I would love to confirm this. In my testing I'm certain that DMA didn't work on my board despite there being options in the BIOS for selecting IRQs, if I remember correctly. I tried this with both the HP and FIC BIOS.

I use a Sound Blaster 2 Pro CT1600 for these kind of tests and would have tried all of the available jumper settings.

If you are able to make it work, please report back and I will test it again and try to match your configuration.

Awesome work on this board! I just recently came across this thread as I've been trying to find a board that fits my needs for a PIII system and purchased one of these KC-19+ boards in an attempt to see how the i820 chipset compares. It seems that it's pretty much on par with 440BX, from what I've read, so that sounds interesting to say the least, but the native 133MHz FSB is attractive and the AGP divider is definitely a big plus.

I'm curious about this PCI-ISA bridge chip. The datasheet for the PC87200 suggests full PC/PCI DMA support but doesn't have much to offer about ISA DMA. It's interesting to see the feature parity with the IT8888F that explicitly discusses DDMA and PC/PCI DMA separately. Admittedly, my understanding of the differences and intricacies here is fairly limited, so I'd be interested to see what anyone has to share on this topic.

I've read some success stories of using this board with a SoundBlaster 16 (one is here), but it seems that this PCI-ISA bridge is limited, at least when it comes to cards like the GUS that require various high DMAs. I'd be curious to see if an AWE64 would work in this board, as that could make quite the potent combination.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the HP->FIC BIOS flash must be done in Windows? I saw earlier on the thread that White and Gatewayuser200 found success with the HP utility, but is this in reference to the HP-provided Phoenix utility in DOS or the HP-provided Windows flash tool? I've found both, and I'll attach them here if anyone needs.

Part of what makes this board so attractive is that I'm coming from an ASUS CUV4X that just doesn't bring me much joy in terms of its quirkiness; it's a great board, no doubt, but the VIA chipset is definitely not clock-for-clock equal to 440BX and installing the 4-in-1 drivers seems to help, but not completely ameliorate, the VIA chipset's quirks when it comes to AGP. Speaking of, I swapped the board temporarily to an ASUS CUBX-E (which I may still use over the KC-19+) and found a huge difference in terms of GUI speed, even with a GF4 Ti4200. It seems others have noticed this phenomena. The KC-19+'s use of the i820 seems to be the best of both worlds, avoiding the 440BX's 133MHz overclocking situation and avoiding VIA screwiness. If the ISA situation is salvageable, at least in part, I'd think this board would be an attractive alternative to the more mainstream 440BX setups.

On my board, there is no DMA support on the ISA bus. My guess is that the other reference is a mistake, unless he has some other board revision or a different bridge chip.

It's important to clarify that Adlib sound will always work, regardless of DMA, and this can be misleading. DMA is only needed for digital sound effects, not FM or MIDI.

I see, thanks for clarifying as much. My board hasn't arrived yet, so I'm curious to see what the results will be. I wonder if there's different revisions of this board with slightly different bridge chips or something.

Thanks for the explanation as to the AdLib sound as well; I wasn't 100% sure as to whether it was an all-or-none thing, so it's good to know that it will just work.

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-20, 09:32:

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with […]
Show full quote

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with the Intel 820 chipset.

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/relea … 99/cs111599.htm

Besides the RDRAM, it was very interesting to see a board like this with not one but two ISA slots! Unfortunately, this board relies upon a large PC87200VUL PCI-ISA bridge chip which does not support DMA. This means that while music is possible, there will be no digital effects from a Sound Blaster.

This board is still a fun tool for comparing performance characteristics of SDRAM and RDRAM. It would be kind of silly but may be possible to run a Pentium 2 or possibility even a Pentium Pro with RDRAM with the right slocket adapter.

Another caveat is that the HP BIOS will NOT allow you to skip the memory test at boot and this makes a cold boot or reboot a very long and boring process. Especially if you are running a slower CPU paired with a large amount of memory. It is possible to fix this by flashing the FIC BIOS but this is not trivial as it requires the use of an external programmer.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with this but the lack of DMA on the ISA bus really ruins it for me. But maybe someone else can find a use case for this. I would say that it's still a nice board to add to a collection as long as you understand its limitations.

Note that this board normally has the BIOS chip soldered on without a socket. In my photo there is a socket because I put one in after reprogramming the chip. I wasn't sure at the time if the FIC BIOS would work and didn't want to brick my board.

The AGP slot is also universal so that's neat.

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The attachment IMG_20211220_034101_resize_85.jpg is no longer available

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Hello, i've the same card. The HP oem version. I haven't found system panel connectors description and the kc19+ Dfi IS different from the HP version. Have you got the solution ?

slash032 wrote on 2024-11-01, 10:50:

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-20, 09:32:

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with […]
Show full quote

I picked this board up on eBay out of curiosity. I'd never heard of a Slot 1 supporting RDRAM but this is a real thing with with the Intel 820 chipset.

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/relea … 99/cs111599.htm

Besides the RDRAM, it was very interesting to see a board like this with not one but two ISA slots! Unfortunately, this board relies upon a large PC87200VUL PCI-ISA bridge chip which does not support DMA. This means that while music is possible, there will be no digital effects from a Sound Blaster.

This board is still a fun tool for comparing performance characteristics of SDRAM and RDRAM. It would be kind of silly but may be possible to run a Pentium 2 or possibility even a Pentium Pro with RDRAM with the right slocket adapter.

Another caveat is that the HP BIOS will NOT allow you to skip the memory test at boot and this makes a cold boot or reboot a very long and boring process. Especially if you are running a slower CPU paired with a large amount of memory. It is possible to fix this by flashing the FIC BIOS but this is not trivial as it requires the use of an external programmer.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with this but the lack of DMA on the ISA bus really ruins it for me. But maybe someone else can find a use case for this. I would say that it's still a nice board to add to a collection as long as you understand its limitations.

Note that this board normally has the BIOS chip soldered on without a socket. In my photo there is a socket because I put one in after reprogramming the chip. I wasn't sure at the time if the FIC BIOS would work and didn't want to brick my board.

The AGP slot is also universal so that's neat.

The attachment IMG_20211220_034130_resize_98.jpg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_20211220_034101_resize_85.jpg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_20211220_041729_resize_65.jpg is no longer available

Hello, i've the same card. The HP oem version. I haven't found system panel connectors description and the kc19+ Dfi IS different from the HP version. Have you got the solution ?

Did you check your post - Front panel Dfi kc19+ HP oem

The HP VL600 uses the FIC KC19+ (HP OEM) board - https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?page=1& … e=24&name=vl600

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-28, 18:30:

On my board, there is no DMA support on the ISA bus. My guess is that the other reference is a mistake, unless he has some other board revision or a different bridge chip.

It's important to clarify that Adlib sound will always work, regardless of DMA, and this can be misleading. DMA is only needed for digital sound effects, not FM or MIDI.

Little bump: I have this board too now and blindly assumed your experience was definitive - but on a whim I decided to give it a try this evening and I think I have DMA working 🅾️

First off given your guess about revisions/bridge chips a run-down of what I have:

FIC KC19+ with sticker stating "REVC05"
Nat Semi PC87200VUL briedge chip, with "A3" indication on it, exactly as pictured here
I might have a different BIOS to the two listed on TheRetroweb, my string is "HY.91.03DU"
Sound hardware: Terratec EWS64 (hardly the simplest card, but I had a spare lying around...)
FWIW other hardware: P3-500 Katmai, 2x 128MB PC800 ECC RDRAM, Diamond Stealth3D 2000 (S3 Virge) 2MB, Quantum Fireball ST 1.6GB IDE HDD

So why do I think I have DMA working? Well, Doom2 with working sound effects makes me think so 😉

But I think I also understand why it didn't work for you:
- to get it to work at all I needed to disable onboard CS4280 audio
- I can only make it work with playback on DMA3
- If I try to set DMA to 0, I get typical no DMA symptoms: AdLib and MIDI on 330 work fine, but no SB sound effects
- if I try DMA 1, I get conflicts and the EWS64 can't initialize.

What I suspect is going on:
- the PC87200VUL supports DMA via PC/PCI, as stated in the datasheet
- the onboard CS4280 also supports PC/PCI
- somehow the two implementations conflict, either at BIOS or hardware level, resulting in DMA 0 and 1 being unavailable for ISA but DMA 3 is.

Having said this, I'll now try to dig up a simpler, less tempramental (preferably non-PnP) sound card to verify my findings.

Edit:
Re-tested with a very non-PnP Sound Blaster 16 CT1750 MCD (that urgently needs re-capping by the sound of it). Similar same story:
- did not need to disable onboard CS4280 to get things to work, in fact I didn't even need to reserve IRQ5
- DMA 0 no SB sound effects
- DMA 1 no SB sound effects (no noticeable conflicts either though)
- DMA 3 working SB sound effects

I'll have to pull my board out to confirm. I most likely used DMA 1 with a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 in my testing and didn't try the jumper on a different DMA channel, since this is the default.

Isn't DMA 1/3 for low/high DMA the default for the Sound Blaster 16? I'm wondering if there are games hard coded to DMA 1 that would fail. I've never configured a Sound Blaster Pro to be on DMA 3; always preferring the defaults when possible.

Me too, but when things don't work I try other options...

Default for SB16 is DMA1 low, DMA5 high. Using DMA3 for 'high' DMA was more something for buggy boards that didn't support 16b DMA properly, or ALS100+/120 chipsets that only implemented double-low DMA for their SB16 compatibility. I don't think you can even select this on the CT1750, it can only use 5, 6 or 7 for high DMA.

Hard-coded games are pretty brain-dead in any case, but yep, they'd fail (or rather: not give SB digital audio) on this board.

I haven't got this hooked up just yet, but my revision is REVC09, for reference.

I haven't been able to get mine to POST. The lights come on but there is no video. The system beeps if no memory is presented but not if there is no video card; I don't know if this is normal for this BIOS.

I reflashed the BIOS chip, just in case, but it's still not working. I added a PLCC socket to this system originally, but my soldering still looks fine. I'm not certain why it would stop working after being stored in an antistatic bag.

I tried both PCI and AGP video cards (Rage XL, Voodoo 3 AGP, GeForce FX 5200, and GeForce 2 MX), and three different memory sticks.

I tried various Pentium 2s and 3s with 100, and 133Mhz FSB, and confirmed that the CPU should be supported.

When I connected the ATX power connector, I didn't realize that the PSU was set to ON, and the system tried booting while it was plugging it in as I was connecting it. It's possible that I damaged it at this time.

I bought another one of these for testing, but found that it had the same problem as my other one with not being able to POST. Any thoughts? I noticed that some of the capacitors near the PCI slots were bulging a little. I'm not certain if it's related to this problem though.

I'm currently populating the board with a Pentium II (SL2U3) 100 Mhz * 3 @ 350 Mhz, which is indicated as supported by the KC19+ manual, a single stick of 256 MB of 800 Mhz RDRAM, and a PCI Rage XL. I also swapped in a brand new CMOS battery.

I get beeps and boops when it turns on, including the keyboard lights flashing briefly. It also emits the correct beeps whenever the memory size changes, indicating that the BIOS is recognizing new hardware. However, I can't get any video out of it.