First post, by LocalBus
Hi! After going "down" the ranks with DOS compatible machines (started with AMD64 with ESS-Solo1 soundcard) - I am finally back to the roots where my journey began back in 1994. While my machine was a classic VLB 486 DX2 spec, I got this mainboard handed down to me a couple of years later when it was time for upgrade. Long story short, I went for a Cyrix 6x86 PR166 CPU instead, so this mainboard have been collecting dust ever since.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the manufacturer behind it, but so far to no avail.
What is very rare about it, is the Socket 4 + Socket 5 combo, where the printing on the mainboard covers jumper settings for P60/P66 (P5) and P90/P100 (P54C). I know the first owner bought it with the original P90 (Gold heatspreader) with the FDIV bug in all its glory. Sometime later this was swapped for the P100 that is currently mounted.
I'm now on a quest to resurrect this piece of history (have to source some 72-pin FPM SIMMs and some kind of Multi I/O card first). Since it does lack all the legacy I/O connectors on the mainboard I have to go the ISA route for the I/O card and possibly a complementary PCI IDE controller. I guess technically there were never any PCI Multi I/O cards? I just remember the huge VLB Multi I/O card on my old 486.
It carries the early Pentium chipset from OPTi:
82C571 + 82C572
And
82C822 (this one surprised me) - VLB-to-PCI bridge - makes me wonder if it would be possible to retrofit a VLB port 🤔
I'll try to keep this topic open as I go, hopefully it will POST once more!
Cheers,
Linus