What do you plan on putting on the ISA slots?
Because that's the advantage of this mono against ordinary ones.

Asd

There are a lot of 430tx ATX motherboards with 4 isa slots and 4 PCI slots, where you could put a 100mbps ethernet card, 2x voodoo2 in sli and a matrox or nvidia tnt2 pci and still be able to use 3 isa sound cards.
Does the industrial mobo provide overclocking (multi change, fsb at 83MHz and voltage adjustments)?

You could always use a regular, new, super-fast SSD with an ultra-cheap sata->ide converter (dos compatible option), or even a PCI --> Sata controller in Windows 98.

Ok, it can and will be fun, it is extraordinary, but apart from that I don't think it's gonna provide something useful to you. 😉
Keep in mind that an ISA vga will GREATLY degrade performance.

That's a nice looking board - I have a similar one with an identical layout, although it needs to be recapped. Not sure yet if I'll use it in one of my final builds, but this is what I had in mind for it:

1) PCI 1: Since you can disable onboard VGA (which is a nice S3 chipset), choose another PCI VGA card to partner it and switch with - a Voodoo/ ATI/ NV/ TSENG variant.

2) Remaining 6x ISA slots:

ISA 1: See if you can find a slow ISA VGA card you can switch with:
486 Mobos: Can you install multiple VGA cards - like AGP/ PCI switching?

ISA 2: MPU-401

ISA 3: GUS

ISA 4: Sound blaster

ISA 5: Game blaster

ISA 6: Reelmagic MPEG card

Enjoy!

This will be an interesting build.

Asd

The Virge might have wimpy 3D, but it's a solid S3 2D core as far as I remember.

Asd

A Virge/DX (375) is not as weak as you think. After all, S3 have been making graphics chips for several years when they designed that chip. The video modes will pretty much be restricted by the 2MB RAM.
You should be able to get 800x600@24bit (1024x768 needs 4MB), 1024x768@16bit (1280x1024 needs 4MB) and 1600x1200@8bit (which is probably to blurry anyway). Heck, even image with the specs you linked to mentions 1024x768@16bpp.
Mach32 was introduced in 1992 while Virge/DX was introduced in 1996. S3 wouldn't have been successful for so long without descent resolutions and colour depth.

frisky dingo wrote:

calvin wrote:

The Virge might have wimpy 3D, but it's a solid S3 2D core as far as I remember.

That's what I'm thinking, but iirc it has res limits, something like a max of 256 colors @ 1024x768 or something. And a max of 16 but color overall where as my Mach32 can do 24bit color. I will have to wait and see what it can do. That all aside I picked out a cpu, a 200mhz mmx pentium. I also found a old U1 copper cooler master heatsink and a fan that should work. Now just to find the mounting bracket, were did I put that? 😕

Put that ISA ATI card in P-233MMX system and you'll have it behave like a low end 486. If that is your purpose, then go ahead 😉 24-bit color on ISA bus is very slow and it simply can't compare to S3 Virge PCI.

MACH32 PCI cards do exist. From what pictures I could find those were made at least in 1993.

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frisky dingo wrote:

It's coming along nicely. I'm still working on it so it will look much better when done. I also routed the vga output directly to the voodoo 2

Looking very nice! Can't wait to see more pics.

Isn't a voodoo 2 sli, overkill for a pentium 200mmx ?from what I been reading on vogons, u need a much faster proc to benefit from the sli.

Asd

frisky dingo wrote:

I'm betting a single voodoo 2 would be best.

Yeah i think that too,even if u have the ability to play games at 1024x768 with the SLI,not sire if the cpu has the power for that.