Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-12-23, 09:50:

Socket3 wrote on 2022-12-23, 09:23:

Most games up to 1999 can be comfortably played on the Blade 3D line in openGL or D3D at 640x480, with older titles like GLQuake running well even at 800x600. So far I tried Homeworld, GL Quake, Quake 2, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, Forsaken, Croc, MDK, Lego Racers and Diablo 2, they all ran great* @ 640x480.

Can confirm, I had a Blade3D back in the day and it was a fairly decent graphics card for pre-1999 3D gaming at 640x480.

I do remember some minor glitches in OpenGL which may have been resolved by later driver updates (not sure). But overall, it rendered most games that I played very nicely.

Me too 😀

In winter 1999 I went from the 1MB Cirrus Logic card in my 486 to a integrated Tirdent Blade 3D (Lucky Tech VIA MVP4 mainboard) and was ecstatic when I saw my new PC can run any 3d accelerated game off my demo disk at playable framerates with good image quality.

You're right about drivers. Some drivers have no-or basic openGL support, while others offer great openGL support and performance. I remember in late spring of 2000 I had to re-install windows 98 and lost the driver CD - so I bought a few blank disks and went over to a friend who had fast(ish) internet, and we downloaded all the drivers I needed plus some games. We downloaded the official drivers from the manufacturer's website, and had no openGL support. The following day I wend over and downloaded the video card driver off the Trident website (I think, can't remember exactly, it's been 22 years) and actually got better performance in most games vs the driver my computer originally came with.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-12-23, 09:50:

Socket3 wrote on 2022-12-23, 09:23:

Most games up to 1999 can be comfortably played on the Blade 3D line in openGL or D3D at 640x480, with older titles like GLQuake running well even at 800x600. So far I tried Homeworld, GL Quake, Quake 2, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, Forsaken, Croc, MDK, Lego Racers and Diablo 2, they all ran great* @ 640x480.

Can confirm, I had a Blade3D back in the day and it was a fairly decent graphics card for pre-1999 3D gaming at 640x480.

I do remember some minor glitches in OpenGL which may have been resolved by later driver updates (not sure). But overall, it rendered most games that I played very nicely.

I noted that VIA had supplied a later OpenGL ICD with their version of the Blade3D driver. It's still really slow but I recall it was able to run Quake II in maybe 640x480.

I do have another question.... can anything useful be done with the redundant Zoomed Video (ZV) and Riser Card pins?
It seems that ZV was a VESA / PCMCIA standard for video on laptops from PC-Card MPEG encoders. It was usually a pin-to-pin connection.... so what did VIA have in mind for this? It seems like they had some vision of a media display device, but this was a really limiting option to go with!

It's so interesting.... the Mini-Box M200 / M300 were released at the same time as the EPIA and initially seem a great choice (but expensive). Then I read the manual.... the case is "designed for embedded systems and therefore can only tolerate a limited number of reassemblies". Oh, OK.... I might stick with hte Novatech case where I can at least use all of the features.

Thinking about swapping the HDD for a KingSpec PATA SSD right now as a 32gb (see LBA-32 BIOS limitation) as their now down to £50.

ShovelKnight wrote on 2020-04-16, 12:20:

The upside is that it was able to boot from any USB device I threw at it (USB floppy, USB CD-ROM, USB stick)...

I've just managed to get my Epia-800 board working (turned out to be missing jumpers stopping it from POSTing) but I'm failing to get it to boot from USB at the moment. Any tips on how to configure boot order to get it booting from a USB flash drive?

I've tried several different USB sticks, including older smaller (4Gb or less) ones that some older systems seem to need, flashed with FreeDOS via Rufus, or Easy2Boot, and one of the XP from USB bootable tools. The only one that has even briefly worked has been the XP installer, which gets as far as presenting its option menu (Grub4DOS etc), but selecting an option either reboots the system or comes up with a "Checking A20 ... Done!" message. All the other bootable flash drives, that work on other systems, just get a "Boot device error - insert system disk" error. They do get detected as USB mass storage further up the POST message though.

The board does boot from an IDE drive pre-installed with Win98 though.

I updated the BIOS to version 2.07, which seems to be the latest, and there are actually fewer USB options in the boot menu - now only USB-ZIP and USB-FDD - but the results have been the same whichever one has been selected.

It's probably too old for USB booting. You can try Plop Boot Manager, but I've never been able to make it work. No matter what computer I try it on, it starts to boot from the flash drive and then freezes after a few seconds (if it doesn't freeze immediately after displaying the option menu).

Hi. Thanks for the information here. I just bought one of these boards and can't wait for it to arrive.

I am always looking for alternative casing and I was looking for very minimalistic options. So, do you have any recommendation? What is the minimum power consumption? (I was thinking about using a PicoPSU but it may be too low).
Thanks!!

For others having trouble with creating a booting disk/drive. The easiest way for me was to connect the hard drive directly to a modern pc via a USB adapter and format it with Rufus with freeDOS. Then I copied all the windows installation files to the disk and drivers.

Does anyone know if it's possible to DIY a convertor for the non-standard USB pin header on the original EPIA?

Judging from the pin-out in the manual, the connector is not only a smaller pitch of pins to standard (2mm rather than 2.54mm?) but the pin pit seems to be different, and I'm not sure I understand all of the functions.

VIA EPIA:
1: +5V 2: Gnd
3: USB2- 4: USB2+
5: USB3- 6: USB3+
7: OC2 8: OC3

Standard:
1: +5V 2: +5V
3: USB- 4: USB-
5: USB+ 6: USB+
7: Gnd 8: Gnd
9: Key 10: NC

First off, what is "OC"?

I'm imagining it would be possible to solder up a 2mm pitch socket and 2.54mm pin header with short wires, transposing the pairing of + and - signal pins, and doubling up the 5V and Gnd pins?

I can't just add a USB2 PCI card as I've got the board in a very small "A09" case from AliExpress, and I'm using the expansion card slot (which would need a riser cable to use with a PCI card) to hold an IDE CF card adapter.

justin1985 wrote on 2023-05-21, 21:38:

First off, what is "OC"?

I believe it stands for "open connection", meaning nothing should be connected to it.

EDIT: Looks like some manufacturers use it to mean "overcurrent" for USB overcurrent protection/detection, so it could be that too....

mscdex wrote on 2023-05-21, 22:56:

I believe it stands for "open connection", meaning nothing should be connected to it.

EDIT: Looks like some manufacturers use it to mean "overcurrent" for USB overcurrent protection/detection, so it could be that too....

Thanks!

Well I've ordered the headers/sockets from eBay. I'll try without those two pins connected and see how it goes ...

kralost wrote on 2023-02-07, 02:28:

Hi. Thanks for the information here. I just bought one of these boards and can't wait for it to arrive.

I am always looking for alternative casing and I was looking for very minimalistic options. So, do you have any recommendation? What is the minimum power consumption? (I was thinking about using a PicoPSU but it may be too low).
Thanks!!

I have a similar question. While 160W of PicoPSU should be sufficient for any typical setup, even with fast 3.5" HDD and PCI video card, but I'm planning to use it with a laptop PSU rated at 100W. Will it run at 100W, with integrated graphics and IDE to SD adapter?

ujav wrote on 2023-06-03, 18:03:

I have a similar question. While 160W of PicoPSU should be sufficient for any typical setup, even with fast 3.5" HDD and PCI video card, but I'm planning to use it with a laptop PSU rated at 100W. Will it run at 100W, with integrated graphics and IDE to SD adapter?

That's more than enough. I used to run a Jetway J7F2 (CN700/VT8273R+) with a 25W TDP VIA C7-D 1.5GHz and a 5400RPM 3.5" HDD on a 80W PicoPSU with external 60W 12V PSU. It did need a small fan on the PicoPSU as the CPU draws its current from +5V but that CPU has a relatively high TDP. The C3 used here is probably 8.3W TDP (Ezra) or 13W (Samuel 2).

mscdex wrote on 2023-05-21, 22:56:

justin1985 wrote on 2023-05-21, 21:38:

First off, what is "OC"?

I believe it stands for "open connection", meaning nothing should be connected to it.

EDIT: Looks like some manufacturers use it to mean "overcurrent" for USB overcurrent protection/detection, so it could be that too....

I finally got around to soldering up a converter cable (it's not pretty) by doubling up the +5v and Ground pins, and leaving the OC pins unconnected.

This works nicely with the front panel connectors on an A09 ITX case 😀 So VIA's OC must be open connection.

It is great to get four USB ports working on this board - even if they're only USB1.1, and don't like booting from flash drives!

I'm just going to add a little to the information in this thread for future searchers on using the EPIA-800 for retro gaming based on my own build since this thread was helpful to me.

I have two of these, and one is in a mini retro Win 95 PC I built to enjoy some games from that era. Overall, it really works well using just the on-board hardware, no expansion cards at all.

You can check out my full build over at https://theclassicgeek.blogspot.com/, but here is the basics in terms of it's performance without having to read my long-winded blog post.

DOS:

Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition, Quake, High Octane, and more all ran fine, as expected, as well as David Murry's modern Attack of the PETSCII Robots. Not many DOS games are going to stress this system, at least not the ones I play.

Windows 95:

I wanted to try a few 3D shooter games that were a bit more demanding, so I tried the original Half Life, Blood II: The Chosen, […]
Show full quote

I wanted to try a few 3D shooter games that were a bit more demanding, so I tried the original Half Life, Blood II: The Chosen, and Quake II. They are all perfectly playable, Half Life runs well at 640x480, as does Blood 2.

In fact, Half Life at 640x480 runs best in GL mode, while running through Anomalous Materials you see the FPS counter hit 60 and the lowest dips I seen were in the mid 20's, but rare. At 800x600 it dances between 20 and 40 FPS. Fraps don't seem to like DX mode, but it felt perfectly playable. Don't bother with software rendering, you're lucky to break 20FPS.

Blood 2 is best played at 640x480, netting you 20-40 FPS on average while running through the train and station. Again, software rendering is a slideshow and best avoided.

Quake 2 runs great at 640x480 and can even do 800x600! Better at 640x480 obviously, and frame rates will dance all over the place, but without Fraps running, I would have been hard pressed to notice.

I decided to try one of my favorite racing games of the era, Wipeout XL. I spent many hours playing Wipeout across multiple platforms and it remains one of my classic favorites to this day. Again, it plays good on the EPIA-800 at 640x480, but 800x600 is also perfectly playable. In both resolutions it likes to hover around 25-30 FPS.

A couple other games I tested were Mechwarrior 3 and Twisted Metal 2. TM2 runs at a solid and smooth 25-30 FPS in both 640x480 and 800x600. at high details. While MW3 runs good in high details at 800x600, hovering around 25-30 FPS on average.

Lastly, I wanted to try a couple non-3D games that I spent countless hours playing back in the mid and late 90’s. Command and Conquer (Gold for Win95), Red Alert, and Roller Coaster Tycoon. They both run great on the EPIA-800. Roller Coaster Tycoon even runs perfectly at 1024x768.

I suspect most 2D, Adventure. RPG, and RTS games of the era will have no problems at 800x600, and even 1024x768 if it's supported. It's Windows 3D/FPS games where you're going to have to make the most sacrifices for better performance.

Thoughts:

I can honestly say I am very pleased with how this build turned out. The performance, the overall aesthetic, and the build itself was just fun to do and share. I see a lot of really cool Winnows 95/98 based retro builds that focus on getting as much performance out of them as possible, and I had a build like that myself up until a few years ago, but I really don’t see a lot of minimalist retro builds, and that’s really what I wanted to do.

The EPIA-800 is a neat board and a small piece of computing history, being one of the first two ITX boards released. It’s got plenty of limitations, and there are definitely much better performing options out there, but having to work within this builds limitations was actually quite fun for me. I ended up with a small retro build that will provide me with many ours of entertainment, it was pretty cheap and easy to do, and it don’t take up much space at all.

StriderTR wrote on 2024-01-10, 07:37:

I'm just going to add a little to the information in this thread for future searchers on using the EPIA-800 for retro gaming based on my own build since this thread was helpful to me.

I have two of these, and one is in a mini retro Win 95 PC I built to enjoy some games from that era. Overall, it really works well using just the on-board hardware, no expansion cards at all.

You can check out my full build over at https://theclassicgeek.blogspot.com/, but here is the basics in terms of it's performance without having to read my long-winded blog post.

Thanks for posting - great write up of your build!

One thing I've noticed when using the VIA SB Emulation drivers in DOS (well, Win98 reboot to DOS mode) is that SimCity 2000 totally locks the system up whenever I try and launch it with MIDI music enabled - regardless of whether it is set to AdLib or General Midi etc. I wonder if this is just my setup / DOS configuration, or a general issue with the VIA SB emulation?

justin1985 wrote on 2023-08-07, 20:07:

I finally got around to soldering up a converter cable (it's not pretty) by doubling up the +5v and Ground pins, and leaving the […]
Show full quote

mscdex wrote on 2023-05-21, 22:56:

justin1985 wrote on 2023-05-21, 21:38:

First off, what is "OC"?

I believe it stands for "open connection", meaning nothing should be connected to it.

EDIT: Looks like some manufacturers use it to mean "overcurrent" for USB overcurrent protection/detection, so it could be that too....

I finally got around to soldering up a converter cable (it's not pretty) by doubling up the +5v and Ground pins, and leaving the OC pins unconnected.

USB Convert.png

This works nicely with the front panel connectors on an A09 ITX case 😀 So VIA's OC must be open connection.

It is great to get four USB ports working on this board - even if they're only USB1.1, and don't like booting from flash drives!

You will fry the chipset southbridge/motherboard power rails by doing this!

Those pins connect directly to the raw chipset pins and power without any of the filtering or electrical protections USB requires.

VIA uses a special daughterboard for the front USB headers called the USB-CV1.

You must provide the following to safely use this header:
EMI filtering
Bus termination
Over current protection
Over voltage/transient protection
ESD Protection

Here's what VIA's board looks like, as you can see by the component count, it is not a simple pinout adapter. My version of the simplified design is below it.

I have made an open source clone of this daughterboard that provides all these things and simplifies the design.
https://github.com/chadr/VIA-EPIA-USB-CV1-Clone

kingcake wrote on 2024-01-15, 16:29:

You will fry the chipset southbridge/motherboard power rails by doing this! […]
Show full quote

You will fry the chipset southbridge/motherboard power rails by doing this!

Those pins connect directly to the raw chipset pins and power without any of the filtering or electrical protections USB requires.

VIA uses a special daughterboard for the front USB headers called the USB-CV1.

You must provide the following to safely use this header:
EMI filtering
Bus termination
Over current protection
Over voltage/transient protection
ESD Protection

Here's what VIA's board looks like, as you can see by the component count, it is not a simple pinout adapter. My version of the simplified design is below it.

comparison.JPG

I have made an open source clone of this daughterboard that provides all these things and simplifies the design.
https://github.com/chadr/VIA-EPIA-USB-CV1-Clone

Oh wow - little did I know! Funny thing is though, it does work! At least I've used it connect flash drives a good few times without any (apparent) adverse consequences.

I had seen the adapter referred to in the EPIA manual, but assumed it was just a passive adapter from the days before the internal USB2 header was standardised. I've downloaded your Gerbers - presumably PCBWay is the best way to get it made up?

justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-15, 17:48:

kingcake wrote on 2024-01-15, 16:29:

You will fry the chipset southbridge/motherboard power rails by doing this! […]
Show full quote

You will fry the chipset southbridge/motherboard power rails by doing this!

Those pins connect directly to the raw chipset pins and power without any of the filtering or electrical protections USB requires.

VIA uses a special daughterboard for the front USB headers called the USB-CV1.

You must provide the following to safely use this header:
EMI filtering
Bus termination
Over current protection
Over voltage/transient protection
ESD Protection

Here's what VIA's board looks like, as you can see by the component count, it is not a simple pinout adapter. My version of the simplified design is below it.

comparison.JPG

I have made an open source clone of this daughterboard that provides all these things and simplifies the design.
https://github.com/chadr/VIA-EPIA-USB-CV1-Clone

Oh wow - little did I know! Funny thing is though, it does work! At least I've used it connect flash drives a good few times without any (apparent) adverse consequences.

I had seen the adapter referred to in the EPIA manual, but assumed it was just a passive adapter from the days before the internal USB2 header was standardised. I've downloaded your Gerbers - presumably PCBWay is the best way to get it made up?

It is very interesting to know it worked. USB 1.1 is prettyl slow and tolerant, so I guess it's not too surprising. But what really shocks me is that the motherboard enabled the ports without the OC pins being pulled to +5V with a 560K resistor.

I made a ton of these when I was testing my design, if you'd like a fully assembled one, I'll gladly send you one for the cost of shipping.

If you need more than one, then yep, PCB Way or JLCPCB are both good.

justin1985 wrote on 2024-01-15, 12:59:

Thanks for posting - great write up of your build!

One thing I've noticed when using the VIA SB Emulation drivers in DOS (well, Win98 reboot to DOS mode) is that SimCity 2000 totally locks the system up whenever I try and launch it with MIDI music enabled - regardless of whether it is set to AdLib or General Midi etc. I wonder if this is just my setup / DOS configuration, or a general issue with the VIA SB emulation?

Thanks!

I can confirm, I just tested it, and it locks up my board as well. Never tried it before. Just always ran it SB Compatible or Pro mode. =/

Now I'm curious as to why it locks up.

I own this little curiosity, its a Eden ESP 5000 on a socket 370 interposer.

Undecided what to do with it exactly but its a choice between building a full rig around it or finding a tiny socket 370 board that supports it and building a pocket rocket for DOS.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-01-20, 08:18:

I own this little curiosity, its a Eden ESP 5000 on a socket 370 interposer.

Undecided what to do with it exactly but its a choice between building a full rig around it or finding a tiny socket 370 board that supports it and building a pocket rocket for DOS.

Eden ESP 5000.pngVIA Eden ESP 5000.png

I'm sort of in the same boat...

While I don't have a standalone VIA C3 processor, I do have a second EPIA-800 board, and that one has all 3 video outputs, VGA, S-Video and composite. However, I have no idea what I want to do with it.

I could just keep it on the shelf as a backup to the board I'm currently using, but that just seems like a waste.

I considered using it for a pure DOS build using an S3 Virge/DX PCI video card and seeing how well the on-board SB Pro would work in 6.22.

I really don't want to use it for something like a Windows 98 build for a couple reasons...

1. I don't think it's powerful enough on it's own to handle many games from 1998 onward, and would require, at the very least, a dedicated video card.
2. It's single PCI slot seems to be very picky about what cards it will work with, as well as being limited to PCI for my video card.

I had also considered a second Win95 build, but using a dedicated PCI video card I can get to work with the slot, BUT, they are all simply too expensive to just take a chance I can get it working.

So yeah, I am always looking for ideas and open to suggestions as to what I can do with this second board. 😀