I've been using a very similar EPIA 800 as my go-to for DOS gaming for quite a while. These VIA C3 CPUs tend to provide roughly half the performance per clock of a PII or PIII, so your Eden 533 should perform similar to a 266MHz Pentium II. You also have the bonus of being able to slow down the CPU using SETMUL to suit many speed-sensitive DOS games.

sfryers wrote on 2025-04-22, 16:48:

I've been using a very similar EPIA 800 as my go-to for DOS gaming for quite a while. These VIA C3 CPUs tend to provide roughly half the performance per clock of a PII or PIII, so your Eden 533 should perform similar to a 266MHz Pentium II. You also have the bonus of being able to slow down the CPU using SETMUL to suit many speed-sensitive DOS games.

Thanks for the update. I did notice I should be able to slow things down a bit, so given I'm able to make everything work like I want, I'm hoping to have a neat little box for old PC games.

One thing that I completely missed, however, was that the board does not have a floppy drive connector, only 2 IDE. Might not have taken a chance on that if I had noticed.

dav3yb wrote on 2025-04-23, 19:18:

One thing that I completely missed, however, was that the board does not have a floppy drive connector, only 2 IDE. Might not have taken a chance on that if I had noticed.

That's true, but they do have pretty decent USB floppy support.

sfryers wrote on 2025-04-23, 21:16:

dav3yb wrote on 2025-04-23, 19:18:

One thing that I completely missed, however, was that the board does not have a floppy drive connector, only 2 IDE. Might not have taken a chance on that if I had noticed.

That's true, but they do have pretty decent USB floppy support.

Yeah, and thankfully I've got a USB floppy drive, although I'm not sure if it works, but I'll be giving it a shot... I'm hoping to not need it as much, since I'm hoping for mostly doing some games within Windows, and less DOS stuff, but we'll see. As long as I can get into the BIOS on this one that should be coming in today, I'll looking at putting myself together something nice though. I think my current leading case is the APEX MI-008.

dav3yb wrote on 2025-04-23, 19:18:

sfryers wrote on 2025-04-22, 16:48:

I've been using a very similar EPIA 800 as my go-to for DOS gaming for quite a while. These VIA C3 CPUs tend to provide roughly half the performance per clock of a PII or PIII, so your Eden 533 should perform similar to a 266MHz Pentium II. You also have the bonus of being able to slow down the CPU using SETMUL to suit many speed-sensitive DOS games.

Thanks for the update. I did notice I should be able to slow things down a bit, so given I'm able to make everything work like I want, I'm hoping to have a neat little box for old PC games.

One thing that I completely missed, however, was that the board does not have a floppy drive connector, only 2 IDE. Might not have taken a chance on that if I had noticed.

if you need one with the floppy header go for an EPIA-M (M1000), i think its one of if not the only one that has it, though be careful with some models as they have a header that looks like floppy at first glance, the M10000 ive got i use for dos/98, aside from the shitty caps that plague these boards it performs well, the onboard video is S3 unichrome which works great for dos and early 98, should also handle early xp well enough, the onboard sound isn't dos compatible, so my options were pci gpu with SBEMU, or a sound card with onboard graphics, the unichromes image is sharp, colours look nice and compatibility is good, cpu is a 1ghz, works great with setmul, and can be slowed to a crawl.

last i checked on ebay most of these EPIA boards are way overpriced, especially as most will need new caps, my M10000 i got 15yrs ago and it never worked right (constant BSOD when installing Os) and i only just got it working after noticing a few buldging/leaking caps, good boards but i think you take a chance when buying one especially if you pay ebay prices of £140 or $249 🤣.

also that looks like a nice case, mine came in a similar sized one, ive been looking for a good replacement.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-04-24, 05:40:

if you need one with the floppy header go for an EPIA-M (M1000), i think its one of if not the only one that has it, though be c […]
Show full quote

dav3yb wrote on 2025-04-23, 19:18:

sfryers wrote on 2025-04-22, 16:48:

I've been using a very similar EPIA 800 as my go-to for DOS gaming for quite a while. These VIA C3 CPUs tend to provide roughly half the performance per clock of a PII or PIII, so your Eden 533 should perform similar to a 266MHz Pentium II. You also have the bonus of being able to slow down the CPU using SETMUL to suit many speed-sensitive DOS games.

Thanks for the update. I did notice I should be able to slow things down a bit, so given I'm able to make everything work like I want, I'm hoping to have a neat little box for old PC games.

One thing that I completely missed, however, was that the board does not have a floppy drive connector, only 2 IDE. Might not have taken a chance on that if I had noticed.

if you need one with the floppy header go for an EPIA-M (M1000), i think its one of if not the only one that has it, though be careful with some models as they have a header that looks like floppy at first glance, the M10000 ive got i use for dos/98, aside from the shitty caps that plague these boards it performs well, the onboard video is S3 unichrome which works great for dos and early 98, should also handle early xp well enough, the onboard sound isn't dos compatible, so my options were pci gpu with SBEMU, or a sound card with onboard graphics, the unichromes image is sharp, colours look nice and compatibility is good, cpu is a 1ghz, works great with setmul, and can be slowed to a crawl.

last i checked on ebay most of these EPIA boards are way overpriced, especially as most will need new caps, my M10000 i got 15yrs ago and it never worked right (constant BSOD when installing Os) and i only just got it working after noticing a few buldging/leaking caps, good boards but i think you take a chance when buying one especially if you pay ebay prices of £140 or $249 🤣.

also that looks like a nice case, mine came in a similar sized one, ive been looking for a good replacement.

Yeah, I noticed people asking pretty absurd prices for some of this old tech... That's partially why I went with this one that I did... it's listed as "BIOS locked," and I have no idea what the password is... seems like the default bios came with a password on it as well, as it seems to have been some kind of home server by default (Mirra was the brand name). I've got a programmer coming in, and i should be able to pull the BIOS chip and flash it with the default one and get things working though. Fingers crossed anyways. The programmer costs more than i paid for the board.

I'll also need to check on one of those USB header boards that's needed for these, as I did see in another thread they aren't standard and need another breakout board.

ive been meaning to pick up a programmer but since i only mainly flash PLCC32 chips i just use a motherboard with the same socket/chip with a freedos usb and uniflash to hotswap and flash bios. hopefully reflashing the bios will remove the password, though ive never done it so cant say for sure, as for the front usb i think theres someone on here manufacturing replacement boards, luckily mine has normal headers so not an issue.

Wyse Vx0 thin clients are pretty nice for DOS and some early accelerated 3D - https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/vx0
Also have BIOS locked with Fireport by default.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-04-27, 11:47:

ive been meaning to pick up a programmer but since i only mainly flash PLCC32 chips i just use a motherboard with the same socket/chip with a freedos usb and uniflash to hotswap and flash bios. hopefully reflashing the bios will remove the password, though ive never done it so cant say for sure, as for the front usb i think theres someone on here manufacturing replacement boards, luckily mine has normal headers so not an issue.

Yeah, i'll post here how it does with the flashing... i should get the programmer in later today, but not sure how much time i'll have to mess with it.

As for the USB's, there is someone here that has a design that he's got for getting the ports working properly. I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it though, after getting the BIOS sorted out. Once that's done, I can look into actually getting things rolled into a nice little case and setup, and worrying about front USB ports.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-04-27, 13:06:

Wyse Vx0 thin clients are pretty nice for DOS and some early accelerated 3D - https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/vx0
Also have BIOS locked with Fireport by default.

I did see where there were some BIOS's for this board that used the "Fireport" password, but everything I've tried hasn't worked. I'm hoping ill be able to flash the most recent OEM bios from VIA onto it and get in no problem. Although the retro web has the bios, I was able to use the wayback machine and find the same one on an archive of VIA's website.

dav3yb wrote on 2025-04-27, 16:53:

Yeah, i'll post here how it does with the flashing... i should get the programmer in later today, but not sure how much time i'll have to mess with it.

Well the flasher came in sooner than expected, and I had time to fool with it before lunch.

Things went very well, although I almost screwed up pulling the chip out, as I wasn't super sure how to use these little pullers. I now have a stock BIOS and can access everything it seems. Need to drop in a new CMOS battery and then I'll get to start seeing about loading things up. I'll get to see if the compact flash card I have will actually work as a boot drive. Also need to find an IDE CD Rom drive.

https://a.co/d/g9kpQY1

This is the one i bought btw.

This has been quite an interesting journey thus far.

I've been having issues with the CF card I got to try and use as the boot drive. It would say it needed to have some Large mode enabled, but it seems like no matter what I set the drive to in the BIOS, it would force a surface scan when trying to install Windows 98, and then eventually just stop saying there were errors or corruption on the drive.

Swapped over to an SD to IDE adapter I had, and the first SD card I tried (Samsung microsd), also failed... and now it won't let me erase it at all. I wonder if this was due to some options being set that shouldn't have from trying to get the CF card to work. I did find a spare SanDisk 8gb card, and it completed without issues.

I've booted into Windows 98, and can start considering moving forward with a build. I'd also like to try to get a hold of the header board for the USB front ports, which a user by the name of kingcake made some of, but due to not having enough posts on the forums, i can't send him a private message. Here's his post from a similar thread, in hopes of him seeing it and reaching out:

kingcake wrote on 2024-01-15, 21:16:

It is very interesting to know it worked. USB 1.1 is prettyl slow and tolerant, so I guess it's not too surprising. But what really shocks me is that the motherboard enabled the ports without the OC pins being pulled to +5V with a 560K resistor.

I made a ton of these when I was testing my design, if you'd like a fully assembled one, I'll gladly send you one for the cost of shipping.

If you need more than one, then yep, PCB Way or JLCPCB are both good.

Hopefully I can get my hands on one. Main thing now is to get drivers installed, and figure out what all various updates or hotfixes i need to try to get to make windows 98 work as good as it can.

I have this one I think or a variant. I remember I had trouble getting a removable media to work as a boot drive (via usb). Kind of defeats the purpose of a compact machine if you need to use a IDE Cdrom as a boot device when you need to do maintinence/reinstallation etc.

It's still possible to have a compact setup with a slim optical drive if you can find a suitable case. These are my retro mini-PCs: Re: 3DFX Mini-ITX Build

Joakim wrote on Yesterday, 16:44:

I have this one I think or a variant. I remember I had trouble getting a removable media to work as a boot drive (via usb). Kind of defeats the purpose of a compact machine if you need to use a IDE Cdrom as a boot device when you need to do maintinence/reinstallation etc.

Yeah, I'm not looking for the smallest setup imaginable for it, just something more compact than a small matx case. I did order an Apex MI-008 case, which should suit my needs well. I'll likely design and 3d print an adapter to put the sd to IDE adapter into the floppy drive slot, which will leave the PCI slot open for either a better GPU, or possibly a sound card.

I would like to get a decent 3dfx build going one of these days. I have 2 voodoo 3 3500s (I think), as well as a pair of voodoo 2s I could do some sli with if I ever get around to it.