VOGONS

Need help to identify OPTi based industrial 486 ISA board

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First post, by Astralix

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Hi!

Even following Vogons a long time, I never got into retro PC hardware ... Until that day where an old ELSA WINNER ISA VGA card from my box of old things saved a R&S Network Analyzer worth around 3500€. And later this card saved even more expensive testgear.

So, for testing this old equipment I got hold of an old Rohde & Schwarz PSM7 Industrial Controller. Frankly that is a 486 16-bit ISA PC with an 8-slot 16 bit ISA base-board and some extras like CF-Card reader, numeric operator panel and an extra 16x2 LCD built aside an inter LCD VGA monitor. The 500MB HDD was still working and boots DOS6.00 and Windows 3.1. It also has some NI-GPIB and SCSI drivers installed but the cards are missing. Finally it also features an IOMega ZIP Drive.

As the HDD was not willing to identify under Linux attached with a USB-IDE cable, I added a CF-IDE adapter and an fdisk, format, sys and xcopy later the whole thing boots from an industrial CF card mounted on a slot in the back. Nice!

Problem 1:
But I do have an issue with the FDD. It searches, it activates on a: and it gives no failure messages. But it always claims the disk is empty. A DOS 6.22 boot disk is claimed non-bootable. I know for sure that the disks work.
Also trying some other 3.5" FDD from my stock pile of old gear did not solve the issue. Anyone an idea on that?

Problem 2:
Testing an original NI-GPIB ISA card, I found that the VGA card does not start. The system beeps like normal, but no picture. I tried several different jumper settings on that card, but no luck. So I ordered a few other cards and try again.

Problem 3:
To try the FDD interface from the ISA Adaptec SCSI controller I added to the box, I need to disable the on-board FDD. But I do not see any further labeling on the board aside the few jumpers and I cannot see any "Soft Setting" for that in the AWARD BIOS. And I cannot see any manuals out there showing up in Google, when I add the topics
Vertex M1 486 OPTi and such...

So does anyone recognize this board?

Reply 1 of 3, by Horun

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That card does not have a floppy controller, there is not one in the 82C493/82C392/8xc206 OPTi-486SXWB Chipset according to the datasheets. So the "on-board" floppy controller must be on the back plane somewhere.....
Show us a picture of the ISA back plane please

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 3, by Astralix

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Thanks for coming back!

I expected nothing else, but such an competent answer 😉
As the main- / busboard does feature a few things, I did not expect the floppy to be located on that one.

So I added a few pictures, not only of the mainbaord but also the front view of the really nice unit. Taking the shots, I figured that the FFC was removed from the connector that enables the additional frontpanel keyboard.
Later I need to find out how R&S likes the front keyboard to be addressed...

There is quite some action on the bus board, there is an Intel 80C196 CPU with it's own support chips and FLASH ROM.

Between the IDE and FDD sockets there is a National Semiconductor PC87312VF and the datasheet reveals, it is a super-io-controller with Serial 16550 compatible ports, IDE ports and FDD interface.

Down under the ISA bus carriage, there are a few other chips, but I bet these are the CF card reader. In addition there must be another serial port controller for two ports.

Astralix

Reply 3 of 3, by Astralix

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Update:

So almost all problems are solved by now, except that the FDD is not working. Regardless, what drives I attach, it does consider the disks to be empty.

Interesting encounter:
As the FDD is not working, I use the CF card reader on the front of the unit to exchange drivers with my normal Win10 PC. But when I copy files to the CF card with a USB Multi-Card adapter, the files are defective. For instance the BAT files are of a valid size, but when I open them on the 486 in EDIT or NC, they are empty.
When I copy the files over to the same CF card with the same card read on my Linux PC, everything is totally fine.

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