I wonder how this will fare on 50 Mhz with VLB? 😀

Will it work with a Dx2-66? or better?

got pics? 😀

It's a DX/2-50, so VLB should only be running at 25MHz, which is a tad slow.

Might as well upgrade or overclock to 66MHz.

I have an AMD DX2-80, should I better try that?

If you want to cache all of that 64 MB of RAM, be sure to set your external L2 cache to write-through mode. Otherwise, you'll need to upgrade to 512 KB of cache for external write-back mode.

feipoa wrote:

If you want to cache all of that 64 MB of RAM, be sure to set your external L2 cache to write-through mode. Otherwise, you'll need to upgrade to 512 KB of cache for external write-back mode.

Thank you, that's just what the chipset datasheet says.

The most important part of the stuff here:

I have iSX-25, iDX2-50, AmDX2-80, AmDX4-100 for CPUs, although I'm not sure if DX4 is supported.

Nice! Time to put it all together.

By the way, that particular motherboard can only handle up to 256 KB of L2 cache.

From memory I've got a similar board.

You'll want this

http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486vlb … 03tgv2.txt.html

Basically I don't think I tried such a high cpu on mine, or did I? Maybe I tried my 133. It's been a while - I've got quite a few 486's atm. This one is in a pile of "CBF" to finish as I've got one 486 in my wife's computer room being worked on 😀

It might work with the 100 just not display as amd - maybe enhanced 486 or whatever.

I found that with a number of my VLB Boards they tend not to like more than 32mb ram for some quirky reason especially when running windows on them. In dos I don't encounter many probelms. I've tried multiple ram sticks. Only on later PCI Boards I've had - it seems to go away. I honestly don't know why. Yet on one of my 1997 boards the opposite applies - It doesn't like a lot of my ram modules it's very picky.

Have you considered a CF > IDE (Ultra DMA) Solution for this PC? 😀
If you plan on doing some overclocking on VLB Boards - (Can someone explain this?) - It gets rid of quite a few problems.

I think it would be interesting to see the 80 and 100 at various settings. Although personally if you want the most compatible system I'd stick with a DX2-66 for a number of reasons.

Personally for me I don't see much point going past 16-32 mb ram on a VLB system anyway and anything more than a DX2 66 chip. If you have a much better Graphics card maybe - some good VLB cards can kick ass that's when I'd get excited 😁

What games do you want to throw at this thing (This is the part I really like to see)

I also have Am5x86-133ADW, But I don't expect it to work well on this board. I also think that anything higher than 66 Mhz is for later PCI boards.

And having anything close to a Pentium is not fun for me because I have a lot of Pentiums and can make anything from 75 to 233Mhz with or without MMX.

I tried DX2-50 at 66mhz, it POSTed OK, memory test OK.
3-volt AmDX2-80 at 66mhz and 3 volt won't POST. At 5 volt POSTs OK.
AmDX2-80 at 80 Mhz POSTs OK, but again, doesn't POST at 3 volt.
AmDX4-100 at 66Mhz POSTs with "Cache memory bad" message. 5 volt. 3 volt - no POST.
Am5x86-133 at 80Mhz - no POST at all
DX2-50 at 80 Mhz works fine, so I'll stick to that until I find out if I can roast my 3-volt CPUs.

wtf? It does not seem safe to use 3-volt AMDs at 5 volt, but there is no other way to get a post.

x3 multiplier is officially supported, but not supported by this exact mobo, since the pins responsible are either non-existant, or soldered, so I didn't try DX4-100 at x3 or 5x86 at x4.

Judging by memory test speeds, DX2-80 is significantly faster than DX2-50. There's a significant beep when the memory is tested, I just had to listen carefully 😀

Concenring a CF card - I'm not sure, I don't have either an adapter or a CF card, while I've got a lot of HDDs form 100 to 20 000 Mb to choose from. And 64 Mb memory is enough to have a RAM disk for whatever I need to get a fast access to. But the whole idea is curious.

And I'm not sure what games I'm going to play. Ultima 7, perhaps. And Master Of Orion - I put this on all my old rigs, it is too cool to not have it.

And thanks for the link, but the board is a little different from what I have. I have this rev.2 board in dead condition, though.

Yes you are correct, I did in fact wonder why the BIOS was located in a different position on the Image of the board when doing the link.

It was the only link I could find after about 10 minutes of googling etc. Scarce or what.

I am working on a similar system albeit with a PCI bus atm. M918 Based. I've spent a good 5 hours hand picking games to archive onto a single CD so I can copy over. I've gone class DX2 - 66 Basic 2MB PCI Graphics, Classic SB16 only in a flip top case. I'm going to remove the CD drive when done and keep only 2x HDD's in there (One easy to access for transfer) and the 5.25 and 3.5 drives for looks 😀

I strongly agree with you - it seems we share something in common possibly like many other enthusiasts here. A Classic MMX System is perfect for late 90's dos games like Duke 3D / Blood etc all that kind of stuff. I also quite like them for some earlier 90's games as they work quite well (Sierra / Hugo, quite a number of classics etc - and they operate much faster minus a few for example the arm shuttlecraft grab scene in SQ5 - I Had to transfer the save game to my 386 to complete it at correct speed 🤣)

Sorry if I'm going off topic but I thought I would share my passion for the same thing by listing a few games I'm going to be playing ;

* going to try Ultima 7 (Never played)
* Lots of Adventure games (Sierra mainly)
* a lot of XT based games
* Rise of Triad
* Overkill
* Champ Kong Games
* Monopoly
* Oldschool chess apps
* Virtual Pool (Getting it working properly is the next thing)

I really REALLY want to get my hands on QEMM (Any ideas anyone?)

Do you plan on running pure dos or windows as well? 😀

What is your sound card like for OPL Based sound (Seems to be very common with a lot of 486 games I play from that era)

and what capabilities does the 2MB Rom serve you? 😀

The list of games is no offtopic, really 😀 Thanks for that, I'll be looking into it. By the way, instead of Googling stuff you can always try this awesome database: http://museum.ttrk.ee/th99/

I downloaded the whole thing with HTTrack and now even a large cataclysm can't prevent me from getting info on old computers 😀

I don't know a thing about QEMM, maybe it's worth digging into. In basic terms, what advantage does it give?

I'm planning to run DOS 6.22 + Volcov Commander, maybe Windows 3.1 later. Nothing like windows 95 or 98, although they would work I guess. It just does not feel right to use those things on a 486 😀

When it comes to sound cards, I'm really not an expert. From what I tried, SoundWave has good SB compartibility, supports General MIDI and MT-32 emulation, FM syntesys. On a 386SX-40 MT-32 emulation slows down the system a great deal, some games don't load, some become less playable. But if it workes there, it sound amazing. I managed to get Prince of Percia 2 to work and it literally kicked ass!

According to various sites, Orchid sw32 has ICS WaveFront syntesizer and WSS compartibility. It was made in different versions, which included a 1Mb ROM version, a 2Mb ROM version, both with or without onboard SCSI controller. ROM has compressed instrument sounds, bigger ROM equals better sound quality, I guess. It also has three 15ns RAM chips which should give a total of 64Kb cache memory.

btw, there's something wrong with my Caviar, I couldn't start the system with it as type 47 (all numbers taken from the sticker at the top). Type 45 doesn't work as well. It spinns up propperly, used to work a long time ago, but now all I get is HDD controller failure. Old Seagate ST145A works well as type 45, but I know it has a diskfull of bad sectors. Dead HDD?

QEMM is just a memory manager. If you're running DOS 6, memmaker works just as well.[/quote]

After looking through your motherboard manual it appears that your motherboard has very basic support for dx4 chips. You should probably be aware that There are actually 3 different pinouts for DX4s. There is the intel pinout, the AMD pinout (AMD also made DX4 chips with intel pinouts), and the Cyrix pinout. Intel DX4 always had 16kb of cache, AMD usually had 8 but sometimes 16, and Cyrix always had 8kb. Cyrix always had 8kb writeback. Sometimes AMD/Intel chips are writeback, but sometimes write through. 3V 486DX2 chips also follow these rules.
Some motherboard BIOSes check the CPU to see what it is, and if they don't recognise it, they won't boot. The AMD 5x86 is supposed to have a workaround for this depending on if the chip is running in 3X or 4X mode.
I can't explain why your motherboard boots 3V CPUs in 5V mode, but not 3V. That's weird, and a BAD idea. If you want to run these chips I recommend an interposer, or a different motherboard. Though, it sounds like you'd be pretty happy with just a 5V DX2-66.

I recommend sticking with a 33MHz bus unless you are absolutely certain your VLB cards can handle it. Sometimes they appear to work, but then one day you get a corrupted hard drive.

Anonymous Coward, The exact motherboard I have can't handle DX4s, the jumpers for DX4 simply do not exist 😀 I mean, they're mentioned in the manual, but there are just empty lead dots instead of them.

OK, I'll stick with 33Mhz bus. This ASUS VLB combo seems to be a budget solution, so maybe I should not expect perfect stability at 40Mhz.

Thank you for your post 😀

40 or even 50MHz is possible with VLB, but you have to be careful...especially with your HDD controller. If you have a good quality motherboard and good quality controllers, you can do it.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

40 or even 50MHz is possible with VLB, but you have to be careful...especially with your HDD controller. If you have a good quality motherboard and good quality controllers, you can do it.

How do I know if I do?

The best way I've found is to use google newsgroups to read articles on the subject from the mid 1990s. Certain manufacturers actually certified their stuff to work at 50MHz. For example, I am pretty sure my Hercules Dynamite Power specifically states in the manual that it supports 50MHz operation. ET4000W32P and ARK based VGA cards seem to be pretty good at 50MHz in general. I've had bad luck with S3 though.
The HDD controller is really the one to watch for though. If you get graphics corruption on your vga card, you just reset the machine and try again. However, with HDD controllers if you get drive corruption that means you need to format the drive and start over. I get around this problem by running my HDD controller on the EISA bus instead (my board is VL/EISA combo).
For motherboards, I would guess Asus boards with SiS chipset would probably work pretty well.

Well, BIOS string says, mobo's manufacturer is Lucky Star, so I guess I'm not that lucky 😀

Concerning ASUS combo device, there are two quarz thingies, one of which is connected to CL-GD5428, so it seems to me that graphics chip works on it's own frequency, not on VLB frequency specified by jumpers on the motherboard.

I believe those crystals are used to set display resolutions. Trust me, your card runs at the same speed as the main memory bus.