Wow Guys, THANK YOU ALL! This is getting very interesting.
As first reply, I'd say that the VLB 386 was just a cherry. The main goal of this topic was my kid-dream of having a 486 socket to pseudo-VLB additional connector(s). So, it was for 486s mainly. At those times, there were A LOT of ISA-only 486s, so, there could have been market for such an adapter.
TheMobRules wrote:I don't think the cost of designing and producing such a device would have been reasonable vs getting an actual VLB motherboard (assuming it is somehow feasible to build something like what you are describing).
On the other hand, motherboards with VLB slots that support 386 processors do exist (you will find a few threads about those in this forum).
• Probably right. However, considering Evergreen even made a 1 to 2 486 CPUs SMP double socket adapter... Reading the topic with yesterday's eyes, we can see tons of 486 owners with ISA-only motherboards that could have been potentially interested in a single upgrade/adaptor that could have made their system upgradable for quite a while (controllers, SVGAs, etc.).
• Wow! I didn't know VLB 386s existed!!!
dionb wrote:Yep. Particularly if you consider the Blue Lightnings to be "386". Leaving out all the weird cabling, what you're describing sounds suspiciously like an Alaris Leopard or Cougar.
Never heard of these... will Google this stuff! Thanks.
Anonymous Coward wrote:Such an adpater *might* be possible, but I'd have to look at all the pins on the VL bus to see where they go. It's possible that a few pins are special control lines that go to the chipset, and maybe specific chipset support for VLB is required.
The other problem I see is shielding. VLB is a noisy bus, and you're going to need a relatively long cable to go from the CPU slot to the VLB card edge.
I have actually been thinking of making a similar adapter. Not for VLB, but to add a 16-bit ISA connector to an 8086 CPU.
WOW MAN! Are your really able to make such a thing? Or at least to even "try" to make it? Or at least to even know where one should start in theory? What are you? An electronic engineer? Where would you start? Where to get a board? How to build the lanes on the board??? The control chips?
kixs wrote:FYI... there are 386 motherboards with VLB slots out there. I own a few.
As for the project... if someone has the know-how and if it's possible at all... I say go ahead 😀
• As I said, I had no idea they existed! WOW!
• Definitely: go ahead guys!!! Show us pics and benchmarks!! hehe
The Serpent Rider wrote:Are there any games which clearly benefit from having VLB card on a 386 system?
You have a point!
Well, but it wasn't only for video cards. What about controllers? EIDE PIOMODE4, or even Ultra ATA and SCSI VLB controllers!
Imagine then the performance benefits on file servers... Small to large companies with huge infrastructures... would have been able to upgrade their systems by only adding the adapter and a VLB controller, keeping their servers for a long time...
Scali wrote:
My guess would be 'no'...
You raise interesting points. However, let's not forget that a 486 DX2 66 could have been used for quite a while after the release of DX4s and Pentiums. Games were evolving at a fast pace, and soon became unusable on even DX2 66 CPUs. But with such an adaptor and just upgrading the video card with a new / expensive one, people could have kept playing with "modern" games on their 486s...
Then there's, as mentioned above, the benefits of using VLB controllers. Countless 486s had not even EIDE onboard connectors, just IDE.... with only ISA slots...
matze79 wrote:it is not really faster to use VLB on 386DX40, because the limit here is often memory bandwith and cpu power.
As above, thanks though!
feipoa wrote:There are some VLB+"386" results in this post, Re: Post your 386 Speedsys results here . You'll have to read a few pages to make sense of it. From what I recall, VLB+Am386DX had practically no benefit. The benefits of VLB+386 seemed to manifest when using the DRx2-66 CPU. I would like to see a more in depth study on this topic though.
Cyrix made something similar to what you are describing. It was called the Cyrix MediaGX and used a special socket 7 motherboard. It was ahead of its time.
Wow Feipoa, you're always a resource!
And I'll Google those MediaGX creatures... curious!
jesolo wrote:Keropi recently posted a thread about a 3/486 motherboard he was trying to identify but, he managed to find info for it before a […]
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Keropi recently posted a thread about a 3/486 motherboard he was trying to identify but, he managed to find info for it before anyone replied and therefore removed his post.
It was this motherboard: http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/m/U-Z/32085.htm.
I saw the post and started to chat to him about it and he actually managed to get a VLB card working with a 386DX-40 CPU.
He tested it as follows (hope it's OK for me to share this):
with an ISA WD90C30 vga and got these results:
wolf3d: 29.1fps
doom: 9.38fps
- with a VLB WD90C33 vga:
wold3d: 43.9fps
doom: 11.7fps
Based on the above, there definitely seems to be some speed improvement when pairing a 386DX-40 with a VLB graphics card (if you can get it working) but, even so, Doom performance is still not close to what will make it enjoyable to play and, as such, there probably is no real world benefit of pairing a VLB graphics card with a 386 CPU.
It would be interesting to see how it compares with perhaos an ET4000 ISA & VLB graphics card.
Interesting data, thanks bro!
And it would also be great/interesting to compare and benchmark other video cards, like S3864 or 928 or 964 or ATI Mach64, and also EIDE controllers as said above... SCSI, why not!!?
Thanks everyone!
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