I have a MSI adapter. It doesn't support the tualatin, but every other cpu "just works". All I need to do is set the FSB to 133 and it's good to go.

Fastest PIII that worked is a 1 GHz mode. The Tualatin don't even post

I believe you misunderstood what I am talking about. I meant the original "slotket"s, the ones that adapted a Pentium Pro CPU to a Slot 1 interface.

The Socket 370 adapters are well known and are certainly well documented on this forum.

Oh I most certainly did!

So there are Pentium Pro Slot 1 adapters? Hmm interesting. Well I will sit back and follow the other posts 😀

This might be indeed of great use for my "time machine" project! 440BX stability together with Pentium / Cache slowdown options.

What have you got?

Yes! Mind you the only places I've ever heard or seen these fabled slotkets is from the occasional forum and Wikipedia.

What do I have? Well I'm a bit of a knowledgeable, yet, simply aspiring newbie. I had a few 440BX boards (before I realized their significance) and Socket 370 slotkets along with 2 350MHZ Pentium 2... until I threw them away.

However, I may eventually have access to more generic Asus slotkets, 440BX and LX boards, 1.2GHz Celerons and even a PPro machine, that of which I don't know the exact specs of.

The reason I gather this kind of information is simply to formulate the ultimate retro PC that will do literally anything. My last attempt consisted of socket 7 boards, an AWE 32, 16MB of ram, and a PCI video card. Long story short it had a dead CMOS battery and said battery was integrated into the RTC so I gave up on that.[/i]

My Super Socket 7 board also gave me issues. Some data corruption issue. So I put my 440BX board back into the machine 😀

I got another SS7 board though, but haven't done any longterm testing yet.

The 440BX is just rock solid and that's what I want!

The Ultimate Retro PC is hard to achieve with a single unit. DOSBox is likely the most flexible approach. Armed with Roland MIDI modules and a USB joystick you can play pretty much any Game.

Having said that, real hardware is way more fun, although sometimes it does give you headaches when something doesn't work the way it should...

Without a doubt... of course I've already been using dosbox for a while, I even have gone so far as to have wired up an MT-32 to my main rig.
In all honesty, while having a perfect comp is impossible, we can at least get close, using hardware with the best overall support and stability, and of course scalability in terms of CPU speed.

Of course! It's all about the journey!

What I found with my "slowdown projects" is that you can usually toggle between "very fast" and "very slow" with a huge hole in the middle...

The older your gear is (e.g. a 486 or Pentium) the more options you have. These boards have onboard L2 cache which is very helpful when turning off L1 cache. Slot systems you only have L1 to play with. L2 gets disabled as soon as you disable L1 (Otherwise Slot 1 would be perfect as it's the first platfor to have a super wide FSB range from 66 o 133).

A decent 486 system is very very flexible. You can play with the FSB and Multi. L1 and L2 cache. And also a Turbo button. Allows you to cover a lot of machines from a slow 386 to a fast 486 in very granular steps.

I've read that the 440BX chipset doesn't support Pentium Pros.

A few things come to mind here.

1) PPro itself was relatively rare among consumers because it was very expensive. Pentium and Pentium MMX were vastly more popular.

2) I think AdamP is right in that PPro and BX are incompatible. I found some usenet posts that go along with this.

3) PPro was primarily a server chip and those expensive servers were replaced with Slot 2 Xeons or maybe that PPro Overdrive, not Slot 1 boards.

Additionally, PPro was only an exciting consumer option for a short time period. The missing MMX is an issue with some games (Unreal complains for ex). It's also quite inefficient when it has to operate on any 8/16-bit code and loses its edge against a Pentium MMX, let alone a Pentium II or Celeron A.

So I think these adapters are somewhat rare because they never went mass market cheapo like Socket 370 stuff. PPros weren't put into Slot 1 boards because they were too slow by the time Slot 1 was really interesting.

Well, if it's true that it's BX incompatible then that would certainly defeat our purposes for them. Admittedly, that exact 8/16-bit inefficiency might help in attempting to slow it down, trying to get speeds lower than 386 or between a 386 and the P2s on a BX board at least.

Another idea I just had...

Where there ever L2 cache boards which you could put into the PCI slot? That would be anice turbo for a Slot 1 system with L1 cache disabled.

Considering that PCI is a lot slower than even main memory, I don't see why a device like that would exist....

Bugger...

Oh well once my Pentium 200 arrives I will play around with the other SS7 board. That cpu will work with the ICD.EXE tool so looking forward to "time machine project revisited" 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

My Super Socket 7 board also gave me issues.

Which board and what issues did you have?

The Iwill gave me data corruption (read errors in DOS where it asks you to retry, abort, or something like that..). I tried PIO mode instead of DMA but the issue didn't go away.

Put the 440BX back in the box and all is good. I won't be trying to fix the Iwill though, enough cheap parts around to have fun with 😀

The Aopen AX59 Pro is a nice board, but doesn't have a L1 setting in BIOS. And ICACHE or ICD only work on the Cyrix and Intel and not on the K6...

So I have a Pentium 200 underway and that should be nice to complete my "timemachine sheet" with some more slowdown results...

EDIT: Well this is odd. 440BX system is fine, so I tried the other SS7 board and I get the same read error again. Weird though, it's always at the same spot (during running autoexec.bat when it's loading AWEUTIL or CTCU for the AWE64)...

So far only the SS7 boards had this issue. I havn't seen it on the 440BX.

As far as I know only i440FX, and maybe a handful of the very first i440LX based Slot 1 motherboards accepted them. Im sure of the FX boards, but most pages list the LX as incompatible with Perntium Pro. Then again some early LX motherboard do support 3,3V core voltage, and only Pentium Pro processors used that.
Even in 1997 the Pentium Pro-s were insanely overpriced, yet the 233MHz Pentium II was usually faster at a much lower price point.

I have a 440FX board with both Slot 1 and Socket 8. There were a few like that. This one is a Supermicro P6SKE and it is a gigantic board because it has spots for all sorts of extras like Ultra SCSI (on P6SKS).

Aww, see now I gotta run to the surplus place, again. I saw a card which I'm pretty sure was not a slot 1 adapter, but it did hold dual Pentium Pros. Curious what it went to, now.

Logistics wrote:

Aww, see now I gotta run to the surplus place, again. I saw a card which I'm pretty sure was not a slot 1 adapter, but it did hold dual Pentium Pros. Curious what it went to, now.

Maybe it was part of an Asus P65UP5 board?