Bancho wrote on 2021-08-12, 21:38:

I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have […]
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I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have the original disk but unfortunately its bad 🙁 I need to Change both Dallas's on it too as they are dead.

My board is a Asus VL/EISA-486SV1 which I currently have a DX2 66mhz and 16mb of ram in, CL VLB VGA Card and Tekram EISA HDD/FDD controller with 4mb cache

Did you try any of the ECU packages at this link, some of which contain your boards config file (!ASU4901.CFG)

http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/pub/EISA/sources/ASUS/

PC-Engineer wrote on 2021-08-12, 21:29:

dionb wrote on 2021-08-10, 10:36:

Tbh, I'd be more concerned about the apparent VLB slots here than the EISA: VLB+EISA was rare, and one of the vendors doing it was ECS - but ECS had its own proprietary local bus, using the same physical form factor as VLB, just with different pinout (including power/ground pins!). However this is a Gigabyte board and never heard of them using ECS local bus instead of VESA.

I have this ECS Board (SL486VE) and the VLB-Slots are full VESA comaptible, tested with several VLB cards. Currently its running with a Mach32VL. Also the Socket 3 supports full compatibility with the P24T (tested too).

As the SIS 406/411 Chipset is a EISA/VL combo chipset, the Gigabyte 486 SA board has fully compatible VLB and EISA Slots! I am looking at a test of this board from 05/1993 (c’t magazine) right now with confirmation of its compatibility. They also tested a Mach32VL

I have the ECS SL486E. Guess what the difference is... V stands for VESA. No V is no VESA, despite the slot looking identical. Put a VLB card in it and the magical smoke comes out. Thank you ECS.

TheMobRules wrote on 2021-08-12, 19:31:

NScaleTransitModels wrote on 2021-08-12, 18:57:

Interesting... would bus mastering affect speed for VGA VLB cards?

A while back someone on this forum told me that VLB graphics cards do not use bus mastering. VLB bus mastering only seems to be important for SCSI controllers.

That's basically correct. I don't know any bus-mastering VL graphics card. IIRC, the Virge chip read 3D command lists using bus mastering, but only in PCI mode. Yet bus mastering failed under Linux on my Soyo 4SAW2 board. The Windows driver only enables bus mastering on Pentium class computers. So: No bus mastering for VL graphics cards is correct. Sometimes slots that couldn't use bus mastering were labelled "VGA only".

Bus mastering used for SCSI controllers is also correct. Most prominent example is the Adaptec 2842VL.

I expect that bus mastering is also used by some other interface cards, like high-performance network cards.

VL mastering is not used by any VL IDE controller I know of. Some are able to run the IDE DMA protocol on the IDE cable, but they translate it to PIO and have the processor access the data as-if the drive is in PIO mode.

dionb wrote on 2021-08-12, 22:40:

PC-Engineer wrote on 2021-08-12, 21:29:

I have this ECS Board (SL486VE) and the VLB-Slots are full VESA comaptible, tested with several VLB cards. Currently its running with a Mach32VL. Also the Socket 3 supports full compatibility with the P24T (tested too).

I have the ECS SL486E. Guess what the difference is... V stands for VESA. No V is no VESA, despite the slot looking identical. Put a VLB card in it and the magical smoke comes out. Thank you ECS.

Ohhh, thats a very disappointing but interesting fact. Sadly the SIS406/411 has a slow EISA performance and the expensive EISA graphics cards have the same performance like ISA graphics cards. I hope the smoking Graphics card was a common, not such rare type. Became both components, mainboard and graphics card, killed by this action?

PC-Engineer wrote on 2021-08-13, 04:59:

[...]

Ohhh, thats a very disappointing but interesting fact. Sadly the SIS406/411 has a slow EISA performance and the expensive EISA graphics cards have the same performance like ISA graphics cards. I hope the smoking Graphics card was a common, not such rare type. Became both components, mainboard and graphics card, killed by this action?

Actually the card still worked afterwards in another board. And it was a Cirrus Logic GD-5428, so about the most common VLB card anyway.

It's possible the ECS local buis is damaged, but no cards to test that. The rest of the motherboard still worked, but I've never gotten it stable. It has a Dallas DS1387 RTC with 4kB RAM, which was also soldered to the board. It gave me a lot of trouble getting it loose, and after modding it with an external battery and adding a socket, it sometimes does want to boot, but sometimes not. 'Massaging' both CPU and RTC seems to help, which suggests that I damaged some traces when desoldering it. It's currently waiting in my box with big pile of 'projects'.

Bancho wrote on 2021-08-12, 21:38:

I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have […]
Show full quote

I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have the original disk but unfortunately its bad 🙁 I need to Change both Dallas's on it too as they are dead.

My board is a Asus VL/EISA-486SV1 which I currently have a DX2 66mhz and 16mb of ram in, CL VLB VGA Card and Tekram EISA HDD/FDD controller with 4mb cache

Which BIOS does your board use? Award or AMI?

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-09-05, 14:29:

Bancho wrote on 2021-08-12, 21:38:

I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have […]
Show full quote

I have a EISA/VL system built, although its not really fully finished yet. I need to find the EISA Configuration utility. I have the original disk but unfortunately its bad 🙁 I need to Change both Dallas's on it too as they are dead.

My board is a Asus VL/EISA-486SV1 which I currently have a DX2 66mhz and 16mb of ram in, CL VLB VGA Card and Tekram EISA HDD/FDD controller with 4mb cache

Which BIOS does your board use? Award or AMI?

Its what appears to be a very basic Award BIOS

Could you dump your BIOS and scan the manual?

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-09-07, 00:22:

Could you dump your BIOS and scan the manual?

Sure, I'll try and get it done the weekend

That would be great, thanks!

Bancho wrote on 2021-09-10, 22:02:

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-09-07, 00:22:

Could you dump your BIOS and scan the manual?

Sure, I'll try and get it done the weekend

Sorry for resurrecting (and kind of hijacking) the thread, but did you ever get to scan the manual @Bancho? I recently got a board just like yours, works just fine but the jumper settings available on TH99 and such seem to be kind of incomplete, lots of dubious "factory configured - do not alter" stuff. So I would be very interested in taking a look at that manual if you still have it, even if it's just basic photos instead of actual scans.

Also, you mentioned the config disk you got is bad, but can you do a DIR listing or is it completely unreadable? I would like to reconstruct it based on the config utility and files that are available online.

I can dump the BIOS from my own board tonight, it's an Award v4.00 with extremely limited options (no way to set timings, enable/disable caches or select boot order). Just date/time, floppy, HDD, display and shadow config.

TheMobRules wrote on 2022-07-05, 18:35:

Sorry for resurrecting (and kind of hijacking) the thread, but did you ever get to scan the manual @Bancho? I recently got a boa […]
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Bancho wrote on 2021-09-10, 22:02:

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-09-07, 00:22:

Could you dump your BIOS and scan the manual?

Sure, I'll try and get it done the weekend

Sorry for resurrecting (and kind of hijacking) the thread, but did you ever get to scan the manual @Bancho? I recently got a board just like yours, works just fine but the jumper settings available on TH99 and such seem to be kind of incomplete, lots of dubious "factory configured - do not alter" stuff. So I would be very interested in taking a look at that manual if you still have it, even if it's just basic photos instead of actual scans.

Also, you mentioned the config disk you got is bad, but can you do a DIR listing or is it completely unreadable? I would like to reconstruct it based on the config utility and files that are available online.

I can dump the BIOS from my own board tonight, it's an Award v4.00 with extremely limited options (no way to set timings, enable/disable caches or select boot order). Just date/time, floppy, HDD, display and shadow config.

I didn't get to scan it unfortunately. I still have the manual, so will try and get it scanned. I can't remember if the disc structure was readable. I still have this system built (but stored away.) i will try and fire it up and see if I can read the disk again.