IMHO it looks like everything is configured correctly and your card is simply a 512k model, and yes I believe 1mb should allow more colours but I'm not 100% sure on this.

Memory chip capacity is measured in bits rather than bytes. Those chips are 4C4256 chips, which means they are 4 bits wide with 256 kilobits of memory on each bit of width. 8 kilobits makes one kilobyte, so each chip is half a kilobit total - so 128 kilobytes.

You have 4 of these making a total of 512 kilobytes.

You need more memory to run in greater than 256 colours. If you can get some DIP 256x4 memory chips with 80ns or less access time you should be able to use the higher colour modes.

Ah that makes perfect sense. And I bet the "-8" means 80ns access time too. Thanks guys, told you I was a noob 🤣.

Looks like I'm gonna be ordering a few of those puppies. Any online suppliers you guys would recommend?

Theoretically you can run 640x480x16 or even 800x800x16 with 1MB of frame buffer, but you can only do 640x480x8 and 800x600x8 with 512KB. However, even if the chip does support these resolutions, an ISA card without the ability to use double buffering, the results may not be particularly fluid.

Why are there three sockets for EPROM? Usually you find one EPROM, which has an 8-bit bus width. I suppose they could have put a second EPROM to enable a 16-bit bus width. This would be useful in 286 machines, as 386 machines could shadow the ROM to RAM and speed it up alot. But only 32KB is needed, and it seems like all the sockets expect 32KB devices. 32KB x 2 is 64KB. I wonder what the third EPROM is supposed to be for in that case.

The RAMDAC looks to be a TR9C1710, which is a 256-colour only DAC. So that card can't show more than 256 colours regardless of how much memory is fitted.

SarahWalker is right, you need a ET4000 with Trucolor DAC and your card has only a 256 color DAC.

Well crap, that sucks. I already bought the memory chips too. Oh well, guess I'll just run SimTower on my Pentium 3 for now. Thanks a lot for the info guys.

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Hey guys, I've been setting up my newly-acquired 386 system for the past few hours, and just finished. I went to play SimTower in Windows 3.11, and it tells me it cannot run without TrueType and quits. Apparently TrueType is disabled at 256 colors and below.

Are you sure that's the reason? AFAIR you need to install a (any) printer driver to be able to use TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1x.
The Limitation to 15/16 bit color doesn't make much sense. (It would make sense for anti-aliasing which Windows 3.1x did not have yet.)

So it turns out, I'm a massive idiot. I installed a printer driver like you suggested idspispopd, and then realized I had to install a a TrueType font manually. I'm not sure if I could do it before I installed the printer driver because it never occurred to me. Boy do I feel dumb.

SimTower runs now, although it's pretty slow. The Pentium MMX rig I'm building should handle it fine though, and in the meantime it's still playable. Thanks for the advice!