Seems to be some kind of microscope image grabber:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Imagraph-Imascan-chr … 2-/331547211493

Hmmm.... Yeah.. Me thinking, that at least it will be an ET4000 card for Dos games.
I mean. It can be used, as far as I understand, as a simple ET4000 PCI for Dos gaming.
It has an ET-4000-W32 chip on it, and if only used for Dos gaming, I guess the price is good.
Or am I wrong on this? Also. It looks like it has a nice "ramdac" chip on it.

Tseng ET4000 cards are fine DOS VGA cards, but buying this beast just as a retro gaming card is like buying a large truck to do your daily groceries. Yes, it can do it, but it's unnecessarily big, unnecessarily expensive and you wouldn't even use half the functionality it offers.

You can get an ET6000 on eBay for 1/10 of what this card would cost you (or less than 1/3 of the price including shipping):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tseng-ET600-ATC-2165 … FQAAOSwi0xaPIP5

dionb wrote:

Tseng ET4000 cards are fine DOS VGA cards, but buying this beast just as a retro gaming card is like buying a large truck to do your daily groceries. Yes, it can do it, but it's unnecessarily big, unnecessarily expensive and you wouldn't even use half the functionality it offers.

You can get an ET6000 on eBay for 1/10 of what this card would cost you (or less than 1/3 of the price including shipping):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tseng-ET600-ATC-2165 … FQAAOSwi0xaPIP5

You do realise that you have linked to an auction?
Prices for non-auction are way higher than that, somewere between 130 and 530 US Dollars.

In reality, they will most likely not get sold, and the auction might end up on something like 100 US Dollars.
Else, you can check sold items.

To be honest. I did ask about this ET-4000, not because of how good it is with dos games. I have an ET4000-ISA and I did have an Diamond ET-6000 at one point. ET-4000's are good cards for the ISA slot. Yet the Diamonf ET-6000 are garbage when it comes to signal quality on some TFT/LCD monitors. I have no CRT, so I can not say anything about ET-6000 on that. On the other hand, S3-Trio64's, S3-Virge-125's and CL-5446 (all on PCI) are so much better than the Diamond ET6000. Faster and better VGA signal quality. Hence ET-6000's are totally overrated.

All I did ask about, is what the special feature of this ET4000-PCI card is. Useability of the ET-4000 chip is something I know allready. I have had ET-3000's in both 16 and 8 bit slots as well. I have no experience regarding ET-6100 and cards before ET-3000 though.

EDIT:
I meant S3-Virge-325 and not 125. 😁

I also think this card looks interesting and the price is OK.

I would raise the question is this is an add-on controller card only or if it can be used as main graphics card? But there is a BIOS on it, what other use should it have than initializing the card during POST? But maybe its only for the SCSI-part?
If it does not work, you should be able to replace it with a BIOS from any other PCI ET4000?

Predator99 wrote:

I also think this card looks interesting and the price is OK.

I would raise the question is this is an add-on controller card only or if it can be used as main graphics card? But there is a BIOS on it, what other use should it have than initializing the card during POST? But maybe its only for the SCSI-part?
If it does not work, you should be able to replace it with a BIOS from any other PCI ET4000?

I honestly do not know if it is possible to swap the BIOS. In theory it should be possible. Yes. The price is good enough. As an ET-4000 only card, it is rather cheap I must say. The thing is, that I have ordered an ET-4000-ISA, and the eBay reseller/shop wrote me a message, that they have lost it from their inventory, for reasons unknown, and asked me to choose something else. Or get the money back. So I will see if I can get one of these instead. I will report back with my take on this ET4000-PCI, once I have had it tested.

brostenen wrote:

You do realise that you have linked to an auction? Prices for non-auction are way higher than that, somewere between 130 and 530 […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote:

Tseng ET4000 cards are fine DOS VGA cards, but buying this beast just as a retro gaming card is like buying a large truck to do your daily groceries. Yes, it can do it, but it's unnecessarily big, unnecessarily expensive and you wouldn't even use half the functionality it offers.

You can get an ET6000 on eBay for 1/10 of what this card would cost you (or less than 1/3 of the price including shipping):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tseng-ET600-ATC-2165 … FQAAOSwi0xaPIP5

You do realise that you have linked to an auction?
Prices for non-auction are way higher than that, somewere between 130 and 530 US Dollars.

In reality, they will most likely not get sold, and the auction might end up on something like 100 US Dollars.
Else, you can check sold items.

Yes I'm aware I linked to an auction - an auction by a seller who misspelt the name of the card, does not have a minimum price and has a pile of other assorted old bits. And non-auction for USD 130-530? I'm sure there are people asking that sort of price, but you can easily get them for a fraction of that.

Quick google shows 2 for PLN 150 (EUR 35) in Poland:
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … rchiwum_allegro
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … ro&bi_c=Product

Didn't see any ET4000 or ET6100, but I'm confident they're out there for far less than hundreds of dollars.

To be honest. I did ask about this ET-4000, not because of how good it is with dos games. I have an ET4000-ISA and I did have an Diamond ET-6000 at one point. ET-4000's are good cards for the ISA slot. Yet the Diamonf ET-6000 are garbage when it comes to signal quality on some TFT/LCD monitors. I have no CRT, so I can not say anything about ET-6000 on that. On the other hand, S3-Trio64's, S3-Virge-125's and CL-5446 (all on PCI) are so much better than the Diamond ET6000. Faster and better VGA signal quality. Hence ET-6000's are totally overrated.[/]
Bad VGA picture quality doesn't have much to do with the VGA chip (even one that includes a RAMDAC), it's much more the consequence of the analog filters the card manufacturer implemented. So your bad experience here was with the filters Diamond decided to use with its ET6000 card, it doesn't say much about the chip or what other cards with the same chip would do.

All I did ask about, is what the special feature of this ET4000-PCI card is. Useability of the ET-4000 chip is something I know allready. I have had ET-3000's in both 16 and 8 bit slots as well. I have no experience regarding ET-6100 and cards before ET-3000 though.

The special feature is video in / video capture (with what looks like a SCSI connector to record directly to disk.

As for the ET6100, it was basically the same as the ET6000, but with an upgraded RAMDAC allowing higher resolutions/refresh rates, eg. 1280x1024@75Hz. Not much else changed.

Profi versions have often limited resolutions and sometimes also colors. So beware. Seen profi versions with mono output in DOS and with very limited vesa support. So its a lotery.

vlask wrote:

Profi versions have often limited resolutions and sometimes also colors. So beware. Seen profi versions with mono output in DOS and with very limited vesa support. So its a lotery.

He should buy it 🤣 Think such "features" would be software limitations which can be fixed with another Bios or Software VESA driver...

Well... As they did not have any ISA, and asked me if there was something else that I might wanted.
I told them that the only thing I had any interrest in, might be the ET-4000 PCI card.
They were kind enough to offer me this card instead of the ISA at no extra cost.
12 US Dollars plus shipping, not bad if it can do full color and stuff like a standard ET-4000.
I will report back here, with results regarding these things. Do people want benchmarks as well?

dionb wrote:

Quick google shows 2 for PLN 150 (EUR 35) in Poland:
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … rchiwum_allegro
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … ro&bi_c=Product

I acknowledge that you can get it cheaper, yet this is only if you can speak, read and write Polish in this case.
Wich I guess not many people can do here on Vogons or globally. So I only searched on the net for prices, were English is used.

brostenen wrote:

dionb wrote:

Quick google shows 2 for PLN 150 (EUR 35) in Poland:
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … rchiwum_allegro
http://allegro.pl/grafika-tseng-labs-et6000-2 … ro&bi_c=Product

I acknowledge that you can get it cheaper, yet this is only if you can speak, read and write Polish in this case.
Wich I guess not many people can do here on Vogons or globally. So I only searched on the net for prices, were English is used.

My Polish also doesn't go much further than piwo, wodka and bigos (and a few words not suited to a decent internet forum as this one 😉 ). Fortunately there's always Google Translate (built into Chrome these days), which is very useful as a lot of vintage stuff seems to have ended up in that part of the world, and can frequently be snapped up for far less than in the US or Western Europe.

Well... I finally had the time to test this ET4000-PCI and it is great. (depending it is an ET4000).

I tested it in my P-166/32mb Ram/Orchid-V1/AWE64-Gold machine.
It gives 125,8 in 3D-Bench, and the video signal is strong. Stronger than I have ever seen on an ET4000 card.
Plus the image on an TFT/LCD monitor does not have any spaghetti/vertical lines at all. (a big plus in my book)

Compared to my S3-Trio64v+ that I have build it with, it is slow. The S3 gives a little over 138 in 3D-Bench.
I tested it with Raptor, Doom2 and Duke3d. The only problem is that Duke has minor gfx problem were this
card will freeze for about an millisecond or so. Everything else runs butter smooth with all colours present.

Anyway...
This card is really good for an ET4000. Though it is an ET4000, then I recommend it for an 486/PCI system.
I certainly do not complain about this card. It is just wonderfull.
Last thing... It is running a bit warm, though a case with good ventilation should take care of that.

Tested and can only recommend this for anyone that want something a bit different in their build.

EDIT:
Ohhh... Forgot to mention... The card has 2mb of video memory.

It's a fine chip, pretty nice for the ISA and VLB buses. Not the fastest, and there are compatibility issues comparable to or worse than S3.

No reason to pay much to get one for the PCI bus, since it has countless cheap alternatives.

firage wrote:

It's a fine chip, pretty nice for the ISA and VLB buses. Not the fastest, and there are compatibility issues comparable to or worse than S3.

Basically what I just reported.

firage wrote:

No reason to pay much to get one for the PCI bus, since it has countless cheap alternatives.

As I said... If you want something different and like something a bit obscure.
Just look at the price and see what price-range Trio64v+ cards go for these days.

It's cheap enough I tell you.