That brown slot between ISA and PCI is definitely not VESA. It looks to be an EISA slot but what would that be doing on a cost cutting budget board?

Also, that board was probably manufactured sometime in 1995 or 1996. While, with my rather prudish preferences, would use an Intel DX4 with the board, you might be able to have quite a bit of fun with an Am5x86 or a Cyrix/IBM 5x86.

Why wouldn't it be an EISA slot? It's certainly not an opti local bus slot. Boards in that time period were still getting EISA slots, though typically they were Pentium boards. My feeling is that ALi probably just had some chips that needed to be used up.

I only metioned it bing odd because typically, EISA slots were reserved for bank draining high end systems in the early 90s and I thought they went mostly extinct after PCI caught on.

Whatever the case, that adds more options for cards you can put into the system and thus, raises the bar even higher for potential fun with that board.

Must admit didn't look that closely, just saw brown and thought VL-BUS but it is actually just an ISA
Looking at the manual I found on the net it says it has 3 PCI and 4 ISA slots no reason why it's a different colour?
Indeed ISA is a lot more use to me then any other type in a 486.

Was thinking about a 5x86 of some sort but couldn't find any, well for a decent price anyway. The Dx4 120 only cost me £2.50 plus shipping so quite liked the idea of running the final fastest true 4x86 cpu, for now, I can always upgrade later!

Ive got the same board with no bios chip, any chance you could save the bios to disk and email it to me? It looks like a nice little board.

maybe that ISA slot is different because it is shared with the PCI one? It could be just stock being used and used the sharing as an excuse for the strange slot...

Look at the board from the bottom side. If the brown slot has about twice as many pins as the other ISA it could be something special.

Sent you a PM Dirkerk with the BIOS. Havent really had a good look at it yet but seems ok. Not a fan of the lack of PS2 ports, guess I was spoilt back in the day my DX2 66 came with PS2 keyboard/mouse & 16550 UART Com ports.
My 2 mates had a DX4 100 & an early Pentium but serial mice so I had to host the 3 played serial cable Diablo game, it was P-L-A-Y-A-B-L-E but not enjoyable!

Hopefully I'm pulling it apart next week upgrading the RAM/CPU I'll check the underside & let you know

I know what you mean. diablo on isa video on a dx2 is a big suck

pageflipablo

chinny22 wrote:

Sent you a PM Dirkerk with the BIOS. Havent really had a good look at it yet but seems ok. Not a fan of the lack of PS2 ports, guess I was spoilt back in the day my DX2 66 came with PS2 keyboard/mouse & 16550 UART Com ports.
My 2 mates had a DX4 100 & an early Pentium but serial mice so I had to host the 3 played serial cable Diablo game, it was P-L-A-Y-A-B-L-E but not enjoyable!

Hopefully I'm pulling it apart next week upgrading the RAM/CPU I'll check the underside & let you know

You should've asked your friend with the DX4 if you could temporarily swap CPUs with him. 😁

Even if the EISA slot is actually hooked up, without the config file it would be useless.

Could the brown slot be shared with the PCI slot next to it? If it's shared, then you can't fill both those slots at the same time.

the brown slot is a PISA slot for a cpu card:

Brown ISA slot

Well thats definitely the same board, so I'll go with PISA. History really repeats hey!?

Seems like a strange thing to have on a consumer board though?

Even though ratfink solved worked out what the brown slot is I took a pc of the other side the PISA slot is in line with the sticker the 3 ISA slots above, the 3 PCI below.

Funny how the manual just calls it a ISA not that I can see much need or interest for a PISA slot in a consumer board.

okay - I'll ask - what the heck is a PISA slot? I have never seen anything like that!

Probably something similar to a Processor Direct Slot (PDS) on an old Mac?

Well I finally had a week spare to try and get this thing going again. (and also catch up on whats happing here)

I've upgraded a few things and now It got
CPU: 486 Dx4 120
RAM: x2 32MB 60NS EDO
NIC: Eagle Ne2000
Audio1: Awe32 CT3910
Audio2: Labway Yamaha YMF719E-S
Which plugs into either a
Yamaha MU10 or Roland SC55

Running Dos 6.22/WFW

Some of the fun I've had
The CPU came with no heatsink but the same guy was selling a 486/66 With a heat sync for around £2 so was going to use that, however what I got was a 486/33 with a smaller heatsink then I felt comfortable using, I had a AMD Socket A heatsink lying around so using that, it may be overkill but hey my 486 is still am AMD.

The network card was hell to get working until I manually modified the cfg file to the correct resources.

I FINALLY got midi to work. In the end I replaced the Midi cable and slightly changed resources The AWE32 is used for everything accept Midi.

The strange/annoying thing is if I only use the Labway games work fine without using any drivers, however If using the AWE32 for sound I also have to load setupsa/s to get the midi port working in the Labway?

All the hardware is now setup right and no conflicts but I've got so many drivers, bits of software, etc loaded I'm going to wipe it and start again. That said I know I'm not going to have a chance probably till next month so just playing with it as is for now.

Also I finally got to listen to my SC55 and MU10. Raptor sounds a bit funny with the Roland, and the MU10 sounds are a bit distorted. I'm only using batteries as I don't have a power supply for it yet so hoping it's just due to that. The Piano sounded quite nice behind the distortion though!

Well it's taken over a year, partly due to real life distractions, partly due to my P3 project taking preference but the 486 is near enough to being complete!

I don't really see the point of using Dos 6.22 where Dos7 is just as good if not better. However The P3 boots into that so left 6.22 on just to be different, but am using the newer emm368. Hymem.sys and edit.com (So I can have more than 1 file open)

I was going to setup DOS networking but changed my mind. Now I have a reason to use WFW which is behaving very well on my Win2k TCP domain. Also installed is MS Office 4.3 which I found the original floppies for in a customer's server room, Sadly a disk was dead so had to download an entire copy from the net simply to replace that 1 disk.

Annoyingly I don't really need this PC long term, we still have the family's 1st ever PC an Osborne 486 DX2 66 in the garage back home. Apart from no PCI that's a much nicer machine. Even then the dos games I like don't suffer from speed issues so the P3 is more than up to the job. But I just don't think I can part with this one either, not even the desktop case. Nice heavy thing to ship home, bugger

Anyway here are its vital signs
System setup
CPU: 486 Dx4 120 (A80486DX4-120SV8B, C9539CPH)
M/B: Abit AB-PB4 Rev 1.3
RAM: x2 32MB 60NS EDO (LG GMM7328110CS6 32MB EDO 60nS 72-PIN SIMM TIN)
Video: Trident TGUI9440-1
NIC: PCI 3Comm 3C905C-TXM (The ISA NIC was being a pain)
Audio1: Awe32 Value CT3910
Audio2: Labway Yamaha YMF719E-S (Only used for the Midi port)
Midi: Roland SC55
HDD: Quantum Trailblazer 850MB (TR85A351/850AT)
CD-Rom: Creative 4x (CRE-BTB)
OS: Dos 6.22 /Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Issues
Sometimes the mouse stops working in windows. Opening a command prompt and running ctmouse gets it going again.
Line in on the Awe32 doesn't work so the Roland gets its own set of speakers. On the plus side I no longer have to load setupsa/s to get the midi port working. Long term I'll get a mixer anway

Future upgrades
Diamond Stealth 3d: Bit overkill in this machine and the 1MB Trident card isn't causing an issue accept low res in Windows, But it would be nice to mess round with the Virge enhanced games.
PCI card with PS2 Port: Serial mouse are a pain! I’d prefer an adaptor but this is cheaper
8GB HDD: Why not?