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Arcom Olympus PIII EBX Single Board Computer

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First post, by Lomax

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I've got this rather lovely old industrial single board computer that I want to build something nice with. It's an Arcom "Olympus" Pentium 3 Coppermine motherboard with the Apollo PL133 chipset (VT8604 / VT82C686B) that has an impressive range of on-board peripherals and I/O for its size, including:

  • Intel Pentium III 100/133MHz FSB Coppermine CPU
  • Up to 512MByte unbuffered 3.3V SDRAM
  • 8/16 bit ISA compatible PC/104 expansion bus
  • 32-bit 33MHz 5V PCI expansion bus
  • S3 Savage4, 4 x AGP 2D/3D video accelerator with DVI-I and VGA outputs
  • Dual UltraDMA/100/66/33 IDE controler
  • Dual 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB, 2.88MB floppy drive controller
  • Type I/II CompactFlash card socket
  • IEEE1284 compatible SPP/EPP/ECP parallel port
  • Four 16C550 compatible UARTs (3 x RS232, 1 x RS232/422/485)
  • Two Universal Serial Bus 1.1 interfaces
  • RealTek RTL8139C 10/100-BASETX Ethernet controller
  • VIA VT1612 AC'97 audio codec w. Line In/Out, 4W Speaker Out, Auxiliary In, CD In, MONO In/Out and Microphone In
  • Game/MIDI port
  • IrDA via interface module
  • 8-bit Hitachi HD44780 character LCD I/O port
  • PS/2 mouse & keyboard

All this and more on a diminutive 146mm x 203mm PCB! I plan to (eventually) turn this into a SFF Win98SE retro box, in a custom made enclosure, but I haven't yet decided what add-ons I should make room for (e.g. PCI/ISA/PC/104 cards, DVD & floppy drives, internal or external PSU, integrated display?). In the meantime I've spent some time (too much probably) making a fairly accurate 3D model of it in Blender (to aid with the enclosure design), and I've managed to get hold of the full user manual and a few other bits of documentation. I've uploaded what information I have to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/arcom-olympus Would love to get your suggestions for what to do with it, and to hear from others who have the same or similar EBX boards and what your plans are!

Reply 1 of 3, by Lomax

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I already have a 1GHz Coppermine PIII and 512Mb SDRAM installed and I have tested that the board works:

Reply 2 of 3, by Lomax

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I'm going to get myself an EEPROM programmer (probably an Xgecu T76) and try to dump the BIOS, since no BIOS files are available online for this board. If that's successful and I can manage to program a working PLCC-32 replacement chip I'm going to try to modify it to include the Tualatin microcode using BIOS Patcher 4.32. I've never done this before but I think it should be doable, since the board has an Award BIOS and supports a 133MHz FSB. Of course I'll still need a Tualatin with a voltage conversion mod, but those are fairly easy to find (though the 1.4GHz variant fetches ludicrous prices).

Reply 3 of 3, by Lomax

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I just saw that someone is selling 29(!) NOS Arcom Olympus boards on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/295443045221 They have some unspecified CPU (possibly a Celeron 733, as that seems to have been the default) and 256 MB RAM installed. May have a CF card installed as well, though it's difficult to tell from the photos. Asking price is $200 a piece, which is a bit much IMO, though there is a "make offer" option. Thought I'd share since they're pretty cool boards - tempted to make an offer myself!

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