I decided to put together a humorous build on a wonderful board I have; the IBASE MB700L. It's an Intel 440BX motherboard with a gratuitous amount of no less than 5 ISA slots. I've never seen a Pentium 3 motherboard with so many!

Because this board uses the venerable 440BX, DMA is available on the ISA bus. Unfortunately, there is no -5V, but this can be solved by adding a Voltage Blaster.

The board supports a 66 or 100 Mhz FSB with up to an 8.5x multiplier, allowing up to 850 Mhz of Coppermine or pin-modified Tualatin.

With so many ISA slots, what can we do with it?

Here is my attempt:

Roland LAPC-I
Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 CT3780
PCMIDI MPU with Yamaha DB60XG (NEC XR385)
Orpheus with Dreamblaster X2GS
Voltage Blaster
PowerVR PCX2
Voodoo 3 3000 PCI

The sound options this provides include: Roland MT-32/CM-32L (LAPC-I), Sound Canvas GM/GS (Dreamblaster X2GS), Yamaha GM/XG (DB60XG), EMU-8000 (AWE32), Yamaha OPL3 (AWE32 CT1747), and Sound Blaster Pro/16 (AWE32).

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, there is an ESS Solo-1 onboard. This chip has great Sound Blaster Pro compatibility and an integrated OPL3 ESFM synthesizer, very similar to Yamaha's.

The reason for the PCMIDI instead of another sound card with a wavetable header was to add the Yamaha GM synthesizer without the risk of creating a problem with too many sound cards fighting for IRQs. The Orpheus can also be swapped for another PCMIDI since its Sound Blaster Pro support is redundant and it too will need to be configured with an IRQ. My worry is that just cramming this thing full too many "Sound Blaster" clones would create problems.

For video there is the Voodoo 3 which has excellent DOS VESA support and up to Glide3 and DirectX 6/7 acceleration in Windows. This is paired with a PowerVR PCX2 for SGL acceleration. The necessity of the Voltage Blaster for the LAPC-I to function leaves the perfect gap to fit the PCX2 into the shared ISA/PCI slot position with plenty of breathing room for the GPU. There is also the flexibility of using the onboard C&T 69000 to free up another PCI slot instead. This chip is not very powerful but has drivers for Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and NT, and has VESA 2.0 compatibility.

The motherboard has a single floppy connector, one ATA 33/66 connector, four SATA connectors, and an onboard CompactFlash slot.

If you haven't been able to tell yet, this board has very few compromises. It's true that there is no AGP slot, but it does have integrated Intel 10/100 Ethernet for networking.

Another thing to note is that due to the flexibility of Socket 370 and the support for a 66 Mhz bus, this system can be paired with a wide range of slower processors to fine tune the desired speed of the system.

How else can this board be configured given the available slots? I would have liked to have added a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI to go along with the theme of gigantic cards but I don't have one in my collection.

I also have a collection of Sound Canvases, an MU50 as well as an MT-32 (old) and CM-32L, which can take the place of the LAPC-I, PCMIDI/DB60XG, and Orpheus/X2GS. So feel free to brain storm other possible configurations. The goal of this one was to keep everything integrated with the only external box being a mixer to put it all together. This obviates the need for multiple external synthesizers, MIDI cables, power supplies, and having to power them on/off individually, which is a real pain!