LewisRaz wrote on 2020-08-11, 20:49:

I sent a low offer for this on ebay and accepted a counter offer of not much more.

Quite a mystery box... Cannot find much/anything about it and this was the only pic provided..

I usually see 286 builds in cases like this. The floppy drive cage position makes this a very comfortable layout for building — particularly if you want to build something with lots of cards.

mpe wrote on 2020-08-12, 13:00:

#9 Imagine 128. […]
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#9 Imagine 128.

This was my dream card back in 1995.

Something about your photos makes them instantly recognisable. I don't know if it's the lightning or the love for cards with green PCB and yellow tantalum capacitors. 😀

mpe wrote on 2020-08-12, 13:00:

#9 Imagine 128.

This was my dream card back in 1995.

Same here 😁

Yes. Yellow caps contrast nicely on green PCBs

mpe wrote on 2020-08-12, 13:00:

#9 Imagine 128.

This was my dream card back in 1995.

If the LSI chip is considered the graphics chip, what role does the Cirrus Kogic graphics chip play?

The main chip is GUI accelarator and the GD5422 is for VGA compatibility. Each with dedicated RAM.

How is the performance of GD5422 also how is the imagine 9 128 main chip GUI accelerator compares to to get the good idea how good it is?

One more thing about imagine 128, I noticed every card has a empty socket next to the main chip, what is this for and can this be installed to help bit more better?

Cheers,

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-12, 14:03:

Arrived. Very nice deal again..! […]
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Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-04, 21:46:

Quite surprised my price proposal was accepted, but I think it was fair. - CT1350B - MACH32 ISA - several SBCs - MFM controller […]
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Quite surprised my price proposal was accepted, but I think it was fair.
- CT1350B
- MACH32 ISA
- several SBCs
- MFM controller
- 2x ET4000 ISA
- ET4000 VLB
- 386/387
- ...

Arrived. Very nice deal again..!

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That's a great haul. The 286 SBC has me intrigued. I occasionally think about putting an ISA backplane in a large case and keeping a collection of SBCs to swap around depending on what era I feel like at the moment... because more old computers is something that I need apparently 🤣

mpe wrote on 2020-08-12, 13:00:

#9 Imagine 128. […]
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#9 Imagine 128.

This was my dream card back in 1995.

9rebmun, 9rebmun, 9rebmun. 🤣
Very nice ! Have a slightly smaller version, not as great a performance as you think compared to some Virge cards.

My Dual GPU collection is looking good.

It arrived today. Testing the new Pentium MMX 266 SBC. It came with 2x 32MB RAM SODIMMS, on-board bootable CF card socket,USB controller, ethernet, VGA, etc. Things are testing good so far. I can't wait to try out setmul and see just how granular the speed control can be. The BIOS seems to support some CPU throttling, so there may be some possibility of using CPUSPD on it as well.

Deksor wrote on 2020-08-12, 08:18:

Hey can you please help me check something here Identifying PCChips 386 era chipsets ? 😀

I suspect the m326 to have a UMC UM82C491F chipset under the hood (actually I have very good reasons to think it is), but I have no way to verify that.

If you can flash new bios chips, try to run the mrbios ROM designed for UM82C491 and tell me how it goes 😀

I'll definitely do that sometime once I buy a 512Kb EPROM.

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-12, 14:05:

That ET4000 is very interesting. It has a VGA and a EGA connector. I have many ET3000 with this feature but this is the 1st ET40 […]
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That ET4000 is very interesting. It has a VGA and a EGA connector. I have many ET3000 with this feature but this is the 1st ET4000 I see. It is much faster compared to a standard 8-bit EGA card.

Should be the fastest video source you can connect to your EGA monitor?

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This indeed really interesting! How is the EGA compatibility on that one? I have an ET3000AX card that is surprisingly compatible with EGA games despite it being a dual VGA/EGA card - I wonder if it's the same for this card? (some tricky games I've found so far are "Heroes of the Lance" and "Gods" - if you have access to them)

Microchannel bus clone AdLib because other sound cards are impossible to find for MCA. Even offered $2,000 once and no takers. Oof.

supercordo wrote on 2020-08-13, 02:08:

My Dual GPU collection is looking good.

That is a beautiful find. I really wanted one of those when they came out but being a child that was way out of my price range. How does it perform?

Second #9 card this week. I had to call a halt to buying S3 cards for my collection as I own so many of them. However, I could resist buying this one for £8.99 delivered.

I just love how the solder side looks on #9 cards:

I love #9 cards for the same reason - no logical reason 😀 Don't have many yet though.

debs3759 wrote on 2020-08-13, 10:57:

I love #9 cards for the same reason - no logical reason 😀 Don't have many yet though.

well they're really pretty, reason enough imo :3

Bought one of these "sawed off" ESS AudioDrive 1868F cards for next to nothing.

I mostly got it because a) it was super cheap b) I was curious about ESFM and its native 16-bit AudioDrive mode for DOS games. And while ESFM did thoroughly impress me, I'm not all that sold on the AudioDrive mode. Granted, I need to run some more tests, but so far, the results have been very mixed.

Some games do sound nicer in that mode, but others become muffled (filtered?) and a few even appear to be downsampled (e.g. WarCraft 2). On the plus side, its SBPro mode is superb. In that mode, the card sounds clean and vibrant and appears to be very compatible as well. Also, it produces no noticeable noise with the jumpers set to the "Line Out" position. As for ESFM, to my ears it sounds very close to genuine OPL3, sometimes even a bit cleaner if that's even possible. Definitively keeping the card.

Bought some 16x CDR blanks, two DDR3 4Gb dimms (untested but in original Gskil package), assorted cables/things and a few software cd's from local SA store. One of the cd's is MSI Drivers and Utilities G71-MID1031-J24 (for Intel based boards circa 2011) and not found on Archive orgs MSI cd library (i could not find it). Spent about $30 on the stuff, so not a lot but noticed many prices are about 20-25% more than pre-covid.....
added: forgot that a Gravis Xterminator (missing the DB15 to USB dongle) was in that bunch of stuff, think it cost $3.50, untested yet...