wrote:I should have said treat VLB like AGP, one slot for graphics only, overclock (>33MHz) at your peril.
I've heard that populating > 2 VLB slots is a bad idea, but what's the disadvantage of using a VLB IO card + VGA card?
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
wrote:Depends on the motherboard and what kind of controller (if it supports LBA/EIDE and/or use the BIOS on the motherboard/have it's own). If it's an old motherboard and old controller you need to use Overlay software if you want to go beyond 504MB. If you have a newer motherboard, but older controller you'd want to use the motherboard BIOS for setup (and LBA support) which needs configuration. It's generally easy to get them going in DOS, but if you want to boot up WIn 3.11 or Windows 9x, then you might run into problems if you want to enable the full performance. For example in Windows 3.X you need a thirdparty driver to enable 32bit disk access if the disk is larger than 504MB. There are several drivers, and some might not with your card and/or drive.
Wow...that does sound like a lot of trouble. Having read the above, I'd consider using a DX4-100 Overdrive (iirc those were always write-through and afaik my best VLB board doesn't come with a 3.3v regulator anyway) but that thing with those drivers sounds like pain waiting to happen 😁
wrote:Used to like the challenge of ISA setups - I generally used a "cheat sheet" with a table of resources available, used, preferred and possible - had to run a SoundBlaster with DMA 0, as a scanner card needed 1 and something else took 3, with the SB being to only device that had the option of 0
My cheat sheet listed fixed resource devices first, then in order of increasing options - saved me an awful lot of fiddling afterwards
Would you think it could be interesting for others to upload your cheat sheet? Such a thing may help others build ISA rigs, perhaps even persuading some to actually try out an ISA build 😀
wrote:Wow...that does sound like a lot of trouble. Having read the above, I'd consider using a DX4-100 Overdrive (iirc those were always write-through and afaik my best VLB board doesn't come with a 3.3v regulator anyway) but that thing with those drivers sounds like pain waiting to happen 😁
Do your homework and get help here on Vogons 😉 We'll sort it out so you get the performance.
Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see. There are so many things that we take for granted when assembling AT systems and up that one can forget how the limitations are with an XT machine, specially if you wanna make it all period correct. Here's some difficulties for someone misinformed and that just goes "cool i got an XT motherboard":
1- Well if you got some OEM motherboard like the XT ones from Commodore well if you don't get the power supply as well tough luck. Maybe you can figure the pinout and make a converter to redirect proper voltages with a generic PSU. If you got a regular generic 8088 board go to the next step.
2- Expansion boards. What to get? Well essential first is video card. Easiest way is to find a VGA 8bit or a 16bit one that can work on an 8bit slot. But now if you want to be period accurate MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA are all RGB TTL signals, so good luck finding a monitor. If you're tech savvy and good with a soldering iron maybe you can build an RGB to SCART converter. Live in NTSC land? Oh well get, a CGA card and use the composite output with your NTSC TV.
3- Well you covered the above steps let's try and boot the thing shall we? Get the DOS disks ready... Well yeah no High Density floppy support, either you have a low density floppy (or do tape on the hole trick) and find a way to crete a boot disk on it or you are not getting to the next step.
4- Booted DOS great! Let's do something... WTF, keyboard not working? If your BIOS didn't give a Keyboard error during POST and you're totally oblivious you need an XT compatible keyboard this is the point you are going notice it.
5- Got a keyboard? Great, if you're thinking about adding an hard drive... Period accurate? Well you have MFM/RLL or 8bit IDE. The latter is rare and the first uhh maybe you can find a heavy hard drive that still works. Or maybe get one on eBay and pray it doesn't die during shipping. GH mentions XT-IDE which is a blessing today and enables you to use CF cards on an XT. From a 286 and up you don't need more than a generic IDE controller to work... And you might still need to build the XT-IDE yourself...
6- I/O cards, well you can always use 16 bit ones just fine. Not really a big problem. You might wonder why you have to set the clock every time you start DOS though. We take a RTC for granted, but on an XT no dice.
Tired of writing about XT's now and there's plenty of stuff still to mention.
VLB systems well, i have 2 boards and i didn't find them so much more complicated than earlier 486 PCI systems. And as long as i kept FSB at 33MHz i could use all the VLB cards i wanted. If you decide going for 40MHz don't use more than 1 VLB card though and still... VLB systems have their difficulties but teah maybe on my list these could be 2nd or 3rd
My pick for hardest build is nothing special, but purely based on the number of "support" threads and issues people have.
It's building a Windows 98 SE machine with MS-Mode. We see it all the time: Someone installing Windows 98 SE, everything works fine, retro gaming is awesome. Then they want to try out MS-DOS mode and things fall apart 😵
wrote:wrote:Wow...that does sound like a lot of trouble. Having read the above, I'd consider using a DX4-100 Overdrive (iirc those were always write-through and afaik my best VLB board doesn't come with a 3.3v regulator anyway) but that thing with those drivers sounds like pain waiting to happen 😁
Do your homework and get help here on Vogons 😉 We'll sort it out so you get the performance.
As soon as I get to that point, I'll know where to find you 😜
wrote:Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see. There are so many things that we take for granted when assembling AT systems and up t […]
Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see. There are so many things that we take for granted when assembling AT systems and up that one can forget how the limitations are with an XT machine, specially if you wanna make it all period correct. Here's some difficulties for someone misinformed and that just goes "cool i got an XT motherboard":
1- Well if you got some OEM motherboard like the XT ones from Commodore well if you don't get the power supply as well tough luck. Maybe you can figure the pinout and make a converter to redirect proper voltages with a generic PSU. If you got a regular generic 8088 board go to the next step.
2- Expansion boards. What to get? Well essential first is video card. Easiest way is to find a VGA 8bit or a 16bit one that can work on an 8bit slot. But now if you want to be period accurate MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA are all RGB TTL signals, so good luck finding a monitor. If you're tech savvy and good with a soldering iron maybe you can build an RGB to SCART converter. Live in NTSC land? Oh well get, a CGA card and use the composite output with your NTSC TV.
3- Well you covered the above steps let's try and boot the thing shall we? Get the DOS disks ready... Well yeah no High Density floppy support, either you have a low density floppy (or do tape on the hole trick) and find a way to crete a boot disk on it or you are not getting to the next step.
4- Booted DOS great! Let's do something... WTF, keyboard not working? If your BIOS didn't give a Keyboard error during POST and you're totally oblivious you need an XT compatible keyboard this is the point you are going notice it.
5- Got a keyboard? Great, if you're thinking about adding an hard drive... Period accurate? Well you have MFM/RLL or 8bit IDE. The latter is rare and the first uhh maybe you can find a heavy hard drive that still works. Or maybe get one on eBay and pray it doesn't die during shipping. GH mentions XT-IDE which is a blessing today and enables you to use CF cards on an XT. From a 286 and up you don't need more than a generic IDE controller to work... And you might still need to build the XT-IDE yourself...
6- I/O cards, well you can always use 16 bit ones just fine. Not really a big problem. You might wonder why you have to set the clock every time you start DOS though. We take a RTC for granted, but on an XT no dice.
Tired of writing about XT's now and there's plenty of stuff still to mention.
VLB systems well, i have 2 boards and i didn't find them so much more complicated than earlier 486 PCI systems. And as long as i kept FSB at 33MHz i could use all the VLB cards i wanted. If you decide going for 40MHz don't use more than 1 VLB card though and still... VLB systems have their difficulties but teah maybe on my list these could be 2nd or 3rd
Sounds a lot similar to the proprietary ones, except they are a little bit more compatible with more modern PC hardware
1. A stable Slot A build running at stock that doesn't kill your ears.
2. Tall, wide, heavy metal server cases. Nearly lost my arms when salvaging junk from one of them, let alone build one 😵
3. A lasting fast Super Socket 7 system, breaking the 3 year mark.
4. Late 486s. Aforementinoed jumper hell is one thing, serial suckage and other quirks are another, it almost falls into SS7/Slot A territory.
5. Scavenged RDRAM-system builds, like early P4/late P3's. Diving from the convenience of every other RAM type to this can lead to a few GuideDangits.
1. Non-PC compatibles. Including ZX Spectrum, Sun workstations, etc. The area where 99% of your PC knowledge is useless.
2. Personally, I always found building an XT from scratch the biggest challenge when it comes to PC. Nothing is integrated, not even RTC, you need a somewhat special keyboard, all your 16-bit ISA cards are not old enough for it and, unless you find one of those scarce 8-bit VGA cards, you need an EGA monitor as well. For me, XT holds the crown because of the "where the hell am I going to get all those parts?" issue.
3. Any late 486. PCI or VLB, they just have too many jumpers. I specifically hate "jumper forests", where they are concentrated in huge chunks like here. It's OK when they are in a row, distinguishable from one another, not this mess...
4. Probably SS7.
wrote:[
wrote:I should have said treat VLB like AGP, one slot for graphics only, overclock (>33MHz) at your peril.
Are those VLB harddrive controllers so hard to use btw? If I were to actually build one, my gripe would be that I don't have any good ISA controller cards and I also don't have any good VLB graphics adapters. I do have a ISA cl5434 and a couple VLB controllers with 2 IDE connectors (I don't have anything fancy for VLB though)
I have a combo card that supports 2 x serial, 1 x parallel, 1 x game 1 x floppy, 1 x ISA IDE and 1 x VLB IDE. It is called the Kouwell KW-560D. Using the VLB IDE is not hard to do, if you have the driver software or even the manual for the jumpers. However, I have had data corruption on my CF cards and I believe they were using the VLB enhanced speed at the time, so I am wary of the VLB IDE connection.
One 16-bit ISA controller should be just as fast as the next. IDE is a subset of ISA with a few extra lines easily provided by common logic chips.
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/ - Nerdly Pleasures - My Retro Gaming, Computing & Tech Blog
1. anything made by IBM
2. anything made by IBM
3. anything made by IBM
4. anything made by IBM
5. anything made by IBM
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
PC's and clones are a piece of cake compared to 80's Unix machines. Big brand or off-brand, the hardware was almost never interchangeable and a lot of it was really hokey.
Second to that is the early Macs. Just crazy amounts of patching and mildly updating the system software until bloody 9.2.2. I'm serious. Apple did not have a properly multitasking OS with a FULLY protected memory model until OS X came about. Before that it was a nightmare of conflicting INITs, control panels and incompatible drivers.
"It's science. I ain't gotta explain sh*t" 
wrote:you need a somewhat special keyboard, all your 16-bit ISA cards are not old enough for it and, unless you find one of those scarce 8-bit VGA cards, you need an EGA monitor as well. For me, XT holds the crown because of the "where the hell am I going to get all those parts?" issue.
I'm calling on ~20 years old memory here but as I recall about 1/2 the 16-bit VGA cards I tried worked fine in 8-bit slots.
To my understanding that backwards compatibility was deliberate on early 16-bit VGA cards.
.
GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
For me the toughest was 486 VLB systems.
Acquired second hand so I didn't always have manuals and I wasn't online yet so most things were figured out by experimentation and tracing circuits.
Would be easier today but with the bad experiences back then I avoid VLB anyway.
.
GRUMPY OLD FART - On Hiatus, sort'a
Mann-Made Global Warming. - We should be more concerned about the Intellectual Climate.
You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life, but if he can't handle sushi you must also teach him to cook.
My family had a cheap VLB 486 board back when they were current. PCI was out but those boards cost more.
We had a lot of trouble with that system but the VLB disk controllers seemed to work okay. I didn't notice any random disk corruption, but if it was in fact happening then it wouldn't entirely surprise me.
We never had any VLB video card, but had 2 VLB IDE cards (only one at a time). The first was a cheap $20 card which didn't boot reliably, but it seemed to just be a defective card.
The 2nd was an EIDE VLB card, allowing use of larger hard drives. It supported 16.6MB/sec PIO Mode-4, and that seemed really fast at the time.
I used it with a WD 1.6GB. It worked fine without any drivers, but in order to get faster performance it needed a TSR loaded at boot. I remember being impressed with how fast it was with the TSR. At times, the hard drive sounded like the static noise from a dialup modem and it would load things much more quickly than if the TSR wasn't loaded.
Before either of those we had an ISA IDE card, which always worked fine. I do remember these old cards being a jumper hell, but I didn't mind it. I had much better experiences with jumpers than "plug-n-pray" software configuration in those days.
With jumpers you definitely need the instructions though. I'm not sure if I have the documentation for any of those cards anymore, so if I dug any of them out and tried to use them today, I might be in trouble.
I remember some upgrade we did where the printed instructions actually included a procedure to reinitialize something on a hard disk. I don't remember if it was the VLB EIDE card or something else. The instructions actually had us typing a short .COM program in debug.exe and then running it. Certainly an amusing thing to put in a user manual - but it *did* fix the problem we were having, whatever it was.
#1) Anyway, I can't deny that 486 was more trouble than any other system I've used, though not because of VLB in my case. It was just a really unstable cheaply made motherboard, lots of jumpers, some obscure BIOS settings, and I didn't know much about what I was doing back then. If I had a quality 486 board today, I like to think I'd have an easier time, but I might be surprised.
From today's perspective, a 486 is definitely a lot more archaic than a common Pentium. The latter will still work with a lot of common, fairly modern hardware, but a 486 board loses that. No ATX form factor, AT power supply needed, DIN keyboard, BIOS is not flashable, unlikely to have PCI, likely not to have an onboard IDE controller (and if it does have, it won't work with anything > 540MB). Lots of jumpers to configure, likely to use those old barrel batteries or a Dallas RTC chip. Lack of video options or card options in general (lacking PCI). Probable difficulty with finding a usable combination of drive controller and hard drive that will work.
Stepping up to the Pentium era makes so many things a lot more modern.
#2) Super Socket 7 with an NVidia AGP card was frustrating. You can eventually figure out what hoops to jump through to make these setups work, but it's not something that wants to work. When it does work, then it might underperform. I eventually found a combination of drivers that performed significantly better than other combinations did. I'm not sure why, but it was a marked difference. I might be rebuilding that system eventually, hope I still remember what to do with it.
Although it wasn't really "difficult", I had an HP slot-2 machine (2nd hand) that by default didn't enable bus mastering on PCI slots. I had my hard drives plugged into a PCI card that needed it enabled. Without it enabled, the system would lock up during the BIOS startup procedure. Any time the BIOS wasn't configured correctly for some reason, I had to pull the computer out, get the cover off, unplug the card, reboot into the BIOS, enable bus mastering on that slot, shut back down, and then plug the card back in. I got really sick of that.
I also got sick of the 5 minute boot times. It had the slowest boot of any BIOS I have ever seen, and the agonizing memory "test" could not be skipped. Planning to use your computer soon? Need to reboot for some reason? Go get a drink.
wrote:Another example is my Abit BE6-II - BSODs in win98 with GF4 titanium cards if chipset drivers are installed. In XP it will sometimes work, other times freeze at the login screen. It's also picky about ram. Only one of my 7 256mb modules runs on it, and less then half of my 128mb sticks. The compaq only works with hyundai / hyinx and samsung modules.
In contrast my MVP3 based A-open AX59 PRO just works and it's easy to set up. It works will all my ram, and I can safely install via 4in1 4.43 with forceware 4x.xx and it's trouble free. Same for my Soyo SY-6BA+ - intel 440BX, takes almost any ram and AGP video cards I put in it. No lockups, no bsods, no drama whatsoever.
The ABit BE6-II was manufactured with very awful capacitors. Have yours been replaced? If not, they could be to blame for how it's behaving. I think almost all the ABits of that period ended up in the trash because of cap problems.
wrote:Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see.
Thanks for the insight carlos 😉 I'll get a full case with parts if I ever go this route.
8088 systems aren't that hard. It REALLY depends on what you wanna do with it.
1- Many 16-bit IO controllers do work on 8-bit slots. I have a Prime2 controller and I can even use IDE (through XT-IDE universal firmware) for CF cards (HDDs do not work in 8-bit mode).
2- Video cards aren't that hard to find. I am currently using a CGA clone card (though composite - I lack a TTL monitor), but I do have a cheap Trident card that is supposed to work in 8-bit mode, but the necessary pins for the jumper settings aren't soldered. I could fix that if I wanted to.
3- AT2XT convertrers are easy to make. The PIC you need is very cheap, and I already had a programmer anyway. Made it quickly in a single afternoon and now my regular AT keyboards work. For period correctness any AT keyboard from the XT era would have a switch so one would not need that.
None. I exclusively use OEM boxes.
Honestly, the trick to XT-class machines is to methodically document everything about the hardware configuration, then you know where you can add things. Here's an example (which reminds me that I should disassemble that machine and photograph it for System Specs, and update the file to fully reflect the current state of the machine, and remove conflicts): http://bhtooefr.org/files/ambergrsmemory2.txt
Otherwise, getting specific hardware can be difficult. But, even with increasing the difficulty level on my XT build by doing it in a 5155 (which had a clone board in it already, which I replaced with an IBM board for authenticity, but all other cards except for the CGA and FDC got replaced) and therefore only getting one long card in addition to the CGA and FDC, I didn't find it that bad at all.
wrote:Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see. There are so many things that we take for granted when assembling AT systems and up t […]
Once you try 8088/8086 systems you'll see. There are so many things that we take for granted when assembling AT systems and up that one can forget how the limitations are with an XT machine, specially if you wanna make it all period correct. Here's some difficulties for someone misinformed and that just goes "cool i got an XT motherboard":
1- Well if you got some OEM motherboard like the XT ones from Commodore well if you don't get the power supply as well tough luck. Maybe you can figure the pinout and make a converter to redirect proper voltages with a generic PSU. If you got a regular generic 8088 board go to the next step.
2- Expansion boards. What to get? Well essential first is video card. Easiest way is to find a VGA 8bit or a 16bit one that can work on an 8bit slot. But now if you want to be period accurate MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA are all RGB TTL signals, so good luck finding a monitor. If you're tech savvy and good with a soldering iron maybe you can build an RGB to SCART converter. Live in NTSC land? Oh well get, a CGA card and use the composite output with your NTSC TV.
3- Well you covered the above steps let's try and boot the thing shall we? Get the DOS disks ready... Well yeah no High Density floppy support, either you have a low density floppy (or do tape on the hole trick) and find a way to crete a boot disk on it or you are not getting to the next step.
4- Booted DOS great! Let's do something... WTF, keyboard not working? If your BIOS didn't give a Keyboard error during POST and you're totally oblivious you need an XT compatible keyboard this is the point you are going notice it.
5- Got a keyboard? Great, if you're thinking about adding an hard drive... Period accurate? Well you have MFM/RLL or 8bit IDE. The latter is rare and the first uhh maybe you can find a heavy hard drive that still works. Or maybe get one on eBay and pray it doesn't die during shipping. GH mentions XT-IDE which is a blessing today and enables you to use CF cards on an XT. From a 286 and up you don't need more than a generic IDE controller to work... And you might still need to build the XT-IDE yourself...
6- I/O cards, well you can always use 16 bit ones just fine. Not really a big problem. You might wonder why you have to set the clock every time you start DOS though. We take a RTC for granted, but on an XT no dice.
Tired of writing about XT's now and there's plenty of stuff still to mention.
VLB systems well, i have 2 boards and i didn't find them so much more complicated than earlier 486 PCI systems. And as long as i kept FSB at 33MHz i could use all the VLB cards i wanted. If you decide going for 40MHz don't use more than 1 VLB card though and still... VLB systems have their difficulties but teah maybe on my list these could be 2nd or 3rd
That is why I will likely forever never bother with XT systems even though I got a keyboard that works with both (little switch), XT can be pretty expensive. The window of opportunity to collect XT hardware cheaply is long gone.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
I'll toss in PIII-S systems, getting a later stepping CPU like the SL6BY to even post on a taiwan capacitor era board is often a challenge and requires flashing a new bios with a regular PIII or celeron, in addition to replacing all the caps on the board before you do anything. Even then getting it stable and not freezing up requires using a period video card with the proper driver. Tossing an Apollo Pro chipset in and getting all the features to work like memory interleaving is also difficult, as usually this has to be done after boot via software because VIA screwed up the basic bios they sent to vendors. In my case I had to add the stepping revision microcode to the BIOS by hand. I think they probably perform better on a 440BX slot 1 board, but finding a slotket is almost impossible now. I don't really like the pin mods, it kind of defeats the purpose of the CPU and makes it so you can't use it on a real Tully board.
