First post, by Lomax
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all!
Registered here since I'm about to build my first ever retro gaming system; I stumbled upon a really cute "EBX" format (146x203mm) PIII Coppermine board and couldn't resist it 😀 It's basically the same footprint as a 5 1/4" drive, and I'm planning to build my own case for it with a CD-ROM and floppy. The board is an industrial single board computer from Arcom (defunkt) called "Olympus", and all I've managed to find out about it is in the datasheet (the manual has sadly not been archived by the WayBackMachine). I know it has a Via VT82C686B southbridge, which I've verified does support Sound Blaster emulation (through the VIAAUDIO.COM & VIAFMTSR.COM TSRs). I also know it has a reasonably nice S3 Savage4 3D graphics controller on board, and further expansion possibilities via a PCI slot and a PC/104 slot. I do not know for sure what northbridge it has though; this is covered by a heat sink in the photos, and it's not mentioned in the datasheet. Since I haven't got the board yet I'm unable to check myself, but I would like to get a stick of PC133 SDRAM to populate its single RAM slot before it arrives, so I can test it out straight away. My question is though, what is the maximum stick size this board is likely to handle? I know the datasheet says 512Mb max, but looking at the possible northbridge candidates (Apollo Pro 133, ProSavage PM133, PLE133, etc) they all say 1-2Gb. Any chance I could get away with putting a 1Gb stick in there?
Edit: I'd also be interested to hear your general opinions about this board; what would you suggest I put in the PCI slot? And what about the PC/104 capability? How do I figure out the pinouts for the breakout headers?
Edit 2: Adding a photo of the board