Tseng EVA-480, ET2000
One of first cards that emulates EGA (IBM EGA compatible), 256kB RAM
Graphic resolution 640x480, 16 colors (from 64 color palette)
Hardware zoom/pan
Zilog Z80 (4MHz) makes card fully CGA/Hercules compatible.
I think, this is late revision with Z80 integrated on single board. Former revision had Z80 on daughterboard.

I had a 30% off coupon for a local thrift shop, so I went in and walked out with this lot.

I only needed a printer, to be honest, but I just couldn't leave the little cassette deck there. It's mint. And yes, it works perfectly. Not only that, when looking for a tape to test it with in-store, I spotted this copy of No Jacket Required. Bonus score! Less than twenty bucks for this lot.

The Samsung is nearly new and still has ~2/3 of its toner left. I'm guessing it's on the original cartridge.

^^ no date code that I can decipher, anyone have any idea when this was made?

The Phil Collins tape is a bit beaten up, but the jacket (hah!) is in good shape. It plays okay except for one track on side B where the tape is stretched.

Also grabbed a couple interesting CDs... Did you know the composer for Cowboy Bebop did a concept album about robots? Well she did, and now you do. I have no idea who that album in Russian / Cyrillic is but I liked the design & the fonts. 😜 (That's pretty much my criteria for picking an album up for 50 cents.) Some good pop-y tracks on there.

Maybe we should have a 'bought this (retro) music today' thread...

pepino_169 wrote:

Tseng EVA-480, ET2000 One of first cards that emulates EGA (IBM EGA compatible), 256kB RAM Graphic resolution 640x480, 16 colors […]
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Tseng EVA-480, ET2000
One of first cards that emulates EGA (IBM EGA compatible), 256kB RAM
Graphic resolution 640x480, 16 colors (from 64 color palette)
Hardware zoom/pan
Zilog Z80 (4MHz) makes card fully CGA/Hercules compatible.
I think, this is late revision with Z80 integrated on single board. Former revision had Z80 on daughterboard.

Hah, I wonder if you could run arbitrary code on the Z80 and use it as a kind of co-processor? That graphics card is nearly as powerful as the systems it was designed to go in.

...come to think of it, that's a bit like the way modern GPUs have gone. 😜

The cassette recorder looks like it's from the 1970s. Also, that recorder looks shiny as well. Might want to check the belts as well for safety measurements.

Very nice haul on the cassette player and printer. You should be able to get a good 5-10 years out of that printer.

Last printer I purchased from a thrift store was an old Dell (Lexmark) B/W laser printer. It lasted me 7 years before it finally started having enough problems for me to get rid of it. I paid a whopping $7 for it.
During that time I ended up refilling the original toner once or twice before the original drum wore out. Bought a new drum/toner on eBay and then refilled that one once or twice before the printer finally started having issues picking the paper up as well as the fuser starting to wear out and not fuse the toner to the paper properly.

Printing with that thing was cheap as dirt. I kinda miss it, but I have a color laser printer now and also recenlty got an old HP Laserjet 5000 as well as a couple new toner/drums for free that I may well put in service to print all b/w stuff as it is still a nice printer for b/w stuff. I just need to get either a usb to parallel adapter or an old HP network adapter for it as the original one died 3-4 years ago.

I have an old Dot Matrix printer that has 24-pin print head, supports color ribbons (either multi-color or single-color), envelope support, different fonts, including the ones on the PC, and different types of paper can be used (with or without the feeding holes). Paid a whopping $6.99 for it and the ribbon is still in great health.

Yeah, I have a Yamaha PN-101 9-pin dot matrix for my MSX, with several extra ribbons. I was able to get it going as a character (only) printer using a USB->Centronics adapter on my Linux workstation, but that just wasn't gonna cut it. I need fonts and graphics. And printing 30-page scientific work at 0.33 pages/minute is painful. 😜

BTW on second analysis, the Phil Collins tape plays fine and the Lloyd's recorder is definitely gonna need a belt.

Today I got a Gravis Ultrasound PnP Pro for about 50 dollars.

I've already found a GUS PnP (non-Pro) before, but I could never get it to work. It needs new capacitors, and the main chip contacts might be damaged.

However, so far I can't get the new card to work, either. I've tried really hard under pure DOS, and even though all diagnostics work fine, the card doesn't produce any sound in the mixer app and can't get detected by Tyrian's setup utility. I hope that I just suck with dealing with PnP stuff under DOS, so I'm gonna build a quick Socket 7 rig soon and try the card under Win9x with the original driver disk.

So I risked ordering this from Alibaba and it arrived overnight from Hong Kong. Right off the factory conveyor belt, brand spanking new. Comes with a backplate and a driver disk. Will be putting it through its paces tomorrow. Missing the classic game port, but <shrug>. This will be for my Tualatin 1.4 CPU. He says the warehouse has 500 of them left in stock. $50 plus $30 shipping, but the shipping is not much more as you order more. $36 shipping for two motherboards. If this performs well will probably order one more. I wanted a workbench system that was Windows 98SE Socket 370 with an ISA slot and if this works out I am a happy camper.

P.S. - If you guys want his contact info @ Alibaba just let me know and I will post it here. He's easy to work with and very efficient. Who knew you could get a factory new Socket 370 board these days. Quite happy.

^^ Interesting, that looks exactly like this Gigabyte board. Yours has a few more caps (hope they're not GSC, heh) but there are blank solder pads in those locations on the Gigabyte. What was it marketed as?

Same VIA chipset with the 82C686B southbridge, naturally, so hopefully it has the DOS-compatible sound options in the BIOS. If not you can probably flash it to the Gigabyte one.

yea, I was thinking msi at first, I have a 462 board it instantly reminded me of, but yea, taht like 99.999% the gigabyte board.

GOTTA LOVE CHINA!!!

I'll know more tomorrow as I reinstall Windows 98SE and give the full scoop on it. Crossing my fingers it all works out nicely.

xjas wrote:

Yours has a few more caps (hope they're not GSC, heh) but there are blank solder pads in those locations on the Gigabyte.

Don't know if this helps. Here are some closeups of the three most common caps on the board.

vetz wrote:

JidaiGeki wrote:

W Gruffydd wrote:

I'm still trying to find a Canopus Spectra 2500 for a Witchdoctor setup, but I recently acquired these:

DSCN5473a.jpg

Nice! I have all three cards for a Witchdoctor setup, but no cables. Internal long SLI cable should be easy to make, but the Spectra<->Pure 3D II cable is an unknown for me. Do you have the cables too?

The internal cable is easy to make with parts from Ebay. I did so for my setup.

I'm not sure if it's against Vogons rules to link an ebay auction, so I'll PM you the link of what I purchased to use for the internal pass-through cable. It's not remotely vintage. It was under the title "2Pcs 2mm Pitch 2x7 Pin 14 Pin 14 Wire IDC Flat Ribbon Cable Length 20CM."

Caveat emptor, this cable was an impulse buy after only a cursory examination of the the specs. I don't know whether it will work, let alone whether it will damage anything when used.

amadeus777999 wrote:

PTherapist wrote:

Managed to get hold of a DELL Optiplex 486 motherboard quite cheaply on eBay, which surprised me actually! […]
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Managed to get hold of a DELL Optiplex 486 motherboard quite cheaply on eBay, which surprised me actually!

Picture is from the trader on eBay, so is about the best quality I currently have until I actually receive it.

The motherboard in my DELL has a non-working PC Speaker and instead of trying to fix and risk damaging my only 486 machine, I thought I may as well just replace the motherboard since this was so cheap.

The physical dimensions of this board are practically a match for my DELL, but this is not the same motherboard I currently have (that too was available on eBay, but at a higher price) as this appears to have some kind VLSI chipset, whereas the one in mine seems to have chips marked Headland, with Tseng Labs ET 4000 onboard graphics. No idea what graphics are on this until I get it, the pic is much too blurry.

When it arrives the first thing I'm going to do is run some comparison benchmarks between the 2 boards. All being well, I'll install this inside my Optiplex and then set about reinstalling Windows 95 & NT 4.

Looking forward to the benchmarks - I guess the board may have a Cirrus Logic unit on board. At least this was the case with these "OEM" pentium boards which either sported Tseng or Cirrus gfx-chipsets.

Received the board this morning. It has Western Digital WD90C31-LR 1MB onboard graphics. 😎

Great, the used to make some fast VGA parts if I remember correctly.

@liqmat I wonder what value ESR those non-Sanyo capacitors have.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_series_resistance Any idea how new old stock that motherboard is?

xjas wrote:

What was it marketed as?

You're going to love this. The driver CD says Banana Digital which Luckybob likes to call it Banana Delight. The BIOS at post read "MA5000 v2.0". Another thing I noticed in the Pheonix BIOS is the fan speeds are not being registered so some corners are being cut on this board at least with the sensors.

The good news is my Tualatin 1.4GHz CPU came right up, but the current Windows 98SE installation was having a fit so I am in the middle of a reinstall. Going slowly.

SpectriaForce wrote:

@liqmat I wonder what value ESR those non-Sanyo capacitors have.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_series_resistance Any idea how new old stock that motherboard is?

Have no idea. The only time stamp I see is at post and the BIOS is dated 6/26/2010. I will try and see if I can see any timestamps on the board itself otherwise I'll ask the seller if he knows.

Here is the board on Alibaba. You will notice the game port is pictured, but as you can see on my board it is missing which is no big deal since I have a Sound Blaster Live Platinum 5.1 setup on this machine which has that port. Also, the seller goes by "Joker" which doesn't instill confidence in anyone buying with a name like that, but like I said he delivered super fast and as promised. I would highly suggest you make an account at Alibaba and start a message with him through their system since that will protect you somewhat from what I understand. I might add I had to pay $50 for one board so the price is a bit misleading on the link, but for a new Socket 370 I was fine with that. Of course the $30 shipping was steep, but it was overnighted and that was the only option. He accepts PayPal payments and is how I paid.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wholes … .438a3e5fu5rzlT

I think am really pushing Vongon's rules to the limit here, but it is not often you run across almost 20 year old hardware still being manufactured so I thought I would give everyone a heads up it's legit. My final verdict will be after I get Windows 98SE running with some games and benchmarks.

Have 3 more rackmount industrial PCI/ISA backplane based computers on the way. Pretty sure they all have S423 SBCs in them.

Shipping was kinda horrible, but I did get 50% off the prices of the computers themselves.

Guessing I should be able to see the usb dongles and any add-in cards to make back at least what I paid for everything all together provided they don't get destroyed in transit.

I really need to get a nice 4-post rack to be able to mount all these in. I think I am going to use racks to hold all my retro machines at some point. Should take up a lot less room and be a whole lot more tidy. Racks with wheels are sweet. So much easier than lifting everything to move it around.

All 3 are the same from what I can tell so no need to post seller pics of all 3. One is missing the top cover.. that is how I was able to tell what type of CPU was in it.

^^ Nice, I have one a lot like that. I love the looks of those old 4U rack modules. Is 'lab gear chic' a thing?