This card turned up on that well-know auction site whilst looking for parts for a 486 build. As I could find very little about it online, I thought I’d post my discoveries here. Maybe folks here have more information or other insights.

That delightfully skewed and off-center heatsink covers a Tseng ET4000 chip, which is what I was looking for. Externally there’s not much in the way of identifying features:

FCC-ID: KAZET4W32VLBUS
Googling this will get you a couple of links to auctions for the same card, at least one of which doesn’t have the heatsink so my guess is this was an after-market addition. So obviously the gist of the product code part is ET4 for ET4000, W32 and VESA Local Bus but searching FCC records for this particular ID returned nothing. I did find some similar ones with the same KAZ prefix, also video cards as it turns out:

1Trident Computer Inc, Taiwan  KAZET4TCISABUS   12/23/1992
2Trident Computer Inc, Taiwan  KAZTCI1DWISABUS  12/14/1992

We probably all recognise the name Trident as the manufacturer of those el-cheapo VGA cards but that’s Trident Microsystems (Santa Clara, CA) and their cards sport FCC grantee code HNG. AFAICT Trident Computer (Taiwan, FCC grantee code: KAZ) has nothing to do with that particular outfit and the name’s either just a coincidence or a shrewd attempt to benefit from the other Trident’s (in)famous reputation.

On the solder side: "ET4W32L1"
Google returned absolutely nothing on this, it might just refer to nothing more than something like "Model ET4W32, PCB Layer 1".

COLORImage® BIOS
Plenty of cards have these and COLORImage appears to be used as a brand name by many. There are records of an expired trademark belonging to Personal Computer Products, Inc. but this postdates the card by a few years.

Dumping the BIOS (I feel I should upload this somewhere but I’m not sure where) revealed the following strings:

1Copyright(c)1988 Tseng Laboratories, Inc. 08/23/93 V8.06N
2TsengLabs ET4000/W32i VGA Card (VL-Bus)       Date : 08/23/93
3ColorView

So that was confirmation that it was a W32i, which was before not obvious due to the heatsink. That "ColorView" was registered as a trademark by Trident Computer so that checks out. I guess COLORImage was used similarly but doesn’t have the paper trail.

The card came with 1MB of VRAM as pictured: 8 x AAA1M304P-05, which are 50ns 128K x 8 FPM DRAMs. Those empty sockets where just beckoning to be populated so I looked for more of the same. Surprisingly hard to find compared to the slower varieties, but the Tseng datasheet suggests 50ns for interleaved setups and I wanted to stay on the safe side. Online parts brokers wanted $5 per chip but I managed to find the even faster 45ns chips (deceptively named AAA1M304P-45) for significantly less. Older DOS diagnostics didn’t recognise the extra VRAM but Windows 95 reported the 2MB right off the bat, no jumper changes required.

Speaking of jumpers, there are three and having no information on what they do, I beeped them out. JP1 and JP2 both go to that PAL next to the jumpers so short of popping that out and reverse engineering it (might be a nice rainy-day project some time...) I can only speculate. Experimentation on my DX2 66 suggests they’re something to do with wait states or similar. JP3 is easier; it connects the ET4000 and a pull-up to ISA pin B-04 (IRQ 2).

JP1: 1-2 prevents the machine from booting, 2-3 everything works fine.
JP2: 1-2 gives a marginally better Superscape score than 2-3, so wait states?
JP3: IRQ enable/disable

Anyway, hopefully this post will turn up turn up for others searching for details on this card in the future.