Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-01-18, 18:51:

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 18:40:

@caluser2000 VLSI were kings of the 286 hill. Not sure what happened to them in 386 land. Some early 386 SX chipset and then gon […]
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@caluser2000
VLSI were kings of the 286 hill.
Not sure what happened to them in 386 land. Some early 386 SX chipset and then gone with the wind.
Maybe Intel's acquisition, etc.

Possibly. Good that you are bringing this to the attention of the unwashed mass's 😉. Keep it up mate.

The Wikipedia article reckons that VLSI didn't keep up with process improvements/shrink and Intel's effort to dominate the market with processor + chipset starting in the 386 era had them fade from grace. They were swallowed up by Philips in the late 90's.

Ah right, it was Philips, but not Intel, that acquired them.
Corrected it in my previous reply.

@caluser2000
Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything.
Wish i did your 286-486 jump back then, that would lower the retro budgets now-a-days.
But i spent quite a bit of time in 386 land instead and look at what is this costing me now ?
😁

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 19:41:

@caluser2000
Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything.

Same here. It was my entry point to the world of the PC and I stuck with that system for years. It's only now, some 30 years later that my original PC motherboard no longer works.

For me it was the 386 era that doesn't hold any nostalgia: I went from the HT 286-16 to a no-name (possibly Zida?), no-cache 386-SX40, but I didn't have it long and a couple of years after upgrading I went to a 486-DX2 which kept me going for much, much longer.

In hindsight I bet the SX40 wasn't a great deal faster than the HT 286-16. Certainly not twice as fast.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-01-18, 18:23:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-01-18, 18:17:

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 18:04:

Looking at the best perf numbers posted on the Estonian forum.
That's about 10-20% slower than what i see here at the same 20MHz frequency.
Figured i should bring it up.

slower than what, the 200 series VLSI?

and are their numbers from a true 286 or a 386sx?

That was done way back in the olden days son...

You had to be there to experience it.

what

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 19:41:

@caluser2000 Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything. Wish i did your 286-486 jump back then, that would lowe […]
Show full quote

@caluser2000
Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything.
Wish i did your 286-486 jump back then, that would lower the retro budgets now-a-days.
But i spent quite a bit of time in 386 land instead and look at what is this costing me now ?
😁

🤣. All my updates were from mates updating their systems On reason I liked generic x86 stuff back then. Paid a bomb for the new 286/16 though. It had a mini AT desktop case with flip top lid. That made adding cards very easy once the 14" vga monitor was removed. Some folk go on and on about period correctness which I personally think is a load of bunk 😀. Apart for some OEM systems they were designed to add stuff to them and upgrade if you could afford it.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-01-18, 19:55:

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 19:41:

@caluser2000 Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything. Wish i did your 286-486 jump back then, that would lowe […]
Show full quote

@caluser2000
Yeah man. 286 is cool to me for memorabilia and everything.
Wish i did your 286-486 jump back then, that would lower the retro budgets now-a-days.
But i spent quite a bit of time in 386 land instead and look at what is this costing me now ?
😁

🤣. All my updates were from mates updating their systems On reason I liked generic x86 stuff back then. Paid a bomb for the new 286/16 though. It had a mini AT desktop case with flip top lid. That made adding cards very easy once the 14" vga monitor was removed. Some folk go on and on about period correctness which I personally think is a load of bunk 😀. Apart for some OEM systems they were designed to add stuff to them and upgrade if you could afford it.

Can you not read?

i think we are hijacking megatron's thread here.
lets give him back the space.

pshipkov wrote on 2021-01-18, 20:15:

i think we are hijacking megatron's thread here.
lets give him back the space.

Oooooh! Ok. Back to you megatron......

No, no, the more the merrier; if you've got either a VL82C201 or Biostar VL82C311 board to sell me 😁

I did just find a thread on cpu-world where someone was getting rid of a mountain of old boards... and no-one replied to a message about an exact duplicate of Peters mega-fast VL82C201 board... and it ended up going in the bin.

Mind you, that thread on cpu-world was dated over ten years ago, so I can hardly fault the guy! 😁

shame !

I have few vlsi 201 mobos.
Recently gave the second one from the list above to a (famous) member here.
There is a sibling of the third one that collects dust in my house.
It can collect dust in your house instead, if you want.

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-01-18, 20:20:

No, no, the more the merrier

I like you even though you are a pommy 😀

New part arrived today!

Still waiting on a Harris-25, with which I'll try on any new 286 boards that I acquire.

24bit ramdac. Nice.

This is turning out to just not be my week.

Card won't post. 8 beeps: video memory read/write error.

What's up? Card is missing it's second ROM isn't it? FFS. How on earth did I miss that?

I've tried a few ET4000 'Sync ROM' images, but I still get the video memory beep codes each time. Reading the main BIOS chip my tl866 reports it as a M27C512, so 64KB. Looking through the BIOS with hexdump I can see a date of 04/07/93.

I guess I need the corresponding Sync ROM for this version and RAMDAC type?

Thinking out loud here - most of the ROM images I've seen for the ET4000AX are 32KByte BIOS and 32KByte Sync ROM.

If my BIOS is 64KByte (verified that my TL866 wasn't telling porky pies by peeling the label back - yep, it's m27c512 all right), does this mean it may not actually have a seperate sync ROM????

If that's the case, then why isn't it working....

Bad vram I guess. I've had a few video cards over the last 30 years that have that issue.

Usually showed random pixals on screen though.

Ok. This is weird.

I moved the card from my recently acquired 'slug computer' to my faulty HT12 board (it powers on and works until the memory test POST finished, so I know it's at least partially working), it gave me the video memory beep codes there too.

I've now just moved it back to 'the slug' and:

I've powered on an off a few times since (in fact plenty of times to allow me to re-run the previous benchmarks in 0-wait and 1-wait mode, but with the Tseng instead of the Trident 9000).... and it now seems happy.

WTF.

It's also back to a single ROM. So this version of the card must have a combined BIOS and Sync ROM image. Perhaps the bigger ROM accompanies the 24bit DAC models? Who knows!

I'll post the Tseng-related benchmarks for the PA286-SA1.... for what they're worth. Yeah, video is faster, but it's still a slug.

You woke it up. Well done.

Slugs need love as well you know.

Trident v Tseng results @ 16MHz on the PA286-SA1:

1-wait
Landmark 6: 2488.71 / 5256.90 (ET4000AX wins massively)
CheckIt 2: 2779 / 2979 (ET4000AX wins)
3DBench: 5.1 / 5.5 (ET4000AX wins)

0-wait:
Landmark 6: 2318.49 / 5093.47 (both slower than 1-wait, for some reason?) (ET4000AX wins massively)
CheckIt 2: 2913 / 3121 (ET4000AX wins)
3DBench: 6.1 / 6.5 (ET4000AX wins)

I had to boot several times over to get the 0-wait results to run successfully due to the lockups experienced in that mode. Comptest RAM throughput in 0-wait mode is almost 3MB/sec faster (nearly 8MB/sec, compared to just under 5MB/sec) than 1-wait, so it has a huge improvement with anything memory related. Shame this thing just isn't happy at 0-wait in general.