Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-02-23, 00:21:

Before 1996, most support was on BBS or FTP servers. 1995-96 is when a lot of companies started putting more efforts into their website. It also didn't help that a lot of the established players had already gone backrupt by 1996. A lot of documentation is probably lost forever.

Yeah! I'm just old enough to have dialed into the Microsoft BBS just before it shut down, after reading about it in a book. I ran up a long distance bill.

WJG6260 wrote on 2023-02-22, 01:59:

Thanks for the tip! I tinkered with it some more and got things going. I had to set System BIOS Cacheable to disabled, and then […]
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Thanks for the tip! I tinkered with it some more and got things going. I had to set System BIOS Cacheable to disabled, and then it booted just fine and recognized all 1024k of L2. It’s weird to me that it will only boot with System BIOS Cacheable set as disabled and yet 0ws on cache and DRAM is fine.

This board is just truthfully quite weird overall. It’s very picky about SIMMs and can support 64MB of RAM (based on the EISA CFG) but only in the form of 4x16MB SIMMs. I tried such a configuration and it hung, even using a few different sets of SIMMs. 128MB seems to be a no-go. I have it temporarily running with 4x4MB.

It seems decently quick, but the main memory speed is low, in the ~23 MB/s range with an Am5x86-133. That doesn’t fare well for higher-speed operation. I can’t get 160MHz going, and don’t have a 100MHz oscillator for 150MHz operation. I should probably get some of those. It won’t boot with a 40MHz or 50MHz oscillator jumpered to 1x clk.

I’m really confused why the board freaks out at 40MHz. It should work just fine, but instead I get 53MHz on the Am5x86 and everything is slow. Weird.

It does work with a Pentium Overdrive, which is kind of interesting. It seems decently fast overall, but I haven’t really had the time to play with it much. I plan on doing some real testing and reporting back.

Oh, and SCSI is a nightmare on this board. It does not like the AHA-154x series of cards, nor does it like an AHA-2840/2A. I should try an AHA-152x, but got it going via IDE for now.

Hi, do you have jumper settings for this board? Thanks.