VOGONS


Reply 80 of 127, by feipoa

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If I recall properly, the 206 is just a standard peripherals controller and most chipset manufactuers made them, e.g. SiS, UMC, C&T, etc.

I think only 2 of 6 boards I tested would work with a 100MHz oscillator and L2 cache enabled. What kind of wait states are you having to use? SXL2 at 55 MHz should be fine, at least the two 5 V SXL2-50 chips I have work fine at 55 MHz, but they were running at 27.5 MHz x 2.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 81 of 127, by Phido

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Chips and tech made a lot of common stuff including chipsets for IBM, Compaq, Next, Apple and other very serious entities. They were fundamental in making the chipset concept. Thats all I was saying, at one stage, if things went their way they could have become a very dominant player (perhaps like AMD). They weren't known for having huge massive flaws in their chipsets. I just think we should be careful before bashing the chipset.

I am fairly sure most of the bizarre behaviour lies with the bios.

What kind of wait states are you having to use?

Giggle. Wait states? You think I can set wait states? The only bios cache options I have is on or off.
I can't set size, wait states, or anything else. I can't auto detect hard disks. I can't set basically any bios option normal people would be used to. No cyrix cpu features. It is a barren land of broken dreams.

I assume it has defaulted to the maximum wait states. I can get my 25ns cache chips to operate at 40Mhz no problem. Which is probably why the performance is pretty ordinary for the feature set. Also changing any main memory wait state results in no booting even if they changed to slower settings. That's okay, I will just bump up the clock. I was very surprised it booted at 50Mhz, particularly with a 33mhz chip.

No i have no settings, no way to read anything like that either.
Hence why I am resorting to chips and technology software tools, hex editors, wiji boards, healing crystals and magic enchantments.

edit: I just checked, I can also "enable late RAS".

Reply 83 of 127, by Phido

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BTW the Canon Object Station also apparently used the CHips Bios.
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/H … ion41BIOS-3.jpg
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/H … ect_station.pdf

My hope is maybe someone in the next community has this bios (or a simular chip bios), as the chips and tech were popular with next x86 boxes.

I am also hoping that at 55mhz cache size and speed is not that important. The bus itself will be fairly fast. In this case speed overides everything else. I assume the 8kb of l1 will also help about a fair bit.

Reply 84 of 127, by feipoa

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Phido: How about trying AMI BIOSes from other C&T boards? The AMI BIOS that came in my C&T is feature packed.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 86 of 127, by feipoa

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Biostar MB-1333C. I'm not sure if it is long-term reliable at 40 MHz because it has 33 MHz printed on the chipset. This board only seems to like 64K cache.
and
Abit FU340. It has 40 MHz printed on the chipset. This is the board that had been running the DRAM very hot for many years until it perished. This board ran fine with 128K cache.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 87 of 127, by Phido

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I will have a look at those. See if they work, and what they offer.

Good news, with my peiter hooked up to 12v i can get 50mhz with l1 chip cache on. Cpu temp is 8 degrees c.

I can run benchmarks and games and run windows and apps. I feel 55mhz is pretty doable at least as a bench top setup. 62.5 would be nice to try with maybe 60 or 80w peitler.

Reply 88 of 127, by Phido

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Overclocked my 5429 2mb isa card using mclk. It defaults to 50Mhz. I pushed it to 80Mhz. Mainly boosts windows speed, very slightly faster in dos. Wintune picks about 15-20% boost in video performance.
Adjusted timings.

Ordered 12ns cache. After experiments. My 15ns old 8x8 tag doesn't like 50mhz. I can't get 128+64 to operate at 50mhz.

55 and 62Mhz will probably exceed the tag speed, and probably push the 15ns speed a little close too. So I can pay $30 for mouser to ship a few peices of 12ns, or I can just go 10 peices of 12ns and some eeprom chips.

Reply 89 of 127, by Phido

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Trying out my 486DRx2...20/40
Starting at 66Mhz..

Feeells slllloowwww.. I have to say 50Mhz makes everything feels slow. 40 is walking pace and 33mhz is positively painful.

Bit of petlier cooling.. Getting down to 0 degrees C.

Reply 90 of 127, by Phido

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87.5Mhz crystal has arrived.
I believe my 486sxl's CPU has arrived but is at the post office.
I have more ram on the way, I really want to know about 32mb ram. Yet to arrive.
I will put in my 12ns cache and see how that works. I guess it will be nicer around 50,55,63mhz.
I am still missing my 125Mhz crystal. Not particularly worried about that one as they are quite common in dip 4.

In the end I will run the benchmarks at:
20Mhz
25Mhz
33Mhz
40Mhz
44Mhz
50Mhz
55Mhz
63Mhz

Provided the CPU can run at that speed (and with the petlier I think most of them will run at least non clock doubled)

CPU's:
AMD 386DX (exact same as intel CPU)
Ti 486DLC (L1 on and off)
Cx486DRx2 (l1 on and off)
486SXL (L1 on and off) (clock doubled on and off).

FPU:
Cyrix FasMath
ITT 487
Intel 387

Benchmarks:
Doom
Wintune 97
NSSI
Speedsys
qaplus
landmark
3DSMax 1.1
Photoshop 3.0.5
Vistapro
FPU Bench (my bench)
PMips
Pcpbench

Any requests?

Attached is a copy of my BIOS if anyone finds that helpful.

When I reassemble the box I will Capture some videos off it. Doom. Jazz Jack rabbit 2. Red Alert. Photoshop, 3DS Max.

Attachments

  • Filename
    ctpeakdmbios.zip
    File size
    36.8 KiB
    Downloads
    50 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 92 of 127, by Phido

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486sxl-40 CPU's arrived.

The first one I popped in booted straight up at 50Mhz and I am running some benchies now to check how stable. Looks full stable.

I've cracked 14 FPS in doom for the first time and there might be more in it. The extra cache seems to make a significant difference there, maybe even a noticeable one. In the rest it doesn't seem to make a huge difference.

Hopefully with the 55mhz crystal I can crack 15 FPS in doom. Which would be pretty fast for an ISA pga132 setup.

Reply 93 of 127, by Phido

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Flashed Anonymous cowards Abit bios...

Holey moley! Its a whole new world! There are about 15 different new options on cache, bus, memory and wait states.

Also for some reason it won't boot my Sd card. Maybe it doesn't like my loader. Maybe its too much ram? Abit bios? Its different however I wouldn't say it is less buggy.

Chips and technologies pissed off ami/award/phenoix/mr bios when they decided to enter the bios market.

Edit: Now boots. timings must be a lot tighter, specs I know are fine on the other bios are not doable here.
Petlier fired up I want to try out 33/66mhz mode.

Reply 94 of 127, by Phido

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my ram arrived.

32Mb.... in a C&T Peak board.

Are you ready?

Functions completely normally and is able to pass speedsys and other memory tests and doesn't seem to have affected stability at all. While a big gamble it seems to have paid off. I now have 32Mb. 128Kb Cache (possibly 128+64), 50Mhz (soon to be 55Mhz bus) all functioning completely normally with a 486sxl40. While 32 Mb is overkill for a 386 (and even a 486, I didn't have a 32mb system until I purchased a pentium era machine, and even then it was more suitable for something pentium pro level). Windows loves ram. Photoshop and 3DSMAX are not exactly light weight and they fly now with 32mb.

My 125Mhz crystals arrived. But I am doubtful of them working. My experiments show 66Mhz is not rock solid with the current petlier setup. Maybe with a more powerful one I can get 63Mhz bus stable. They are DIP4 instead of DIP14 so it will take some trouble shooting to get that round peg square hole solved.

Reply 95 of 127, by Anonymous Coward

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Try loading up IE5 or something that can completely fill the memory to make sure it's okay. On the FU340, everything appears to work fine until you push it.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 96 of 127, by Phido

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Ha. I can see your skeptical.

Seems to be working fine. I loaded up Photoshop and 3dsmax at the same time, had both of them processing. Wintune.. Windows also gobbles everything up as a disk cache. Was not able to do this with the 3 chip ones, I could sometimes boot windows, and as you say, it would then fall over. I haven't finished testing, it could still be an issue, but it seems very solid so far.

There is a problem at 50Mhz.. It does fail.
I have mix of 60ns and 70ns in one bank. It fails at 50mhz. 40Mhz everything is rock solid and passes just fine. 50Mhz, flakes out booting windows. So now I just need a pair of nice 60ns 4mb simms. But I might as well buy another 4 x 4mb of the same. Shipping is killing me to Australia, every american seems to overpack. But I now know 9 chip works. I am pissed that the 32mb of brand new 60ns 3 chip parity didn't work and that I eventually will end up buying 32mb in 9 pin parity in multiple shippings.

In the end I will have to sell off a lot of stuff that I have purchased but not using in this build.

In then end I want all 32mb at 55mhz. By my reckon, I think that might just pip the faster pga132 boards (at 40 or 50mhz). I am looking at writing some code to enable the 256Kb cache in the chipset as well, which I think is possible and will make up for some of the slower performance.

Eventually I will capture the video (vga-composite-captured composite) and put together a little video on the build and the machine in action. Playing Jazz jack rabbit II, Red alert, C&C, Simcity 2000, Doom, 3DSMax, Photoshop, Vistapro3, win 95 benchmarks. It is quite a useful little machine. It feels very much like a mid spec 486 in its usability than what most people remember a 386 is like. I can see why people are pretty skeptical.

If you ever get a chance to experiment with a peak Dm board, try the bios I provided, see if it helps with higher clocks and full memory. The same motherboard with the Abit bios I tried, was not stable at 50mhz and I couldn't get 32mb stable either, but I didn't play with all the options. I guess Abit had tightened the timings (possibly non user editable ones) which causes problems (but would make the board faster at the same speed).

I will also try to write a program tho write those registers to enable the 256kb cache.

Reply 97 of 127, by Anonymous Coward

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SCSI controllers and NICs sometimes use memory just below 16MB. It's possible that could also be causing a problem for me. It's been several years since I tested, but I have some free time so I'll pull everything out again to see if I can make any progress.

I'll try your BIOS and see what happens. Can we get some speedsys benchmarks at 50MHz with the SXL cache enabled?

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 98 of 127, by Phido

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This is my new bugbear.

I can't get speedsys to load with the cache on. At any speed. It crashes and has screen corruption while doing its P&P thing.
Speedsys and NSSI crash with the on chip L1 turned on before the benchmarks. I assume they are doing something DMA related, and my ancient board flips out. Which is weird, because floppy seems to work fine, and sound also seems fine.
I had hoped the DRx2 or the Sxl would not have this issue, but they seem to. I vaguely recall I didn't always have this problem which made me think it was related to the ISA clock. NSSI seems to hang detecting the HD or Floppy (I assume floppy). cacheable regions maybe? Shadow'd bios?

My 110 Mhz crystal arrived today and it was ultra expensive, and it isn't even metal encapsulated. It made my epson and made in Netherlands and is in an ic package like a dip12 but with only 4 legs in a dil-4 type arrangement.

Hope i have more luck than my 87.5Mhz crystals. 55mhz is what I think is an achievable every day clock. Still will put it nearly 40% faster than 40mhz. Memory speeds should be quite high, both cached and un-cached. From what I can see, at that speed main memory will be similar latency and speed as external cache at 25mhz.

GIven my board is a 1991 manufacture, its quite interesting that 50+mhz bus is achievable. I can see why intel had hoped that the 50Mhz 486dx would be popular (1991) but then VLB came and spoiled it (1992) which intel responded with the clock doublers DX2's. It will be interesting to compare the 486sxl at 50 bus, 50/25 and the Cx486DRx2 at 50/25 on the same board in a wide range of benchmarks (including memory intensive ones). Technically I would have thought clock doubling would have worked better on the 386's as they take a lot longer to execute instructions in term of cycles, but it seems not to have that effect.

I have also ordered more 4x4mb 60ns ram FPM 9 chip parity. Not cheap, considering $25+ usd postage and 10% tax Australia has to pay on foreign items since July this year. I want to wind this project up, build it, put it in the box and then actually use it as my main retro box. My wife is asking questions now.. Keeping this project stealthy is getting harder.

Plus a I have a 486 board coming and a slot 1 build to start and a SGI indy sitting in the corner of the room looking moody.

Reply 99 of 127, by Phido

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Ok I think I can write a program that write the bits to the motherboards registers to set it to 256kb cache. (as well as control all the other chipset functions)
I also think I can write a program that writes the bits to enable the cache on the 486sxl (as well as configure all the other functions).

Both the 486sxl/dlc and the peak dm are controlled through port 22 and 23

Peak DM
Port 22h and 23h
I assume 22h is the index and 23h is the data

index 2bh enable bit 6 to enable port 92h (maybe need to set to enable write - port 22, 2bh; port 23, 20h

index 21h set bits 5 and 4 to 1 for 256kb.
so should be something like:
port 0022h, 21h ' set to cache register
port 0023h, 18h ' (bit 5 and 4 enabled all other 0)

For Cyrix/TI
Port 0022h and 0023h
0022 is the w index for the next port

Port 0022h, c0h ' select control register 0
port 0023h, 23h 'set nc1, nc0 and barb..

Sweet...

If this works I think I can control all the bios functions and features. Of which there is huge number..

I also note in the documentation there are features you have to specifically enable to make more than 16mb work and be addressable.