well....It may be a minute before I can test the board because its really ticking me off. had some time after work so I started messing with it, which may actually be my problem half the time. Usually the only time I have to mess with my old PC's is late at night and when I do and I hit a problem I want to solve it so I end up being up till 4AM and more and more frustrated. anyways I think the other half of the problem is I don't really have a proper case to put the board in...but anyways
The VLB slots work. after reseating the cards and hitting DEL on boot as suggested I get video with my Speedster but not the S3 so the S3 may be dead which is a possibility since I found it on a shelf at goodwill.
the frustrating part is the system is very unstable. I tried 2 different ISA ide/fdd controller and a SCSI card with a floppy controller on it and I cant get it read anything. the fdd controller on the scsi card starts to load ms-dos from floppy but then resets. The only controller I had luck with was a generic VLB ide/fdd controller. but about 75% of the time I get all kind of corruptions and errors as it boots DOS. I can confirm my fdd drive and DOS disk is good. sometimes I just get odd symbols and it locks up. sometimes I get it telling me about corrupted files. once I got a "divide overload" error. every once in awhile It will boot into DOS from the disk but its none to stable. I tried to run speedsys a few times to see what it says but its always the same thing. Its reports my 486 is running at 22mhz (this contradicts the post which states 66mhz) and I HAVE double checked my jumpers then when speedsys gets to completing the little cpu speed bar at the bottom the program crashes.
I really wish I didn't sell my extra AT cases a few years back....
so.....blah!