Re: 486 Motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 14:12

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For ease of use I recommend a PCI based board with an UM888x or SiS49x chipset. The boards I found good were the LuckyStar LS486E and the GA-486AM/S. A great board but more finicky is the Shuttle HOT433 which was even slightly faster then the GA-486 AM/S. I had one 4DPS which was nice but would not …

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Re: Bought 2 motherboards, both do exactly the same (nothing)

Posted on Yesterday, 14:03

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Connect a speaker & use a diagnose card.

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Re: Arrived ISA 8 bit RTVGA boards

Posted on 2020-02-19, 12:27

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Awesome work!

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Re: Green thinking still companies change computers every 3 years.

Posted on 2020-02-19, 12:24

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

At the end of the day everything's business - most likely "global warming" too.

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Re: Testing of SRAM cache chips

Posted on 2020-02-14, 11:58

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How many valid writes in a row would it take to deem the sram capable of running at a certain speed - is there an industry standard describing required functionality?

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Re: To find the right projects and retro computers AKA what should I build or focus on? (486,Pentium 1-4?)

Posted on 2020-02-14, 10:13

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You're pretty much set with a socket5/7 board for older stuff unless you want a really slow machine in which case you can turn off the chaches and see if this yields the "performance" you want. Concerning the more modern 2D cards - always go for the one with the best picture quality. For me …

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Re: My cool 486 EISA tower

Posted on 2020-02-13, 16:08

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by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Nice looking tower and classic company - great memories. I remember Escom being critizised in the magazines for glueing some of the components to the chassis.

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Re: Shuttle HOT-613 (Single vs Dual - Pentium Pro)

Posted on 2020-02-13, 10:14

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Looking forward to an update - very interesting!

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Re: Converting an SB-AWE-64 into an AWE-64-Gold ?

Posted on 2020-02-13, 09:09

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Most likely not worth it unless you're very skilled and it's a labor of love. The RCA connectors on the Gold are super neat but I was pretty pissed when I wanted to test the card for the first time and had to patch together a RCA -> "mini-jack" cable.

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Re: 486 Multimedia dream build ( 1993/94 ).

Posted on 2020-02-12, 14:52

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

One swell system - the ram prices of yesteryear were something to behold. I remember cruising along with 8MiB in 1995.

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2020-02-11, 16:56

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

yawetaG wrote on 2020-02-11, 06:37: At least most older hardware is usually build to last, completely opposite today's "planned obsolescence" (whether it is by design like a lot of IoT products or by using the cheapest production option possible in terms of quality). The dire truth regarding many …

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Re: Advice on making a stable VLB build

Posted on 2020-02-11, 16:55

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The card I had success with at 50mhz and 0 waitstates was an AvanceLogic / ALG2228 on an GA-486VS.

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Re: Upgrading Socket 4 L2 cache to 2048k (ECS SI5PI MB)

Posted on 2020-02-11, 15:34

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That's awesome - I have the same board. The upgrade to 2MiB cache will be an interesting project. I use 16KiB 12ns tags for my board and 32KiB srams for the banks resulting in 0.5MiB - all BIOS settings max'd out.

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Re: Is ST486DX2-80GS cpu a cyrix cpu?

Posted on 2020-02-11, 15:21

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I remember it being a hair slower than the i486 in non fpu based apps. They were able to outperform i486 and am486 regarding memory transfers though.

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Re: My Amigas

Posted on 2020-02-11, 14:43

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

The black one looks awesome. The modern cards available are pretty impressive - guess with the superclocked versions the Doom / Quake ports start making sense.

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Re: The Budget 1997 MS-DOS & OS/2 Warp (and now Linux) PC.

Posted on 2020-02-11, 14:40

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by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

What modules can be connected to the wavetable header? The K5 is fantastic cpu - really liked it when playing Doom.

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Re: Sound Blaster 128 and SBLive

Posted on 2020-02-11, 14:29

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As already stated - the card needs drivers to work. I used various SB Live cards before getting some AWEs. I think they worked great but were too much in the 486 machines... there was stutter due to the PCI bus which did not occur even on the slowest Pentium platform. I only used a SB128 based card …

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Re: Pentium 66 MHz vs 75 MHz shoot out (on a level field)

Posted on 2020-02-09, 11:56

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

From where did you get the info about the word transfers and could you eplain what "finalising the framebuffer" means? By "finalising" I mean the blit operation where you copy the contents from one of RAM framebuffers where the image is prepared into the VRAM framebuffer to be displayed on the …

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Re: Pentium 66 MHz vs 75 MHz shoot out (on a level field)

Posted on 2020-02-08, 12:27

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Doom, Blood and Duke3D score will scale with overclocked PCI bus. In fact, Doom has huge bus speed dependency, but the Build engine dependency is less pronounced. It's because DOOM is quite inefficient when finalising the framebuffer to VGA. It is doing 16bit transfers instead of 32bit which would …

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Re: Ambra (IBM) 486SLC slimline desktop "restoration"

Posted on 2020-02-07, 17:11

by

by amadeus777999

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Well done - beautiful system!

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