Amigaz wrote:

Actually the case reminds me a bit of the Amiga 3000T's "bulky" look […]
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WolverineDK wrote:

Amigaz, when the job is finished, you can always make it more Amiga like in its look. Since after all Amigaz is a way of saying Amigas in warez. And also I know you are a cool Amiga fan, and no wonder why you love the GUS. It sounds like the Amiga sound.

Actually the case reminds me a bit of the Amiga 3000T's "bulky" look

How did you know I was a GUS-freak? 😁

Playing .mod music thru the GUS rocks...I prefer the to play for example Pinball Fantasies on the PC because of the GUS plays the music with more richness
It's pretty amazing though what you can squeeze out of the Amiga's Paula custom chips which are dated way back to 1985....you can squeeze out 14bit stereo sound out of an Amiga with it's built in sound

First of all, I am a collector of information (don´t worry I am not a Private eye, since I would be too good at it). And second of all, I have read your posts about GUS, and your love for the Amiga. And even i who has only heard GUS through DOSbox emulation, then I feel the GUS sounds a lot like the old Amiga, and yes I knew it had 14 bits of sound in the machine, but damn it was some serious smashing great 14 bits sound that came out 😀
Heck, back in the 90´s I was a member of a Danish local computer club that used Amiga computers, so no wonder why I love the sound of the GUS. But I don´t have the card, but I do love it. And Amigaz, I do know your nationality too. Heck, you live in my brother country.

Amigaz wrote:

The motherboard is made my Elitegroups and called UM4980

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard...M4980.html

The great thing with it is that you can set the non turbo mode speed in 16 steps all the way down to 8mhz XT mode so there's very few games this baby can't handle

This seems to be an incredibly useful feature. I thought that most motherboards offer only two speeds, normal and turbo. My question is if there are any Pentium Class motherboards that offer a similar feature.

Great Hierophant wrote:

This seems to be an incredibly useful feature. I thought that most motherboards offer only two speeds, normal and turbo. My question is if there are any Pentium Class motherboards that offer a similar feature.

I agree, looks very handy. It would be interesting to know if the board reduces the actual clock rate or just throws in waitstates somewhere. Since it is a VLB board and the CMOS setup option reads "Hold CPU Percentage", I suspect it's the latter.

Actually I've never encountered a local bus board (VLB or PCI) that really slows down the clock rate when depressing the turbo button, probably because it would have been rather expensive to implement.

On a side note, those advanced slowdown features are more often found on OEM boards built into brand-name PCs (Dell, Compaq, etc...) than on retail hardware.

There is that famous Dell Optiplex GXPro series Trixter mentions here, I think some Vogons members actually own one of these.

A long time ago I had a Compaq 386SX box with a similar feature: The CPU could be slowed down by pressing a key combination. The funny thing was that it also automatically slowed down whenever the floppy drive was accessed, in order to keep compatibility with some very ancient speed dependent copy protection routines. Now imagine the typical game of 1992 playing an AdLib tune while loading data from the floppy - it sounded like an old tape recorder gone out of whack... 🙄

Amigaz wrote:

I'm kind of weak for these full towers..samudra made my buy two Colani designed Highscreen towers too, hehe

I really hope you're not going to post pictures of these, I don't want to see those ugly Colani blobs ever again!

...and btw, very nice system specs!

Hehe, show them the pictures Amigaz. Maybe it works like an exorcism.

samudra wrote:

Hehe, show them the pictures Amigaz. Maybe it works like an exorcism.

hehe, I'll spam them with pics 😁

Great Hierophant wrote:

Amigaz wrote:

The motherboard is made my Elitegroups and called UM4980

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard...M4980.html

The great thing with it is that you can set the non turbo mode speed in 16 steps all the way down to 8mhz XT mode so there's very few games this baby can't handle

This seems to be an incredibly useful feature. I thought that most motherboards offer only two speeds, normal and turbo. My question is if there are any Pentium Class motherboards that offer a similar feature.

If there's such a socket 7 mobo I gotta know 😎

5u3 wrote:

I agree, looks very handy. It would be interesting to know if the board reduces the actual clock rate or just throws in waitstat […]
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Great Hierophant wrote:

This seems to be an incredibly useful feature. I thought that most motherboards offer only two speeds, normal and turbo. My question is if there are any Pentium Class motherboards that offer a similar feature.

I agree, looks very handy. It would be interesting to know if the board reduces the actual clock rate or just throws in waitstates somewhere. Since it is a VLB board and the CMOS setup option reads "Hold CPU Percentage", I suspect it's the latter.

Actually I've never encountered a local bus board (VLB or PCI) that really slows down the clock rate when depressing the turbo button, probably because it would have been rather expensive to implement.

On a side note, those advanced slowdown features are more often found on OEM boards built into brand-name PCs (Dell, Compaq, etc...) than on retail hardware.

There is that famous Dell Optiplex GXPro series Trixter mentions here, I think some Vogons members actually own one of these.

A long time ago I had a Compaq 386SX box with a similar feature: The CPU could be slowed down by pressing a key combination. The funny thing was that it also automatically slowed down whenever the floppy drive was accessed, in order to keep compatibility with some very ancient speed dependent copy protection routines. Now imagine the typical game of 1992 playing an AdLib tune while loading data from the floppy - it sounded like an old tape recorder gone out of whack... 🙄

Amigaz wrote:

I'm kind of weak for these full towers..samudra made my buy two Colani designed Highscreen towers too, hehe

I really hope you're not going to post pictures of these, I don't want to see those ugly Colani blobs ever again!

...and btw, very nice system specs!

If knew I would find this mobo I would never have bought my 386 PC's, I could have cope with this system and my 286 for those really ancient games

Haven't checked if the floppy access is slowed down yet

That Dell Gx Pro just slows down to 8mhz XT mode? which isn't very good if you want to run for example Wing Commander 1 or Ultima VI, VII which are very sensitive to fast 486 cpu or bigger/faster cpu's

5u3 wrote:

I agree, looks very handy. It would be interesting to know if the board reduces the actual clock rate or just throws in waitstat […]
Show full quote

Great Hierophant wrote:

This seems to be an incredibly useful feature. I thought that most motherboards offer only two speeds, normal and turbo. My question is if there are any Pentium Class motherboards that offer a similar feature.

I agree, looks very handy. It would be interesting to know if the board reduces the actual clock rate or just throws in waitstates somewhere. Since it is a VLB board and the CMOS setup option reads "Hold CPU Percentage", I suspect it's the latter.

Actually I've never encountered a local bus board (VLB or PCI) that really slows down the clock rate when depressing the turbo button, probably because it would have been rather expensive to implement.

On a side note, those advanced slowdown features are more often found on OEM boards built into brand-name PCs (Dell, Compaq, etc...) than on retail hardware.

There is that famous Dell Optiplex GXPro series Trixter mentions here, I think some Vogons members actually own one of these.

A long time ago I had a Compaq 386SX box with a similar feature: The CPU could be slowed down by pressing a key combination. The funny thing was that it also automatically slowed down whenever the floppy drive was accessed, in order to keep compatibility with some very ancient speed dependent copy protection routines. Now imagine the typical game of 1992 playing an AdLib tune while loading data from the floppy - it sounded like an old tape recorder gone out of whack... 🙄

Amigaz wrote:

I'm kind of weak for these full towers..samudra made my buy two Colani designed Highscreen towers too, hehe

I really hope you're not going to post pictures of these, I don't want to see those ugly Colani blobs ever again!

...and btw, very nice system specs!

You mean a pic like this? 😁

Aaahrgh! My eyes! 😵

5u3 wrote:

Aaahrgh! My eyes! 😵

lolol 😁

Wait...I have also a newer Colani designed AT tower 😉

heh my system is similar (same processor, diff video and sound and half the ram, 13gb hd as 8, AMIBIOS, M919 3.4B), except I don't have a working 5inch floppy drive nor a working serial port.

It's quite slow for Quake 🙁

Exchanged my AMD 5x86 since it never wanted to run in writeback mode or 133mhz (4 multiplier) mode correctly
I thought I was having a fast "486DX4" when I ran it in write thru 33x3 mode.
Have installed an Intel i486DX4 100mhz 16kb L1 cache CPU instead, compared to the AMD 5x86 I now have a slightly faster system

Maybe you just had a fake 5x86 or something. It's pretty strange that it wouldn't work in 4x mode.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Maybe you just had a fake 5x86 or something. It's pretty strange that it wouldn't work in 4x mode.

It "worked" and very fast but as soon as I wanted to run something in protected mode I got an error message that I was out of ram
Tried all sorts of different timing settings in the BIOS but nothing helped
And something when I started an app in DOS I got weird coloured letters all over the screen
These errors mostly happened when I had emm386 running

btw. this ECS board has "real L2 cache" 😁

Amigaz wrote:

Have installed an Intel i486DX4 100mhz 16kb L1 cache CPU instead, compared to the AMD 5x86 I now have a slightly faster system

🙁
well if the multiplier actually worked for your cpu, it'd would be the other way around.

AMD5x86s are sold as either writethru or writeback fixed on the CPU; and you can't switch that. Mine's a writeback.

Amigaz wrote:

And something when I started an app in DOS I got weird coloured letters all over the screen
These errors mostly happened when I had emm386 running

That actually sounds like a motherboard-related issue - early revisions of those latter UMC chipset PCI/ISA/VLB motherboards tend to host a ton of problems like the random video problem you have mentioned. What version number does it say on the upper-left corner of the motherboard?

leileilol wrote:

:( well if the multiplier actually worked for your cpu, it'd would be the other way around. […]
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Amigaz wrote:

Have installed an Intel i486DX4 100mhz 16kb L1 cache CPU instead, compared to the AMD 5x86 I now have a slightly faster system

🙁
well if the multiplier actually worked for your cpu, it'd would be the other way around.

AMD5x86s are sold as either writethru or writeback fixed on the CPU; and you can't switch that. Mine's a writeback.

Amigaz wrote:

And something when I started an app in DOS I got weird coloured letters all over the screen
These errors mostly happened when I had emm386 running

That actually sounds like a motherboard-related issue - early revisions of those latter UMC chipset PCI/ISA/VLB motherboards tend to host a ton of problems like the random video problem you have mentioned. What version number does it say on the upper-left corner of the motherboard?

Mine is rev 1.0

It's a sort of OEM board...the BIOS chip is a 64kb model but the socket is for a 128kb BIOS chip but according to a guy who flashes BIOS chips for a part of his living says it's risky to just use the latest BIOS which is 128kb
I bet a BIOS update would solve the problem but I can't find any updates which are for the 64kb BIOS chip

ouch. my bios is 128kb and it's an amibios (which it should have - dated around may 1996 or late 1995.)

the phoenixbios isn't a physical one with the amibios label is it? I wonder for that late 12-96 bios date too, it sounds something an oem would pull.

Not saying that you should flash the BIOS to a 128kb one, since it would brick it 🙁 486s being bricked by accident is like taking a stake through mr. nostalgia vampire's heart, very huge emotional setback.

I think you're confusing the am5x86 and the am486. I do recall that the am486 was sold as either writeback or writethough and could not be changed, but I do remember reading (and it is my experience) that all am5x86 chips are set as WT by default (to be compatible with older motherboards) and can be switched into write-back mode in your motherboard's BIOS (if it supports it).

leileilol wrote:

486s being bricked by accident is like taking a stake through mr. nostalgia vampire's heart, very huge emotional setback.

I think I shall banner print that out in Printshop and comtemplate its trueisms.

leileilol wrote:

ouch. my bios is 128kb and it's an amibios (which it should have - dated around may 1996 or late 1995.)

the phoenixbios isn't a physical one with the amibios label is it? I wonder for that late 12-96 bios date too, it sounds something an oem would pull.

Not saying that you should flash the BIOS to a 128kb one, since it would brick it 🙁 486s being bricked by accident is like taking a stake through mr. nostalgia vampire's heart, very huge emotional setback.

Nope, it says "phoenix" on it 😀

12-96 sound very late...is it a PCI motherboard?

haha, if someone "stakes" my socket 3 mobo that person is a "very dead" person 😁

what am I saying? circa 5-6 years ago I saw all motherboards socket 7 and older like doorstop