First post, by mpe
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This motherboard I am playing with (Abit PG5) has more slots than I can recognise. I get PCI, ISA and cache CELP slot for COAST. But what goes to the other two?
Reply 1 of 7, by Anonymous Coward
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According to others on this forum, the brown slow between the PCI and ISA is a "PISA" slot. I believe this carries the signals of both the PCI and ISA bus. I *think* it can accept regular ISA cards, but its main function is likely to take riser cards so that you can breakout PCI and ISA slots for low profile computers.
That other brown slot near the keyboard controller is something highly proprietary. It looks like Abit reused a COAST slot for some kind of add-on. Does the SiS chipset on this board support any kind of integrated multimedia functions? Perhaps the slot is a breakout for sound or graphics functions.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
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Reply 2 of 7, by Repo Man11
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The slot just below the RAM slots is called a "VGA Slot". https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/A … um-PG5-PCI.html
"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey
Reply 3 of 7, by Horun
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Yes the brown slot near SIMMS is a proprietary video slot for a specific Abit card. Using the Wayback machine found links to drivers for that specific card but no documentation.
Unfortunately could not DL any of the drivers (really want to take a peak inside) but did get the last BIOS dated 5/13/1996
Update: found 5 of the Video driver files thru a foreign site, the special vid card was a SIS 6205 based according to the text inside...
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Last edited by Horun on 2020-08-03, 00:58. Edited 1 time in total.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Reply 4 of 7, by PC Hoarder Patrol
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@Horun, drivers are here ftp://retronn.de/mirrors/www.elhvb.com_moboki … it/drivers/pg5/
Reply 5 of 7, by Horun
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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-08-03, 00:56:@Horun, drivers are here ftp://retronn.de/mirrors/www.elhvb.com_moboki … it/drivers/pg5/
🤣 thanks found them at another site just before seeing your post
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Reply 6 of 7, by mpe
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Thanks.
That's interesting. I wonder why they had a need to add the proprietary VGA slot. I don't see any references to that in SiS 5511 datasheet. So perhaps some proprietary form of unified memory architecture solution? Or combining selected ISA signals for Soundblaster-compatible combined VGA+sound?
Reply 7 of 7, by dionb
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mpe wrote on 2020-08-03, 07:01:Thanks.
That's interesting. I wonder why they had a need to add the proprietary VGA slot. I don't see any references to that in SiS 5511 datasheet. So perhaps some proprietary form of unified memory architecture solution? Or combining selected ISA signals for Soundblaster-compatible combined VGA+sound?
Yes, this is for UMA.
SiS 5511 was the first chipset that supported that, when coupled to an external SiS 620x VGA chip. Performance was - as would be expected - absolutely horrendous, but as a proof-of-concept it was successful and later SiS integrated VGA and memory controller into one chip, the 5596.
Hadn't seen this slot before, but did have a 5511 board with 6202 onboard in UMA. It's like the missing link of computer graphics 😉