one for this processor set.
6:	National Semiconductor Geode # GXLV-200B 2.2V 85C This is the heart of the whole box. It is a true 200MHz processor that is x86 compatible.
7:	These are solder pads that look like a full EEPROM and a RAM expansion slot should go here. Perhaps there is a way to upgrade the system's RAM in this setup?
8:	Audio jack 1/4 phono
9:	VGA connector. The whitepaper on the Geode says that this is capable of 1152x1024. I don't believe it however the MSN software only does 800x600
10:	the standard PS2 port and two USB ports NOTICE! The geode whitepaper states that these are USB-OHCI so compile your kernels accordingly.
11:	Modem Jack: removed for pictures. It's a black RJ11 that has a pair of wires going to the modem card (not shown yet).
12:	Power Jack

WARNING!There is a jumper a little south of the Geode chipset (#5) that is of great significance. You MUST short these two pins otherwise the emachines will not boot anything USB irregardless of the BIOS settings. and I promise never to use the blink tags again...