Diamond Viper VLB Questions? \ VOGONS

Diamond Viper VLB Questions?

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First post, by NJRoadfan

Posted on 2013-05-19, 02:39

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I happen to have one of these laying around new in the box. It is a later revision board (Rev. A7, BIOS v1.12) that features the Weitek 5186 VGA chip instead of the Oak one. Every magazine hated this card because of poor DOS performance, even though it delivered superior Windows performance....well expect for the fact that Windows 9x drivers were a few years late! OS support overall seems to be excellent. OS/2 2.x and up, NT 3.1 to 4.0, and various X Servers on Linux seem to support the card. No clue if Windows 2000 dropped support or not.

-Is the VGA performance of the 5186 any better than the cruddy Oak OTI-087?

-What chip does this card use when running the VBE video modes with the onboard ROM, the OTI087/5186 or the Power9000?

-What chip does this card use when running the VBE video modes with UniVBE, the OTI087/5186 or the Power9000?

-Is it worth running this card in my 486 vs. the Genoa 8500VL (2MB DRAM CL-GD5428) VLB card I have in there now.

Reply 1 of 8, by swaaye

Posted on 2013-05-19, 03:55

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These were nice Win 3.x GUI co-processor cards. I had the earlier one with the Oak chip which was Trident 8900-like in its DOS speed (bad). I have no idea how the Weitek 5186 does in DOS though... Test it!

BTW the Diamond Viper Resource Page is still up. Not a lot there though.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~torsten/viper/

Reply 2 of 8, by NJRoadfan

Posted on 2013-05-19, 04:16

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Here's the deal, the card is still sealed in its anti static bag. Its literally brand new, never used! Part of me doesn't want to open it.

Reply 3 of 8, by elianda

Posted on 2013-05-19, 10:38

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Well, I used the DSystem UltraCAD Papilio G1-2 which is Weitek P9100 based. It has a VESA 1.02 TSR for plain DOS. The driver programmers seemed to focus strongly on windows and within the DOS window of Win9x there is full VESA 3.0 support.
I don't know if the Viper drivers are somehow related. If the situation is similar you may check the VESA speed within Win9x also.

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Reply 4 of 8, by sliderider

Posted on 2013-05-19, 11:53

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VL Bus cards based on the Weitek chip aren't that difficult to find and usually not too hard on the wallet. If yours is still sealed, then I'd leave it sealed and just buy a loose one for testing on ebay when one is listed again.

Reply 5 of 8, by badmojo

Posted on 2013-05-19, 22:21

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I tried a PCI version of a Weitek P9100 based card recently and the DOS SVGA performance was awful. That card was clearly not designed with DOS games in mind!

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Reply 6 of 8, by NJRoadfan

Posted on 2013-05-19, 22:44

NJRoadfan Offline

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badmofo wrote:
I tried a PCI version of a Weitek P9100 based card recently and the DOS SVGA performance was awful. That card was clearly not designed with DOS games in mind!

That depends on if the DOS SVGA actually uses the P9x00 chip natively, or relies on the dud of a VGA chipset. I wonder if I pull the ROM off the Viper and boot up the machine with a standard ET4000 ISA VGA card and only use the P9000 part of the board when needed. Diamond doesn't seem to have bothered with implementing VBE in the ROM and the VGA BIOS is generally only used to provide Int 10H services.

Reply 7 of 8, by Anonymous Coward

Posted on 2013-05-19, 23:32

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It would be interesting pulling the BIOS to see what happens. I'm not optimistic though. Wouldn't you also have to find a way to disable the VGA core?

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Reply 8 of 8, by NJRoadfan

Posted on 2013-05-20, 04:14

NJRoadfan Offline

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I could try taping off the ISA portion of the card, but I'd have to be mindful if the P9000 actual uses any of the power rails or signals. Most of the VLB video cards I have seem to have very few ISA lines connected, basically the ROM address lines and power.

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