I think just about every manufacturer under the sun may have had their own proprietary local bus at one time or another.

IBM had one for the PS/2 computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture

Microchannel was never considered a "local bus". It ran at a fixed 10Mhz.

I have a Gigabyte GA-486US. The local bus connector is realized by two 16 bit ISA slots in a row. I also have the suitable ET4000 VGA and SCSI cards.

BastlerMike wrote:

I have a Gigabyte GA-486US. The local bus connector is realized by two 16 bit ISA slots in a row. I also have the suitable ET4000 VGA and SCSI cards.

Could you post some pics?

Ah yes, I think I've seen that one before. There was a tseng card for it on eBay recently too.

Found some buried in a German forum. Wonder what they called it and how much better the performance was? They remind me of Amiga Zorro cards.

The SCSI card is super cool. That must be quite rare too.

Performance should be almost identical to VLB.

The reason I ask is the video card likely uses the ET4000AX and the SCSI card is using the same host adapter chip Adaptec's ISA cards use. I don't think either chip can completely take advantage of a 32-bit interface.

The ET4000AX should have supported local buses natively. No comment on the adaptec chip on the SCSI card....surely it had to have been better in some ways though.

edit: I see ET4000AX only has a 16-bit host interface. It should still see a big boost due to running at local bus speeds though (33MHz)

That nicely covers the basic needs of 486 Local Bus expansion, video and hard drive interfaces.

I just mentioned this in another thread and ran across this thread searching for details on the OPTI local bus, but I ran a system in 1994 that used the Chips & Technologies WINGINE local bus. Here's my write up and note the engineer on the project in comments on the post.

http://www.bytecellar.com/2007/02/09/chips_technolog/

bp

blakespot wrote:

I just mentioned this in another thread and ran across this thread searching for details on the OPTI local bus, but I ran a system in 1994 that used the Chips & Technologies WINGINE local bus. Here's my write up and note the engineer on the project in comments on the post.

http://www.bytecellar.com/2007/02/09/chips_technolog/

bp

The only information out there on the Opti Local bus seems to be that it exists.

There's not much to know really. It's pretty much like Vesa Local Bus, but it has a different connector. It slightly predates VLB, but it failed and therefore not many cards were made for it.

While browsing some old hardware magazines and forums, I collected some informative facts about proprietary local bus hardware:

First available mainboard providing a local bus was the "486 Superboard" by Orchid in early 1992.
It featured an Opti Chipset and an EISA-style local bus connector called "convertible slot".
This "Orchid local bus" or "Opti local bus" design was adopted by many other manufacturers.
First available graphics cards by Orchid were called "Fahrenheit 1280°D" (S3 911) and "Prodesigner IIsD" (ET4000AX). Several clone cards with these chips were made. Later, an IDE caching controller was also available, the "Tekram DC-660"

Gigabyte featured the "GA-486US" mainboard using two consecutive 16 bit ISA slots for local bus interconnection.
Available cards were "GA-200" (ET4000AX), "GA-300" (S3 911) and "GA-400" (SCSI)

ECS Elitegroup offered local buses on their "UL486" and "FX-3000" a.k.a "US3486" motherboards using the 112-pin MCA slot we all know from the later VLB.
But ECS's implementation is not VESA compatible and unfortunately visually not distinguishable!
Suitable cards for the "ECS local bus": "VI-811" (ET4000AX) and "VI-911" (S3 911)

Chips & Technologies offered a "Wingine local bus" on their 82C4021 chipset based motherboards for their
Wingine F64200 DGX Accelerator cards. These motherboards also had one VLB compatible slot.

Another different local bus connection was used by Joindata with motherboard models "G486PEL" and "G486PLB"
Peripheral cards are "G-HOSTS3" (s3 911) and "G-HOST4000" (ET4000)

There are more proprietary sytems like the Hauppauge 486M, NEC "Optibus", but it is nearly nothing is known about them.

re. Joindata local bus cards: I actually do have an example of a Joindata G-HOST4000 that I acquired from eBay fairly recently as part of a lot of five vintage video cards (the rest being ISA). Seller mistakenly sold it as a regular VLB card, but he also messaged me after the auction ended saying that it was a rare card. After noting that it didn't quite fit in my VLB 486 system, I'd say he was right on the card being rare. Of course, I don't have the right mobo to go with this card, so I don't even know if it works. Here's a picture of it:

So that explains the non functioning slot on the FX 3000D, eh?

This is a pretty interesting post. I knew about some of these proprietary local buses, but the ones from Joindata and ECS are new to me. The ECS slot is particularly troublesome, since you'd have no damn way of knowing if you have one or not.

There must have been warehouses of 16-bit MCA slots laying around for all these buses to recycle them. The Joindata board is using the 16-bit MCA Aux Video Extension slot.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

So that explains the non functioning slot on the FX 3000D, eh?

This is a pretty interesting post. I knew about some of these proprietary local buses, but the ones from Joindata and ECS are new to me. The ECS slot is particularly troublesome, since you'd have no damn way of knowing if you have one or not.

Little necro here...

Discovered the hard way my ECS SL486E with EISA and something that looked like VLB definitely wasn't VLB. Simple way to determine: insert VLB card and it shorts the board out completely - unless it's a cheapo multi I/O card, in which case the system boots but the card starts to smoke 😮

Amazingly, both motherboard and VLB cards (including the smoking one) survived that. No idea what happens the other way round, but I fear it would also short out, probably leading unwitting owners to bin the ECS local bus cards as dead. Distinct feeling they're unobtainium by now 😢