looking4awayout wrote:
Wonder what you could do with a more advanced system, say a 486... 😉
My first PC i bought myself was a Wang 286, but I sold that and built my own whitebox 386Dx/25, with 387. 386's have a special place for me.
I have a Slot one build I need to do. I still have my original slot 1 machine but the Abit board is dead.
I also have become interested stuff like a older SGI build. But that stuff is expensive as heroine and rarer than gold. At least here.
Phido likes his women like his file systems... FAT and 16.
I can handle Fat32, just make sure shes a size smaller than 32gb.
C&T normally made pretty solid stuff. Their 286 and EGA chipsets were excellent. I was kind of surprised that there were so many non-working features, but perhaps you're right about the AMI BIOS. I've been searching for an MR-BIOS replacement for a while, but nothing has turned up. I've also seen boards with the CHiPS branded BIOS that you are talking about, but I didn't know it was so full featured. I have the full manual for the CS82310 chipset, so if there are chipset register settings in the BIOS, I can figure out what everything does. Now it's just a matter of obtaining the C&T BIOS. I'm not really willing to purchase another board to get it, but perhaps the owner will be nice and provide a ROM DUMP.
Are you certain this chipset supports writeback cache? I didn't see any mention of that in the manual.
I'm thinking about putting a bit of a retrospective piece together on CHips and Tech.
I definitely think it will be easier to find someone with a Chips brand bios than MrBios, I don't move in the same circles as you, it might already be lying around in an obscure part of the retro community. Or maybe one day someone might join with that board and that bios. Currently those C&T bios boards are expensive, but they seem to appear randomly on ebay for reasonable prices from time to time. If your interested in the features of the chipset then that will be the one to hunt down.
They are popular in industrial machines:
http://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/rec … m/slotcpu_1.JPG
https://gt3i.com/products/electroglas-pcb-mot … d-peak-dm-386dx
As for the writeback mode, I was looking through TH99 or some such at different boards regarding cache, there was one listed there with a 3rd cache tag DIL socket, if fitted, it claimed write back ability. I will have to go back and look for it.
I found it after trying to match this mobo next to the tag sockets there is another socket, there seemed to be some info regarding what must be installed to make writeback work. It might not have been correctly identified or used a non or different c&t chip. That info is not reliable, particularly because I can't find it in my history.
Looks like the bios has explanations or info while you edit the register bits.. Would be interesting to see it. The boards ended up in machinery that probed wafers and semiconductor production, so probably how that bios got out in the first place. It wasn't in consumer machines but industrial ones.
C&T were developing a lot of red hot technologies. Key were the Winglue and Wingine, which were later adopted by intel and microsoft in a new form. But also famously used by Next Step x86 machines.
http://www.bytecellar.com/2007/02/09/chips_technolog/
Which links back to vogons.
Re: Remember the C&T WINGINE?
A such they were pioneering a lot of things, making it work, it was just a matter of time before a big entity would eat them. First with VGA after IBM, Intel clone CPU and FPU, motherboard chipsets, first with high levels of integration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAT_chipset.
Compare my board with yours.
Simular, but mine has a 32bit expansion slot that looks like a precursor to the wingine format. I think there is a memory card for it. Mine has basically no jumpers, there are about 5 on the board, for things like ram parity, cmos reset, cmos power source. there is one near the CPU but it doesn't boot if jumpered.