There were also multi I/O cards (for which, the ATA controller was the part that benefited from VLB,) as well as SCSI cards and network cards.

I had three VLB cards in one system, and remember wanting a fourth.

I had a VLB video card and VLB I/O card (the primary IDE was the only VLB component on the card though). And as AnonFreak said NICs could benefit too. NICs weren't very popular back then though to say the least. Those were the days of ISA modems or modems running off serial ports.

VLB can only handle 2-3 slots before the signal gets too screwed up. Sometimes one slot was a slave slot and not as capable as a master slot. VLB kinda sucked because it was flakey and it can't really do busmastering so the CPU is hit hard. That and because VLB is an extension of the 486 bus is why PCI took over.

I used the 3rd VLB slot on my old mobo for my full-length ISA sound card because those slots typically have more clearance from mobo components than the rest. Dumb Baby AT messes.

Yes, I had a Trident 9400CXi VLB video card and a multi I/O VLB card in the same system.

The general rule of thumb for VLB 1.0 is:

25MHz - 3 cards
33MHz - 2 cards
40MHz - 1 card
50MHz - integrated onto the motherboard

Mind you this was was only generally speaking. Your actual mileage will depend more on the design of your motherboard. I believe VLB 2.0 improved things a fair bit in regards to how many cards you could use reliably, but the standard came out pretty late (95 ish) and pretty much nobody built anything around it.

I have never really bothered much with VLB for disk controllers, but people who did have nothing good to say of it. At the time VLB was popular, I doubt there were many drives that could really take advantage of it anyway. Keep in mind 1-2MB/sec was pretty typical of drives of the era, which ISA could keep up with quite well. Though later PATA drives are certainly one hell of a lot faster on VL bus, the lack of bus mastering kind of stinks. Best to go with a caching controller in that situation.

If I decide to build myself a VLB system, I got only non-cacheing disk controllers and crappy VLB graphics cards. One of the VLB cards I have is one with IDE controller and VGA on 1 board. No idea if it's any good but I reckon that atleast, since it's all on 1 card, I might have less trouble with the bus.

Any thoughts?

Now what about EISA? I've seen some crazy looking server boards with 5 or 6 PCI slots and (that's AND not OR) 5 or 6 EISA slots. How compatible are EISA slots with the earlier 8 and 16 bit ISA?

The caching IDE cards fascinated me but I've never used one. Anyone care to comment on those?

I do remember VLB disk controllers not bringing much of a tangible improvement, probably because of the lacking HDD performance of the day as AC said.

On the other hand, I've put a Promise Ultra 66 into my 486 PCI mobo and attached a fairly modern 80GB drive. This easily maxes out the bus performance of a 486 ( 😁 ) and you can tell that the CPU and the rest of the platform is the significant bottleneck in Win9x. HDD speed doesn't really matter in DOS overall, and in Win9x the system is too slow for it to matter.

EISA was a much more expensive "managed bus", more akin to PCI or Microchannel than to ISA or VLB. It was just designed so that the cards physically fit in the same sockets, with electrical backward compatibility in the slot intact. EISA was essentially perfectly compatible with ISA. EISA cards were "semi-plug-and-play", in that the auto-configuration was done from a boot floppy rather than in the firmware; and you did have to tell it what resources your non-PnP ISA cards used. But once you did, it played nicely with ISA cards. (Windows 95 couldn't "set" EISA resources either, but it could read them, and move ISA PnP cards resources around to avoid conflicts.)

EISA really should have been the way of the future. VLB sucked, but it was cheap. I've had all kinds of 486s, but EISA is the only bus I've used on a 486 system that really worked properly. Okay, MCA was good too, but it was somewhat proprietary, and not backward compatible.

Anonymous Freak wrote:

EISA was a much more expensive "managed bus", more akin to PCI or Microchannel than to ISA or VLB. It was just designed so that the cards physically fit in the same sockets, with electrical backward compatibility in the slot intact. EISA was essentially perfectly compatible with ISA. EISA cards were "semi-plug-and-play", in that the auto-configuration was done from a boot floppy rather than in the firmware; and you did have to tell it what resources your non-PnP ISA cards used. But once you did, it played nicely with ISA cards. (Windows 95 couldn't "set" EISA resources either, but it could read them, and move ISA PnP cards resources around to avoid conflicts.)

Do the old cards run any faster in the EISA slots than the ISA ones? I'm guessing that since the EISA slots have more bandwith that a video card that would be choked off in an ISA slot would be boosted by the newer slot.

sliderider wrote:

Anonymous Freak wrote:

EISA was a much more expensive "managed bus", more akin to PCI or Microchannel than to ISA or VLB. It was just designed so that the cards physically fit in the same sockets, with electrical backward compatibility in the slot intact. EISA was essentially perfectly compatible with ISA. EISA cards were "semi-plug-and-play", in that the auto-configuration was done from a boot floppy rather than in the firmware; and you did have to tell it what resources your non-PnP ISA cards used. But once you did, it played nicely with ISA cards. (Windows 95 couldn't "set" EISA resources either, but it could read them, and move ISA PnP cards resources around to avoid conflicts.)

Do the old cards run any faster in the EISA slots than the ISA ones? I'm guessing that since the EISA slots have more bandwith that a video card that would be choked off in an ISA slot would be boosted by the newer slot.

Nope

The nice thing about Eisa too is that the cards ROM BIOS'es don't steal and convential memory 😀

What would be considered the best video card in VL Bus? Are the choices the same as ISA or are there some unique ones that you can only get in VL Bus?

The thing with VLB is that there are some cards that are really bad for DOS games. All Matrox stuff and the Diamond Viper, for example. These cards have terrible DOS performance. These are actually early 2D GUI accelerator cards (called "coprocessor" boards). They were nice in their time for Windows, but sucked for DOS, and they aren't as fast for GUI as later chips. They were very expensive (and buggy).

The better choices include Tseng ET4000/W32p or one of S3's later chips like Trio64 or Vision 968/868. These give you excellent compatibility and DOS/Windows speed that a 486 won't be able to saturate.

BTW, there have been other threads about VLB video cards. Seems like yesterday that we were discussing them.

swaaye wrote:

The thing with VLB is that there are some cards that are really bad for DOS games. All Matrox stuff and the Diamond Viper, for example. These cards have terrible DOS performance. These are actually early 2D GUI accelerator cards (called "coprocessor" boards). They were nice in their time for Windows, but sucked for DOS, and they aren't as fast for GUI as later chips. They were very expensive (and buggy).

The better choices include Tseng ET4000/W32p or one of S3's later chips like Trio64 or Vision 968/868. These give you excellent compatibility and DOS/Windows speed that a 486 won't be able to saturate.

BTW, there have been other threads about VLB video cards. Seems like yesterday that we were discussing them.

I don't have any of those, alas. Iirc the best one was a cirrus logic one, a 542? or something.

Cirrus Logic VLB stuff is usually fine for DOS games.