VOGONS


First post, by lolo799

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Imagine you have a somewhat old computer (with a couple of available PCI 2.1 slots) and you decide you need a new machine, but an ATX motherboard won't fit into your AT case, and you don't want to buy a new case for some reasons, what would you do?
Sure you can upgrade your existing first gen Pentium to the max of its capability but you want to give a new life to your computer, and you already have the best Pentium MMX money can get, so you're screwed, or it seems so.

Enter the DTK Assist Card PC, a PC, on a card, snugglingly fitting into one of your PCI slots, which can use up to a 800MHz socket370 CPU, with it's own RAM and network card. And with a soundchip, usb ports and hdd on another PCI board, even an optional modem can be there, isn't life great all of a sudden!
All those applications will be flying now, and the games, man, the games, with its amazing Intel 3D Graphics chip, ok, maybe not really intensive 3D games with full details, but you don't play anything else than Solitaire anyway, right?

That was the good stuff, now for the bad, there are no serial and parallel ports on this, so no way to use any parallel sound devices if you intend to play DOS games in pure DOS, you're stuck with the KC-1206 buzzer.

The Assist Card has 2 RTL8139 chips as you can see below, one is used by the Assist card and the other one by the host system, that only sees a network card plugged.

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You can check the website and manuals at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010502191110/dt … st.co.jp/cardpc
https://web.archive.org/web/20030508083308/ht … load/cardpc.PDF

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 1 of 5, by lolo799

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The card works with my Asus P55T2P4, though the screen did flicker/turn off for a very short time every so often...
It takes a lot of space inside, I had to remove my Voodoo 1, network and SB16 cards to fit the Assist card and its optional sound/usb/hdd board.

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Some benchmarking, 3DMark2000 in 1024*768

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3DMark 2001 in 1024*768:

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And in 640*480

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PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 4 of 5, by cyclone3d

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Looks like you can add as many of these to one system as you have PCI slots... and the host computer still operates as a normal computer.

That being said, you could probably get a PCI expansion chassis and fill it up with a bunch of these cards and have 8 or more systems in one case.

Interesting product indeed.. just pretty useless for gaming it sounds like.

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Reply 5 of 5, by phosgene

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Looks like one of those old remote management cards you'd use in a server, minus the DC jack for a system independent power supply. They were very similar to your card in terms of being a full PC on a PCI card.