This evening's haul:
The ad was just for the minitower with contents, but when I was there I got a box with (crap) monitors, keyboards and cables too.
- Dedicated PICMG minitower (so not AT, basically just ten slots onderneath the PSU)
- Seasonic SS-300FS ATX PSU (30A on +5V 😀 )
- PICMG backplane (see below)
- Pentium 4 SBC (see below)
- DVD-RW (dead), DVD-ROM and CDRW drives
- 3.5" HD floppy, 3.5" USB card reader
- 80GB Seagate PATA HDD
- XFX GeForce4 MX4000 DDR TV PCI (supposedly conflicts with SBC)
- "USBVIA REV F" Via VT6212-based PCI USB2.0 card
- 2x 17" 1280x024 TN panel, VGA connector TFT screens (crap)
- HP USB keyboard, HP PS/2 keyboard, "Qboard" tenkeyless beige USB keyboard and a black Cherry PS/2 keyboard (rubber dome unfortunately)
- Wibra (NL low-price clothes shop...) and Logitech USB optical mice
- pile of floppy, IDE and power cables
The interesting bits in more detail:
1) the backplane:
PBPI-8SA VER:1.1
This is the reason I jumped on this ad. I have an old Wyse 386 consisting of a few interconnected ISA boards that need a backplane with external power to work. Pre-PICMG, but an ISA bus is an ISA bus, so this should work.
2) the SBC:
Arbor HiCore-i6411 Rev:1.1
- So 478, with i845GV chipset
- P4 2.4 Northwood and 2x 1GB PC3200 DDR1
- nice CF slot on the back too
xjas wrote:[...]
Cool stuff, depending on the chipset used that P4 board might have decent ISA compatibility (i.e. with DMA support.) Look for an ITE bridge chip. I've been keeping an eye out for something like that for a while.
ITE bridge chip: check.
DMA support: looks like it 😀
Assumption: working SB audio requires DMA, so is proof that DMA works.
First test I did was to take a known-good ISA non-PnP sound card (Aztech AZT2316A-based) and try to reserve the relevant IRQs (5, 10) and DMA (1) in BIOS. Then boot with my DOS 6.22-on-a-CF install. That failed, the card was simply not detected/usable by any of the CLI tools and did not produce audio in games.
Second test - on a hunch the problem was with resources, I grabbed the nearest - untested - ISA PnP sound card (AZT2320-based). Removed all reservations in BIOS, booted and - all the Soundblaster goodness I had hoped for, both CLI and in Doom2 😁
So at the very least my formerly untested Aztech/Packard Bell Rocky 2.5 modem/sound combo card is now tested and working, at least the sound bit is, and it seems this SBC has a fully functional ISA bus including DMA. At least, as long as my assumption about SB audio is correct...