Re: Mach64 1 or 2MB?

Posted on 2016-11-18, 00:00

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The expansion card can be found if you know where to look. The key is to make sure you pay attention to the part number. Sometimes you can rob them off a PCI model, and sometimes not. I recently picked one up for $20 including shipping. I would compare a high resolution image of a working 2MB card …

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-17, 22:40

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Assuming your board supports hidden refresh, or has the flush circuit wired up, then there shouldn't be DMA issues. SCSI isn't the only device that uses DMA. Using your floppy drive or sound card will also cause problems on a poorly configured DLC type chip. Is the 82C206 chip on your motherboard …

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-17, 13:41

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You have to be really careful, because the register that controls the caching scheme on the DRx2 and DLC, changes the clock multiplier on the SXL. The DRx2 chip also contains cache coherency circuitry not present in the DLC/SXL. This should not matter on boards which supposedly support the DLC, but …

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-15, 23:00

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've owned two of those exact boards, however mine did not have the local bus slot soldered (just a regular ISA slot), though the pads are present. Both of my boards had some kind of defect with the 82C206 system chip, and DMA did not seem to be working properly. This problem affected my ability to …

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Re: Early vs. mature 486 chipsets

Posted on 2016-11-15, 13:05

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I doubt SiS Rabbit would work, because it's a true 386 chipset. The VIA 481/495 and the SiS460 are both designed for 486s, so they might work okay. On a 486, 12ns cache is ideally what you would want for 50MHz, but I've seen plenty of 40MHz 386 boards that use 20ns cache (with 15ns tag). RAM should …

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Re: Early vs. mature 486 chipsets

Posted on 2016-11-15, 06:22

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

From what I can tell, even the early 486 chipsets were pretty mature. The only important difference between old and new has to do with PCI and SRAM/DRAM strategies (like writeback, and interleaving)

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-15, 06:20

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wouldn't do 50MHz in the screamer. I would only try 50MHz on boards using 486 chipsets. It was a major problem for manufacturers to produce boards/chipsets that could handle the 486DX-50, and the VLSI topcat probably isn't up the to job. The Screamer was originally only designed for up to 33MHz …

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-15, 00:34

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes, the 40MHz SXL does support clock doubling. As far as I can tell, they work at 50MHz with no problems. I'm interested in boards from late 1991 to late 1992. Generally these boards are full length baby AT and still use a true 386 chipset (not hybrid one). Sometimes they even support DLC chips. …

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-14, 02:16

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I always felt the extra cache didn't make the chip that much faster, but 5% is still something. What's the deal with the situation where the SXL is actually slower than a DLC?

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-14, 02:15

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I tried 50MHz on an OPTi 495SX board. It wasn't stable even with cache disabled and memory timings lowered. 45MHz seemed to work most of the time. I think I tried my Peak/DM board too, and 50MHz was no go.

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Re: Cyrix/Ti 486DLC vs 486SXL

Posted on 2016-11-13, 23:04

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Golden 80s? As in 1980s?

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Re: OpenGL on Rage IIc

Posted on 2016-11-10, 23:05

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm curious why Rage IIc even exists if it's really a Rage II. Rage Pro was supposed to be the successor to/improved version of the Rage II+, with the main added features being AGP and OpenGL support. As far as I know they were both released around the same time, and both can be used as drop in …

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Re: OpenGL on Rage IIc

Posted on 2016-11-10, 00:17

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Can anyone clarify if Rage IIc is an improved Rage II+ or a stripped Rage Pro? Which driver set does it use?

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2016-11-10, 00:11

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Needs more EISA slots. But for an ISA/VL board it would be hard to do better. Maybe a later version of the SiS chipset with proper support for writeback when using DMA VLB SCSI controllers would be slightly better.

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Re: AMI Mark V Baby Screamer 386 dies spontaneously

Posted on 2016-11-09, 04:42

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Try pulling the cache chips. They may be from a questionable source in China, and it wouldn't surprise me if one developed a short. At least, I saw this kind of thing happen with the Chinese bought 128kx8 SRAM chips.

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Re: Is it possible to smoke a hard drive?

Posted on 2016-11-09, 02:52

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Once I was building a custom Y-cable power splitter, and I somehow managed to reverse the 5V and 12V lines (and grounds). That will definitely smoke a harddrive....at least the circuit board part of it.

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Re: Mach64 1 or 2MB?

Posted on 2016-11-07, 22:17

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Texture memory? This is Mach64GX. It's not a 3D card. Mach64 does have something called an "aperture" which is normally called a "linear frame buffer". It needs to be disabled on systems with more than 16MB of RAM. It uses system memory as the LFB, and ISA can't address more than 16MB.

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Re: Mach64 1 or 2MB?

Posted on 2016-11-06, 09:43

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You won't see the warning message unless the chips are bad.

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Re: NexGen Nx586-P90

Posted on 2016-11-06, 02:14

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Are there any nexgen boards that have FPU sockets? I'm really curious what the FPU performance was like, given that Intel abandoned discrete FPUs in the 486 generation due to bottlenecks.

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Re: Recommendations for fullscreen video on a 486 DX-66?

Posted on 2016-11-06, 00:23

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by Anonymous Coward

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Refer to this thread. Optivision OPV9100 MPEG2 decoder for EISA bus

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