I once bought a Nagasaki MS-2100 'brick'PC.
( Search google on openbrick
)
It is an
18cm by 12cm by 4cm complete PC - Mine without the TV-out though, it has an extra serial port.
Never got it working OK, it had problems starting up, and I finally gave up and stored it in the cupboard
During my recent spring cleaning I wanted to throw it out. Then gave it one, last, hard look. And noticed three swollen electrolytic condensators.
In a last hopeful attempt I grabbed one of my 'decoration' broken motherboards from the wall, unsoldered three similar condensators, replaced the ones in the openbrick... YES, BINGO.
Finally, after three years or so, a working brick PC. It works well on an old 5V 2A supply from an ancient USB hub.
2nd life for my, born again openbrick.
And then I broke it again when flashing a wrong BIOS...
.
After a search on the internet I located Uniflash, a freeware program to burn almost any BIOS.
Now it works like this: You boot any other motherboard in plain MS-DOS. While live, flip out the old BIOS, push in the
replacement BIOS chip, preferably without shorting out any connection on the board..., and flash.
results:
Motherboard 1: Failure due to undocumented bios hardware protection.
Motherboard 2,3,4 : Failure due to ditto.
etc. etc. etc.
ready to give up again, I realised a still have my hacked Capio II Thin client laying around
(Now an MS-DOS/Linux box thanks to my capability of reflashing DiskOnChip's
)
Now this a a 'scary event' as the thing has NO cover on it's internal power supply, e.g.: Open to the mains.
Trusting a
) my steady hand b
) my luck , and
especially my c
) ground fault interrupter
I loaded Uniflash from a USB stick onto the Capio's DiskOnChip, opened it up. Booted, veerryy carefully removed the BIOS chip, replaced it with another BIOS chip. Attempted reflash - no good. Read the instructions.
Attempted reflash with bootblock replacement.
Finally.
3rd life for my brick.
A hackers life.. Maybe I should grow up someday
( Nearing my 58'th birthday now
)
Edited by michelbel 2009-03-30 2:26 AM
no, don't stop, no need to grow up ever. 
