VOGONS


Mystery Motherboard

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Reply 20 of 26, by Jed118

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Interestingly, I just came across one of these boards - it's got some light corrosion and is acting weird (NSSI won't run on it, for starters) but this one takes 30 PIN RAM and has 128 Kb L2 cache. Regular AMIBIOS too. Strange board.

Edit - looks like I've got the lesser Leopard:

https://pcrebuilding.altervista.org/93/1750/T … REV.+B+486.html

Still, kinda cool I guess. Weirdly BIOS reports a Weitek AND an 80387, the latter which is present on the board.

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Reply 21 of 26, by Eep386

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I love my Alaris Leopard. 😀 I want to compare it to a moderately grunty (albeit all-ISA) 486DX2-80 system to see which is really faster.
I'd imagine the Alaris will enjoy superior VGA performance thanks to the VL bus.

I did have to replace a couple of F245's and reflow some floating pins to ensure that the cache on the Leopard keeps working reliably, though.

Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁

Reply 22 of 26, by Jed118

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Eep386 wrote on 2021-08-24, 03:58:

I love my Alaris Leopard. 😀 I want to compare it to a moderately grunty (albeit all-ISA) 486DX2-80 system to see which is really faster.
I'd imagine the Alaris will enjoy superior VGA performance thanks to the VL bus.

I did have to replace a couple of F245's and reflow some floating pins to ensure that the cache on the Leopard keeps working reliably, though.

Hmm, I was going to remove the cache to see if the computer becomes more stable. Looks like I was on the right track 😉

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 23 of 26, by Eep386

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Ever since I replaced the TTLs and did the reflow the cache always detects and is pretty stable for me.
Haven't tested NSSI on it yet though.

Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁

Reply 24 of 26, by Warlord

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eep remember asking you about writeback on the cougar. The board should be capable of it. Yet there seems no obvious way to enable it.

Reply 25 of 26, by deviousgeek

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Warlord wrote on 2021-08-24, 06:06:

eep remember asking you about writeback on the cougar. The board should be capable of it. Yet there seems no obvious way to enable it.

Sorry for the necro, just seeing if you managed to work this out? I recently picked up a Cougar (I) and have a 66mhz DX2 S-Spec (WB) in it, software reports no write-back. Usually MR.BIOS has an option to enable or disable write-back and it's missing. I wonder if we can modify the BIOS?

Reply 26 of 26, by Warlord

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That would be cool, but I havn't the slightest idea on how to mod a mr bios rom. Its definatly the bios, as I've tried an intel DX4 WB varient and had no option to enable WB on that CPU either. Could be that WB isn't possible on this hardware too.