nice stuff amontre!
I regret selling my MU80 some years ago, variety is always good

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-06-24, 05:32:

Vynix wrote on 2024-06-23, 17:16:

It didn't come with a bracket, but given how scarce these 10/100 ISA NICs are, I didn't think twice before buying it.

I got excited at the thought of buying a 10/100 ISA NIC a few years ago and snagged some at a decent price. I was very disappointed by the performance. Even at maximum throughput, it's barely faster than a 10mbit NIC due to the bandwidth limitation of the ISA bus. It's definitely a marketing gimmick.

I think the machines they were most use in would have been the 486DX2/3 and Pentium LPX type, and similar proprietary, that had local bus onboard VGA and I/O but only ISA on a riser. They would tend to have most of the ISA bandwidth free and have the system speed to feed to/off it. It's certainly not a card that will help out a 286 or 386 much. Though one could probably get into situations with later boards, particularly Voodoo2 SLI, where you haven't got enough PCI.

keropi wrote on 2024-06-24, 09:20:

nice stuff amontre!
I regret selling my MU80 some years ago, variety is always good

Thanks ! Just set it and encounter low battery warning. Tested with Albion and Final Fantasy 7 it works. Not sure if it works as intended with the low battery warning and I need to find out how to desolder the battery and replaced it.

cyclone3d wrote on 2024-06-23, 18:17:

I never really understood why you would want a 100Mb ISA NIC. […]
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I never really understood why you would want a 100Mb ISA NIC.

If you only want to transfer a small file a bit faster, sure, but in an ISA only system you end up saturating the ISA bus and bringing the whole system to a halt.

Overclock the ISA bus and it might be worth it.

A cool piece of hardware in any case.

Me neither, since this card was cheap and curiosity got the better of me, I figured it would be worth a shot, this card is going into a Pentium system, so I don't really think it will matter too much since the only other ISA card I have in it is a sound card, the rest of the cards are PCI.

If it does turns out to be a problematic card, I'll just swap back in a PCI NIC until I find another suitable ISA 10m NIC.

@BitWrangler good point, this was also one of the reasons I bought this card, I needed to save one PCI slot for future use.

amontre wrote on 2024-06-24, 15:17:

Thanks ! Just set it and encounter low battery warning. Tested with Albion and Final Fantasy 7 it works. Not sure if it works as intended with the low battery warning and I need to find out how to desolder the battery and replaced it.

I am not sure a battery is even needed for our gaming purposes - it's not like we will save settings to work with our studio setup or something
removing the dead battery is a good idea ofcourse but tbh I would not replace it at all and just have the message display each boot and not pay attention to it 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-06-24, 14:06:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-06-24, 05:32:

I got excited at the thought of buying a 10/100 ISA NIC a few years ago and snagged some at a decent price. I was very disappointed by the performance. Even at maximum throughput, it's barely faster than a 10mbit NIC due to the bandwidth limitation of the ISA bus. It's definitely a marketing gimmick.

I think the machines they were most use in would have been the 486DX2/3 and Pentium LPX type, and similar proprietary, that had local bus onboard VGA and I/O but only ISA on a riser. They would tend to have most of the ISA bandwidth free and have the system speed to feed to/off it. It's certainly not a card that will help out a 286 or 386 much. Though one could probably get into situations with later boards, particularly Voodoo2 SLI, where you haven't got enough PCI.

ISA bus is the system bus on those systems, no DMA/CPU operation possible in the background while you handle ISA card. With move to PCI ISA finalyl got decoupled, but then you can use any PCI ethernet card 😀

Acquired some stuff this past Saturday, decided to start out with video cards...I paid $20 for all of these! But I think the Mach32 is missing a chip that it kinda needs to work, based on pictures I saw on VGA Legacy.

Nvidia card is a GeForce 4Ti 4400 128MB...with a couple bad caps.

It's possible that Mach32 might work in lower res and refresh rates, in that era they had some "professional grade" DACs optional and usually the solder pads left empty on board, but who knows they might have done one with a socket for upgrade. Shooting form the hip on generalities though, needs looking up that chip number to see if it had the basic DAC in it or not.

edit: ah, here's one like yours ATi Mach32 VLB VGA card, quick test

I am now the proud owner of a CUSL2-C, complete with 512MB and a 1000MHz P3. This is turn means that a friend of mine will end up getting my trusty old 440BX Slot 1 board. I don't need ISA, as my pentium 100/233 system is used for mostly DOS, so I'm happy to give him a known good board.

EvieSigma wrote on 2024-06-24, 22:45:

Acquired some stuff this past Saturday, decided to start out with video cards...I paid $20 for all of these! But I think the Mac […]
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Acquired some stuff this past Saturday, decided to start out with video cards...I paid $20 for all of these! But I think the Mach32 is missing a chip that it kinda needs to work, based on pictures I saw on VGA Legacy.

Nvidia card is a GeForce 4Ti 4400 128MB...with a couple bad caps.

PXL_20240624_223203752.jpg

PXL_20240624_223158470.jpg

PXL_20240624_213511991.jpg

Yeah, I was going to say but BitWrangler already mentioned - the DIP-28 chip below the missing QFP DAC is the 'basic' RAM-DAC for the card. It's probably fine for 8-bit / 256 colour modes but probably cannot do 16-bit and higher colour modes without the larger QFP RAMDAC. Notice there's either one or the other, thinking about it, my Intel 486 motherboard with the same graphics chip has the same setup with the smaller DIP-28 RAMDAC and the spot for the bigger RAMDAC not populated: Re: Need help with Intel Professional/GX Workstation L486 Still haven't got that booting very far yet, need to figure out what pins are IDE and which are SCSI
It should work great, also a Ti4400! That's a pretty rare thing to find these days, fantastic lot 😀

An Abit BX133-raid V1.01. Pin AK4/VSS was burnt on the socket.
An adjacent pin AJ3/VSS also has some scoring to it.
It's dead in the water. Caps are TEAPO. I had most in stock, but had to order 1500uF/6,3V/r3,5.
A preliminary test showed some CPU-voltage at 2V (measured at suspected CPU power coil - Mendocino testing CPU).
In a few days we'll see if it's just the caps or something else. Also reflashed latest bios.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-06-25, 11:20:

EvieSigma wrote on 2024-06-24, 22:45:

Acquired some stuff this past Saturday, decided to start out with video cards...I paid $20 for all of these! But I think the Mach32 is missing a chip that it kinda needs to work, based on pictures I saw on VGA Legacy.

Nvidia card is a GeForce 4Ti 4400 128MB...with a couple bad caps.

It should work great, also a Ti4400! That's a pretty rare thing to find these days, fantastic lot 😀

I read somewhere that the Ti 4400 can have faster ram chips than the Ti 4600, and is therefore the better card between the two when overclocked. Does anyone know if this is true?

BetaC wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:27:

I am now the proud owner of a CUSL2-C, complete with 512MB and a 1000MHz P3. This is turn means that a friend of mine will end up getting my trusty old 440BX Slot 1 board. I don't need ISA, as my pentium 100/233 system is used for mostly DOS, so I'm happy to give him a known good board.
IMG_3586s.jpg

Just curious, is there a difference between a CUSL2-C and a standard CUSL2? Aside from both likely having a variant w/ onboard sound (much like mine does, also proud owner of a CUSL2 + 1GHz P3 and 512MB RAM 😁)

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-25, 15:41:

BetaC wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:27:

I am now the proud owner of a CUSL2-C, complete with 512MB and a 1000MHz P3. This is turn means that a friend of mine will end up getting my trusty old 440BX Slot 1 board. I don't need ISA, as my pentium 100/233 system is used for mostly DOS, so I'm happy to give him a known good board.
IMG_3586s.jpg

Just curious, is there a difference between a CUSL2-C and a standard CUSL2? Aside from both likely having a variant w/ onboard sound (much like mine does, also proud owner of a CUSL2 + 1GHz P3 and 512MB RAM 😁)

I am unsure, maybe it's different in that my C model is missing the extra CNR port and the AGP Pro?

FWIW mine doesn't have CNR at all (neither standard nor the slimmer version of it) but does have the AGP Pro slot. That, and the chipset is 815E on mine while yours has the EP version.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-25, 16:49:

FWIW mine doesn't have CNR at all (neither standard nor the slimmer version of it) but does have the AGP Pro slot. That, and the chipset is 815E on mine while yours has the EP version.

From what I can tell, the P part of the chipset just means no integrated graphics.

BetaC wrote on 2024-06-25, 21:34:

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-25, 16:49:

FWIW mine doesn't have CNR at all (neither standard nor the slimmer version of it) but does have the AGP Pro slot. That, and the chipset is 815E on mine while yours has the EP version.

From what I can tell, the P part of the chipset just means no integrated graphics.

Would this be the difference between a CUSL2 and CUSL-2C? E vs EP chipset and thus integrated graphics or not?

[Edit] Just checked Asus' website, and yes, the CUSL2 is 815E with onboard graphics whereas the CUSL2-C is 815EP and thus no graphics. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction 😎

By the way, I assume that CU is for Coppermine, SL for Solano Chipset ...

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:24:

It's possible that Mach32 might work in lower res and refresh rates, in that era they had some "professional grade" DACs optional and usually the solder pads left empty on board, but who knows they might have done one with a socket for upgrade. Shooting form the hip on generalities though, needs looking up that chip number to see if it had the basic DAC in it or not.

edit: ah, here's one like yours ATi Mach32 VLB VGA card, quick test

Interesting, I wonder if it can be upgraded by fitting the RAMDAC chip?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-06-25, 21:50:

By the way, I assume that CU is for Coppermine, SL for Solano Chipset ...

That makes sense, since the effectively same board but with tualatin support is a TUSL