Thecus N3200PRO Hardware Hacking

Using the on-board VGA output

The AMD Geode has an on-chip VGA controller that is connected to an IDC-10 connector on the motherboard, to the left of the CPU. It is relatively easy to build a custom cable to connect this port to a regular DB-15 VGA port. The IDC-10 connector pins are labelled on the board, with pin 2 being and bottom left pin, and pin 10 the topleft one (see image below). The following pinout seems to work enough for BIOS access and simple graphic modes.

4: RED, GREEN and BLUE GROUNDs
5: RED
6: SYNC GROUND
7: GREEN
8: VSYNC
9: BLUE
10: HSYNC

See also this image.

The on-board flash disk

It is possible to replace the on-board flash disk with a larger and faster model. However, keep in mind the following things:

• Be very careful when removing the flash disk, as careless forceful removal could break the pins of the board male connector.

• DO NOT try to access the flash disk using a regular external disk enclosure, unless you know what you're doing. The flash disk uses a standard 2.5" 44-pin IDE connector, as used by laptop hard disks. However, regular laptop disks have a male connector, while the flash disk uses a female connector. Do not try to use some gender changer to connect the flash disk, as the pins will be inverted and you may (and almost certainly will) damage it. Accessing these disks requires a special crossed cable that inverts the odd and even pins, such as this one.