VOGONS


First post, by charliegolf

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Hi.
I bought the following as a cheap recycle for gold for parts job lot -

https://imgur.com/gallery/rKqdMSc

I was going to scavenge the cache and processor but decided to buy a cheap backplane and see if anything works, and they do, at least to post. I've never dabbled in this kind of thing before but know what the sbc and vga card do. I haven't got a clue what the 3rd card is though. Googling, I'm thinking some kind of controller for passive backplane? But don't really know. Has anyone seen a card like this before?

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Reply 1 of 5, by weedeewee

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good job. It's worth more in functional order than for the gold present. highly doubful there's even a gram of gold in total.
clearly old industrial gear.

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
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Reply 3 of 5, by charliegolf

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OK cool. I'll just forget about it. If it was a bus controller for a passive backplane I'd have tried it out but if I can't find out I'll just build something around the other 2 cards and get a rack of some sort.

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Reply 4 of 5, by Thermalwrong

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That last card is a 'one-of-a-kind' custom something card which I agree is to measure 'something' 😀 The number of bodges on that properly made card are a good clue, it's likely there's very few of those in existence and they're each quite useless without the custom software and hardware it was designed to be used with. I found a similar Xilinx fpga equipped 16-bit ISA card in a scrap lot similar to yours, no hits at all for the boards markings.

The VGA card can probably be used as a regular ISA graphics card, but it might need the card's BIOS reflashed since I've found that usually these things are set up to display on the no longer present LCD screen.

Nice work in getting the SBC board working 😀
Now that the systems those are in are being scrapped, I've seen them come up in gold scrap lots as well recently. I got a really nice Advantech PCA-6751 (Pentium 166MMX with Chips VGA) out of a similar lot a few months ago.