CL 5434, Mach 32/64 ...
What do you plan to do with it?

ppppllll1234 wrote:

which ?

wow.

Spammer?

Interesting, joined in 2011 and this is his first post. But ya, Stojke's suggestions are good for a fast ISA card

Tseng ET4000AX usually is brought up in these conversations.

From my tests Western Digital Paradise WD90C31 out performs Tseng Labs ET4000AX.

soviet conscript wrote:

Tseng ET4000AX usually is brought up in these conversations.

et4000 was known for its raw speed(without 2d acceleration), however when it comes to the 2d acceleration(windows) era it became mediocre.
for dos games, go for the et4000.
for windows performance, i would go with ati mach64 or cirrus. s3 and wd would do too.

i have a mach64 but its a low end oem model with 2mb dram, not the high end model with 4mb vram. at least its the only isa card with 2mb ram that i found so far.

Stiletto wrote:

Spammer?

Username, delayed posting, post content etc match the behaviors of some bots, but the thread having an on-topic title is somewhat out of behavior.

I want to implement a X86 SOC on a FPGA chip

Oh, that's interesting, but could you give more than a one-liner description of what you're after, please? It'll help ppl trying to help you I'm sure.

For starter, any reason that it has to be the "fastest" ISA card possible?

ET4000W32i is probably one of the faster cards for DOS. Though I have heard good things about Cirrus Logic and WD. The CL GD5434 is probably the only one I'd use in Windows though. There are also ISA cards based on S3 805i and 868. Those should be pretty good all around cards, but are somewhat uncommon. Mach64 seems to be the easiest high end ISA card to come by. It has superb performance in Windows (for ISA) and decent DOS performance. The DRAM and VRAM models are both good, as long as it has 2MB and a decent RAMDAC (the budget models were somewhat stripped down). The fastest ISA cards for Windows are probably some proprietary designs sold exclusively for professionals. Those are fun but can be challenging to get going.

That ET4000/W32i, you might still get one new from http://www.microlabs.com, though a bit expensive (but then many ebay listings aren't any better).

archsan wrote:

Oh, that's interesting, but could you give more than a one-liner description of what you're after, please? It'll help ppl trying to help you I'm sure.

For starter, any reason that it has to be the "fastest" ISA card possible?

We certainly don't want to have to deal with snatchers around here. We have to check him out and make sure he's human.

Would be interesting to know how the fastest isa cards handle 640x480 modes and higher. Rage 128 is damn slow for a PCI/agp card at svga and higher.

Holering wrote:

Would be interesting to know how the fastest isa cards handle 640x480 modes and higher. Rage 128 is damn slow for a PCI/agp card at svga and higher.

i guess most cards are that slow at svga mode in pure dos, as they can't make use of their 2d acceleration.
with a fast cpu, you can get very high fps in winquake svga mode(software renderer) with most pci and newer cards.

No not really. Rage 128 in particular is damn slow. Don't think many members here realize it since they use slowdown programs or a different card. I actually use one in my current am3+ computer because of its bottleneck. Dos Doom actually gets small slowdown when looking at spectre demons. Warcraft gets fps capped too (normally you can tap arrow key and screen jumps to other side of map instantly, but with rage 128 it scrolls smoothly like on a much older CPU). It's a nice card for opengl, directx, and being able to play such old dos games on a current cpu, but if I play Blood higher than svga I have to switch GPUs in Windows (device manager); yeah I play my dos games inside Win98SE. It's a good card for really fast systems to play old dos games, but not if you play dos games higher than svga.