VOGONS


First post, by noshutdown

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the topic starts with et4000: i have two of them, one made in 9002, which is among the earliest of them, and the other is made in 9534, which i think is pretty late as most et4000s are made prior to 1992, 1993 and later are less common.
but then i saw the picture of an et4000 made in 9701! whose layout is similar to my 9534 one anyway, just that all components have been replaced with smt variants. this really surprised me as isa cards are already fading out at that time, and the performance of et4000 is no longer competetive due to lacking acceleration. i know some low end cards were still in existence by then, even the very fast cirrus5434 is quite compact to save on costs, but et4000 is not expected to be a low cost solution like the tridents.
this doesn't mean that i consider that et4000 to be the latest isa video card, but reminds me of some trident8900dr cards made in year 2000, even equipped with 2 pieces of 16*256 -25ns 100mhz single clock edo ram chips... the 8900dr is supposed to be 8900d with integrated bios, not sure if there are other differences.
as for the latest pci card... they carried on till at least the 2010s but were all low end crap, i think the ati radeon9100(8500le) is the last pci video card of decent position.

Reply 1 of 6, by noshutdown

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noshutdown wrote on 2025-10-27, 12:27:

but then i saw the picture of an et4000 made in 9701! whose layout is similar to my 9534 one anyway, just that all components have been replaced with smt variants. this really surprised me as isa cards are already fading out at that time, and the performance of et4000 is no longer competetive due to lacking acceleration. i know some low end cards were still in existence by then, even the very fast cirrus5434 is quite compact to save on costs, but et4000 is not expected to be a low cost solution like the tridents.

update: i looked up the pictures, and there are actually pictures of TWO cards of the same model, one made in 9701, and the other one made in 9803! phew.

Reply 3 of 6, by Ozzuneoj

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I have a boxed STB Nitro 64 (Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434 2MB) with a warehouse label dated some time in 1999. I think that's pretty late for ISA.

If you want to talk about the latest video chip used on an ISA video card, the Saliant Systems AT3000 equipped with a Sierra Falcon64 is latest one in my collection:
Salient Systems Corp. AT3000 - Sierra Falcon64 + TIGA ISA VGA Card from 1995!

Pretty sure the Falcon64 is from 1995 and was only ever on PCI cards aside from this oddball.

I have yet to find drivers for that, so if anyone stumbles upon them somewhere I would love to be able to test it. 😀

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4 of 6, by Grzyb

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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-07, 07:03:

I have yet to find drivers for that, so if anyone stumbles upon them somewhere I would love to be able to test it. 😀

Doesn't the Falcon64 part work with normal Falcon64 drivers?

Nie rzucim ziemi, skąd nasz root!

Reply 5 of 6, by Ozzuneoj

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Grzyb wrote on 2025-11-07, 07:15:
Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-07, 07:03:

I have yet to find drivers for that, so if anyone stumbles upon them somewhere I would love to be able to test it. 😀

Doesn't the Falcon64 part work with normal Falcon64 drivers?

Sort of, but it's got a lot of issues. I feel like the original drivers would probably function better since it's an ISA card rather than PCI... but I don't really know how that works, honestly. Maybe the card is just not intended for use in Windows and doesn't function very well there. The post in that thread has some information about possible places that had the driver at one point, but the links are dead, sadly.

I would also just like to see what the card is supposed to do with the full driver package, because it's a very odd combination to have a PCI-era 64bit accelerator combined with an old school TIGA chip with 10MB of memory.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.