Here is the Display Adapters section. I simply updated the Diamond Speedstar device driver, and told Windows 95 to use the 8514 driver instead. And that worked!

Also, I am able to use 1024x768 resolution at the desktop, in 256 colors. Perhaps that's nothing special? Anyway, with the resolution set to 1024x768, I ran Wintune 97, and I get these video results -

The video speed seems to be about 4 times faster than a Tseng ET 4000. For my testing, I used a 100 MHz osci, and set the bus jumper to /6. That means the bus speed is 100/6 = 16.6 MHz.

Correction. I'm sorry, but in my message above, I said that the bus speed was set to /6, which is 100/6=16.3. This is not true. Instead, it was set to 7.2 MHz. There are a couple of jumpers to set the bus speed, and I hadn't reset all of them. After I saw my mistake, I set to bus speed to /6, but the BIOS POST displayed garbage, and I could not boot up Windows 95. The reason is because my VGA card, a Diamond Speedstar x24, cannot tolerate this high bus speed. I tried /8, and that worked OK. The bus speed is now 100/8= 12.5 MHz. I reran WinTune 97, and I get this video result -

Strangely, the video speed has dropped. Also, I am running the resolution at 640x480. However, all of the other tests seem quicker.

Question: In order to retest this hardware at a higher bus speed, I need to replace the Diamond Speedstar with my Cirrus Logic card. However, it has no VESA header pin connector. Is this important? Do I need to have the ATI 8514 Ultra connected to a VGA card, using the VESA cable? Also, I have my VGA video cable connected to the Ultra 8514 card. Presumably, this is necessary? Thanks a lot for any info! 😀

You can try it without the VESA connection. It'll probably work fine in the Windows GUI, just might cause issues for things like fullscreen DOS windows and such.

For consistency's sake, you should probably try 1024x768 on the higher bus speed (or 640x480 with the 7.2mhz setting). I'd expect that most of those scores are dependent on the resolution...

I tried the ATI + a VGA card with, and without the VESA cable. If I remove the VESA cable, then plug a VGA video cable in to the ATI, I get a blank screen when I power on the 386 mobo. However, what might be happening is that Windows 95 is booting up, but I can't see it.

If I boot up the 386 with a VGA video cable in a VGA card, I then see Windows 95 boot up, but at the point when the Win95 desktop appears, the screen goes blank. This is because Win95 is telling the ATI driver to take control. At that point, if I remove the VGA video cable from the VGA card, and plug it in to the ATI card, I then see the desktop. So, the VESA cable seems to be a convenient thing to have, for this type of set up.

I tried a new VGA card, alongside the ATI 8514. I tried a Diamond Stealth 24. It's got an S3 chip on it. This card doesn't like high bus speeds. I could only set the mobo's bus speed jumper to /10 setting, which is 100/10 = 10 MHz. Here is Wintune 97's video results for this card -

I then told Windows 95 to use the ATI 8514. I reran Wintune 97. I get a slightly better video speed, and the draw filled objects seem to have improved.

PS - perhaps I should have used 640x480 resolution, as you say for consistency's sake.

I've just done another test. I removed the VESA cable, and connected the VGA video cable to the ATI card. I booted up the 386 PC, and saw a blank screen. I waited for a couple of minutes, then pressed my monitor button, to switch back to the 386 PC. I then saw the desktop OK. This is useful to know.

Now, I will replace the Diamond Stealth VGA card, with a Cirrus Logic card. Then, I will increase the bus speed to maximum, and then retest the ATI card. Hopefully the ATI card will tolerate the high bus speed. I'll post back a bit later with any results.

I ran the ATI + Cirrus Logic VGA card at various bus speeds, and Wintune 97 showed no speed improvements, at higher bus speeds. Also, the ATI could not tolerate the bus speed set to maximum, which is 100/4 = 25 MHz.

retro games 100 wrote:

I ran the ATI + Cirrus Logic VGA card at various bus speeds, and Wintune 97 showed no speed improvements, at higher bus speeds. Also, the ATI could not tolerate the bus speed set to maximum, which is 100/4 = 25 MHz.

25 MHz is a 300% overclocking, you probably require a can of liquid nitrogen first. Be careful that the 386 board does not die of a sudden death.

The Mach8 seems to be much faster than the original 8514A.

I'm pretty sure the CLK/6 is not 100/6. It is 50/6.

You can use Mach8 without a VGA feature connector just fine, but keep in mind you will either have to use a switchbox, or swap the VGA cable manually when you switch between DOS (VGA) and Windows (8514) modes.

I wonder what range of 2mb isa cards their are?

I've seen a S3 928 & ATI cards, did they make 2mb Tseng or Cirrus Logic ?

Well there are just a few. Overall it doesn't had much sense to buy a 2 MB ISA card for an average user.
With 2 MB you can run 1024x768 with 16 bit color f.e. but
- most monitors capped at 800x600@ 56 Hz
- ISA cards usually do not have WinGDI acceleration functions that results in dumb framebuffer access -> slooooow
- Win 3.x is in addition very slow in high color modes

Though some high end ISA cards as with the Weitek P9100 f.e. featured this.

The 386 mobo manual says this, about all available bus clocks -

CLK2/10
CLK2/8
CLK2/6
CLK2/4
7.2 MHz

CLK/4
CLK/3
CLK/6
7.2 MHz

It then says - CLK2 equals the OSC speed of motherboard. (CLK equals the OSC speed of a 486 daughterboard). If for example CLK2/6 = 80/2/6 = 6.6, then the bus clock options with a 80MHz osci would be -

4
5
6.6
10
7.2

If for example CLK2/6 = 80/6 = 13.3, then the bus clock options with a 80 MHz osci would be -

8
10
13.3
20
7.2

I think the 2nd listing above is more likely to be true. Looking at the first listing, only one option (10 MHz) is higher than the standard 7.2 speed. If you look at this webpage -

386DX40 build

and scroll half way down, you can see my 3DBench test results table, for the 386 mobo. They show that the bus speeds of 8, 10 and 13.3 yield higher (and not lower) scores compared to the standard 7.2 speed. I think this table "proves" that listing 2 above is the correct interpretation for the mobo bus speed settings, and that listing 1 is an incorrect interpretation of the bus speed settings on this mobo.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

For the missing pin hole you can either drill a hole, get an adapter (nothing complicated really) or cut the pin out of a cable (this cable will then not be fully DDC compatible anymore so use a spare one).

For drilling this hole, please can you suggest what tool I need to buy? Also, for the adapter idea you mention, do you know what search text I need to enter in to ebay to find one? There are thousands of VGA adapters on ebay. Thanks a lot for any advice.

Pretty much all of the big players that were still around in 1993 or 1994 had 2MB graphics adapters. I personally have owned quite a number of ISA 2MB or 4MB cards, but mostly with S3, ATi and Tseng chipsets. Though Cirrus Logic also had 2MB cards. Supposedly the ones based on the CL GD5434 chipsets are quite good.

It's not quite true that there are no advantages to having an ISA card with more than 1MB. If you only play DOS games, 256KB or 512KB is probably all you would ever need. But more memory makes a huge difference for Windows applications, especially if the card uses graphics acceleration. The Mach8 was one of the first chips on the market which offered this (though did not always have VGA, such as yours).

I think others in here have probably already explained how accelerated graphics can help overcome the bandwidth limitations of the ISA bus, by speeding up the way various line draws are performed. You can think of it as bitmapped graphics (VGA) versus vector graphics (8514). Windows 3.1 is an environment where accelerated graphics makes a HUGE difference.

As others have said, having lots of memory helps tremendously with screen resolution and colour depth. Windows 3.1 doesn't really make good use of 256 colour graphics. Personally I find the windows dithering revolting. Having 15-bit, 16-bit and 24-bit colour depths makes the win31 experience so much better. Though you have to keep in mind that there are also quite a few win31 apps that make extensive use of 256 color cycling that won't run under other colour depths.

My all time favourite ISA card for windows is the Mach64 VRAM. The 2MB version is probably all you'll ever need. It offers 1024x768@16-bit colour. I have the 4MB version, which can do 1600x1200@16-bit colour, but it's really too slow to be practical. Probably your best bet is to pick up that CL GD5434 card I mentioned earlier. They're usually not too hard to find, and pretty cheap. Great DOS performance, as well as pretty darn good Windows graphics, and yes it is an accelerated DRAM chipset.

Sort of related:
If you had to choose between eating a pile of poo (Oak -037) or eating a dead rat (Trident 8800CS) which would you choose for DOS?

Really appreciate the great info, thanks! Recently, I picked up this interesting looking ISA VGA card. It's a CL GD5434! I hope it arrives OK. The last item I bought from this guy was DOA.

The speedstar64 is a great card, but I highly recommend you upgrade it to 2MB so you can take advantage of 64-bit internal memory access (runs as 32-bit with only 1MB).

As for the choice between Oak and Trident, perhaps it would be better to starve.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The speedstar64 is a great card, but I highly recommend you upgrade it to 2MB so you can take advantage of 64-bit internal memory access (runs as 32-bit with only 1MB).

Great! 😀 Now I need 2 pieces of 512Kb memory! Is the quickest/easiest way to get these 2 chips to buy any old video card with socketed chips, and to use them? Perhaps some kind of old 2-4MB PCI video card? Something like that? Thanks!

I did a search for: Diamond Stealth, because I remember that some of these video cards have sockets for extra memory. Here are 2 auctions:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=370052534045 (4 chips)
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=350430590459 (2 chips)

I reckon that both items would be OK, and that both items have 512Kb chips. I also reckon that getting the first item would be advisable, because that has 4 chips, as opposed to 2 chips on the second auction. If my thinking is correct, I will get the first item!

Between the two cards, I'd say the Stealth64 would be more likely to have the chips you need. However, keep in mind that EDO and FPM DRAMs look alike, but are not usually interchangable. Trio64V+ *usually* uses EDO DRAMs. Your card might use FPM. What do the DRAM chips on your CL card say?

Is the quickest/easiest way to get these 2 chips to buy any old video card with socketed chips, and to use them? Perhaps some kind of old 2-4MB PCI video card? Something like that? Thanks!

Yeah, that's one way to do it. Of course, I personally wouldn't want to pull chips off a perfectly good S3 PCI card like the ones you linked, I'd be looking for some crappy Trident or something.