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Re: T-398 turbo switch help

Posted on 2021-04-27, 03:45

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have one of these as well. A diagram would be great if some kind soul ever finds and uploads one. ;_; For what it's worth though, whilst I was looking for the settings, I ran across this picture. Setting mine to match the jumpers in the picture, produces a static '266'. https://www.vogons.org/ …

Re: 486 will not boot from floppy; will not read from floppy either

Posted on 2021-04-27, 00:24

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Is there an ECP DMA jumper setting for the board? I've met a few VLB boards with jumpers for the ECP DMA, even though they didn't feature built-in I/O beyond the keyboard controller.

Re: 486 will not boot from floppy; will not read from floppy either

Posted on 2021-04-26, 15:17

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Try a different I/O card. I had to junk a few I/O cards because the IDE and floppy ports wouldn't work no matter how I set the jumpers. Guess they do go bad...

Re: 486 will not boot from floppy; will not read from floppy either

Posted on 2021-04-26, 01:50

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Do the COM ports work? (test with a serial mouse) If the COM ports don't work either, then, barring mis-set jumpers someplace, odds are the crystal driving the Prime 2C's baud generator probably failed. This crystal should drive both the COM ports and the floppy controller. On my Prime 2C card, the …

Re: Elitegroup WH386SX-D BIOS (Non-Leading Edge WinPro 486 version)

Posted on 2021-04-20, 03:52

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A bit of a necropost, but I discovered this board was also used in the Olivetti PCS30 SX/40. If anyone would be so good as to dump the BIOS of that machine's board, that would be of great help. 😀

Re: Hacked PC Chips M537DMA33 / Amptron PM8400C/D (VX Pro II / VIA VPX) BIOS

Posted on 2021-04-18, 03:37

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Go ahead and add it to UH19 if you like. I've yet to see any issues, but then my board could simply be one of the 'good' ones.

Re: Prolink P386SX-25PW Motherboard

Posted on 2021-04-09, 20:55

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Some updates on this board: The TH'99 information does *NOT* specify which of the cache chips is Bank 0 or Bank 1. Bank 0 is U45 and U47. Bank 1 is U46 and U48. The board maxes out at 64KB of cache apparently, despite the chipset supposedly being able to cache more. Perhaps the TAGs become a factor? …

Re: Creative ISA Sound Card Floating Op-Amps Running Log/List

Posted on 2021-04-06, 22:34

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yeowch! Creative got mighty sloppy on that one. 😐 Thanks for the info as always!

Hacked PC Chips M537DMA33 / Amptron PM8400C/D (VX Pro II / VIA VPX) BIOS

Posted on 2021-04-05, 03:35

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just today I got this board from a swap meet. I got very lucky I guess, mine seems to work (knock on wood!). Discovered that PC CHIPS had disabled a good many options in the BIOS, probably to fake a better return rate on their product by locking various options to conservative settings. I re-enabled …

Re: Why I do this

Posted on 2021-04-01, 01:52

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm a repeat offender in this category. ALL of my retro boxes embrace the notion of scope creep. :P That being said, I'm trying a slightly different tack this time around: I'm building a Pentium MMX class system that emulates what I had back in the day, only with a select few parts improved to fix …

Re: Creative ISA Sound Card Floating Op-Amps Running Log/List

Posted on 2021-03-22, 07:29

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

don't buy 85 degree caps. buy 105 degree caps. they are built better and they only cost pennies more. also buy "low ESR" capacitors whenever possible. on a sound card, low ESR is not necessary, but if you are like me and you replace a lot of caps on a lot of computer parts, sometimes low ESR is …

Re: Need BIOS firmware for 386 Board Micronics Computers

Posted on 2021-03-22, 06:37

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How bizarre! Maybe the 8500VL didn't have enough silicon-chocolate sprinkles or something. (Or maybe said card was dependent on a feature that wasn't provided by the 460's limited VLB support.) I tried a variety of cards, Tridents, S3, Cirrus, even a fussy Chips F64300, and it didn't give me grief …

Re: Need BIOS firmware for 386 Board Micronics Computers

Posted on 2021-03-20, 20:47

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

@SSTV2 2GB-ish sounds about right for the updated Micronics BIOSes. Of course, I never tried the updated BIOSes so I couldn't tell you if they support anything higher capacity. It's interesting that they'd label an SiS 460, a 'MIC 471'. Perhaps Micronics was trying to upsell an older design? What's …

Re: Need BIOS firmware for 386 Board Micronics Computers

Posted on 2021-03-19, 23:12

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I did some probing of MIC 471 chip in Micronics GJX30G-04P motherboard and it turns out that MIC 471 is in fact either a SiS 85C460 or 85C461 chip, but not a 85C471 - its pinout doesn't match MIC 471's pinout. You actually probed every single pin of the MIC471 to determine that? According to the …

Re: Does anyone have an AMIBIOS for Alaris Leopard SLC2?

Posted on 2021-03-19, 02:54

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Interesting, that BIOS is dated 06/06/92.

Re: Fixing a PCChips m729 v1.2 mobo?

Posted on 2021-03-18, 06:25

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No beeps at all is usually a pretty poor sign. Could be anything, from broken/scratched traces, to a dead/corrupt BIOS chip, to a bad main crystal/clock generator, to broken reset logic, to a bad chip somewhere, etc. Simple things first, before you go much farther down the PC CHIPS rabbit hole: Did …

Re: Does anyone have an AMIBIOS for Alaris Leopard SLC2?

Posted on 2021-03-18, 05:57

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I do have an Alaris Leopard Rev.C system, but I'll have to dig it out to dump its AMIBIOS. I don't have any MR BIOS for it unfortunately, I'd love to give it a try! Edit: I just dug it out and dumped my AMIBIOS, it's also dated 11/11/92. Seems to be the most common vintage. Alaris Leopard Rev.C …

Re: 386/486 PC with Alaris Cougar 486BL MoBo

Posted on 2021-03-18, 05:46

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Apologies for digging up this rotten old corpse of a thread, but I got a different Alaris Cougar II board and a different CHIPS F64300 VLB card since my last post to this ancient thread. They work just fine together this time, and the Chips is behaving itself. My last board, I probably just ESD'd or …

Re: Need BIOS firmware for 386 Board Micronics Computers

Posted on 2021-03-18, 02:07

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A MIC 471 is a rebadged SiS 85C471. I have a Micronics JX30G VLB board with this chipset, and it works with the SIS471 config file under CTCHIP.

Re: Deskmaster 486 Cache...

Posted on 2021-03-14, 04:41

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You'll need 20ns or faster rated parts, 70ns will be much too slow to work as cache. 15ns ought to work without any trouble.

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