First post, by s3freak
- Rank
- Newbie
You will not have seen me much on this forum, as I not very confident about posting in public, but I was last active on this forum in 2013 when I personalised DOSBox and posted my patches - Now I have built real DOS boxes!
I have recently purchased this item from eBay, from a seller who sells test equipment, who apparently doesn't know anything about these interface cards, which I stumbled across by searching for A80486DX4100:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/253413889265
As you can see, one of them is a Tseng VLB card, and I could only be certain that it is a Tseng ET4000 VLB, of at least W32 as it has two empty memory sockets. There is also a single board computer with the 486 processor that I was searching for, an Intel 486DX4 100MHz SK096 with write back cache, and finally another communication card containing a TI DSP chip. It appeared that the Intel CPU was soldered to the board.
Whilst the asking price was $134, I made an offer for $50 with the offer notes saying that I wanted only the Tseng card, which the seller had accepted. When I tracked the item being FedExed, the seller put INTERFACES (notice the plural) as the reference with the weight of 3lbs, which meant that I were getting all three cards for just $50!
Once received, I am a happy customer, with not only a Tseng ET4000/W32p VLB card, I also received a communications card with a TI DSP chip and a single board computer with an Intel 486DX4 100MHz SK096 processor with write back cache. However, the Intel CPU is soldered to the board, but I already have another SK096, which the seller managed to desolder as there were still solder on the pins!
I put an extra 1MB RAM on the ET4000, using the RAM extracted from a faulty S3 Trio, to get 2MB, put it in my 486 and it works!
The main question here is that what the other two cards do? I have tried searching online about them and could find no information. If ever I needed the 486 CPU from the single board computer, it would take a tremendous amount of effort to desolder it, as I have seen elsewhere on this forum.