first off, pics. ^.^

2nd, hi Welcome to vogons

3rd. Yes, by default they are designed to plug into a dumb backplane. First issue is finding one that fits into a case proper as most had industrial rackmount chassis in mind. These have been going up in price I've noticed.

what model are these? you could try selling them

Your post looks more like sale advert than question for advice.

Here are the photos...

Thanks for the welcome!

To be clear, these are not for sale. I hoarded them for a reason(which isn't quite clear when hoarding)

More to the point, can several of these run simultaneously on the same backplane? Or would they conflict over the same resources?

Could two of them share the same sound card? I would think not.

you think correctly, one cpu board per bus.

There ARE some backplanes that have several separate disconnected busses but the ones ive seen are pci based.

Do the SBCs have audio support onboard or would they rely on the backplane for that?

I’ve dreamed of building an instant 4player doom setup. Something where I just power it on and all computers connect to the same local doom game. Of course modern hardware is easily powerful enough to run it all in 1 cpu but I’m not sure how to handle the multiple input devices and audio out. I still think a rack solution with 4 sbc’s would rock.

some do, most don't. Back plane required. The video is usually integrated, but usually very basic. That looks like a 5430, capable and compatible, but not known for blazing game performance.

here is the manual for these SBCs in case you haven't found it yet: http://www.voxtechnologies.com/SBCs/pdf/icp/ssc-5x86hvga.pdf
this is the equivalent of having 14 identical motherboards in some sense... ideally they need their dedicated busboard with any ISA cards you want to use with them.

You can use a regular riser board from an LPX system or connect two ISA ports together to make a hacky backplane. I have a similar SBC, the Advantech 6145, with onboard graphics as well. I got a Yamaha YMF719 working on mine by connecting both the SBC and the soundcard into each ISA slot on a generic riser board with 3 isa slots.
I'm thinking of putting together a proper board that connects just two ISA ports and has maybe an ATX power connector to make a very miniature ISA backplane. Haven't got around to that yet though.

I don't think any of the ISA SBCs have audio, larger / custom format ones sometimes do, but that's usually optional and they're more in the range of Via C3 / AMD Geode systems.

For a moment I was imagining a 10x 486 supercomputer... but perhaps not.

I suppose they could be linked somehow but that's way beyond my capabilities.

keropi wrote:

here is the manual for these SBCs in case you haven't found it yet: http://www.voxtechnologies.com/SBCs/pdf/icp/ssc-5x86hvga.pdf
this is the equivalent of having 14 identical motherboards in some sense... ideally they need their dedicated busboard with any ISA cards you want to use with them.

Thanks for that. After review, on page 11 it appears JP14 could bump the CPU voltage up to 3.45. Would that allow me to also overclock it to 120mhz?

possibly, but the parts will be designed to run in spec. Overclocking industrial and enterprise hardware is intentionally disabled and hamstrung. These boards will support what they were designed to, nothing more.

luckybob wrote:

possibly, but the parts will be designed to run in spec. Overclocking industrial and enterprise hardware is intentionally disabled and hamstrung. These boards will support what they were designed to, nothing more.

I bet they have a setting for a 40Mhz FSB which will allow 120Mhz on the DX4-100.

I bet they dont. It might be an undocumented jumper setting, but likely wont work stable if it exists.

I know people fantasize about overclocking, but I cant say it is really worth the effort.

luckybob wrote:

There ARE some backplanes that have several separate disconnected busses but the ones ive seen are pci based.

I've got a backplane with 4 separate PCI and ISA busses. I've been tinkering on it for some time since I'm aiming to have a PMMX, PII, PIII, and PIV in a single chassis.

Anyone seen a beowulf cluster made with several 486 SBC cards? That would be kinda neat.

EDIT: the manual linked shows a 40 MHz setting.

luckybob wrote:

I bet they dont. It might be an undocumented jumper setting, but likely wont work stable if it exists.

I know people fantasize about overclocking, but I cant say it is really worth the effort.

Page 10 of the manual. It officially supports the DX4-120 and the AMD and Cyrix 5x86 CPUs as well.

As for overclocking... I have pretty much overclocked every single CPU I have had starting with a 486 DX2-66 that I ran at 80Mhz.

I caught the bug when I was looking at a friend's 486SX-25 computer and noticed that there was a jumper on the board to switch between 25 and 33Mhz FSB. Tried it and it worked and I was hooked.

I've been successful in overclocking to 120, but only with a fan on the heatsink. Hard to notice a difference in Quake though.
Anyway, do you have any suggestions/links for decent isa backplanes? Ebay has loads of them for more than I'd like to pay...