First post, by Ozzuneoj
- Rank
- l33t
I picked this up last year because it was fairly cheap and a bit of research told me that it actually has some kind of 3D acceleration, which means that it could have some pretty interesting roots in the early days of the industry.
It is a Fujitsu Coral P PCI Evaluation Board Rev. 5.0, equipped with Fujitsu's MB86296 graphics processor and 64MB of SDRAM, hand-dated June 2007. It is worth noting that the board says Coral P on it, but the Coral P chip would normally be the MB86295. This card's MB86296 chip is designated Coral PA and has several additional features.
In this Vogons post from 2014, there are several links related to Fujitsu's unique geometry processor called the FGX-1 from 1997, which was apparently going to be used along side a Rendition V2200 on the "Hercules Thriller Conspiracy" card, which never made it to market.
After more research it seems possible that some part of the Fujitsu FGX-1 (or MB86242, also known as Pinolite) lived on through their future graphics products and ended up in the MB86296S chip on this card. At the very least, this is a chip that is said to have a "geometry processor" as show in this datasheet. Interestingly, they have other products in that pdf that are labeled as having OpenGL-ES support, but this one makes no explicit mention of OpenGL or Direct3D. It also has both VGA and composite video input and a video processor for some kind of pass-through features (haven't read up on this part yet).
I have found quite a bit of documentation about these, including a full (if slightly outdated) manual for the evaluation board itself. This actually allowed me to fix an issue that was preventing the system from booting with the card installed by putting all the jumpers back to defaults.
If the software could be located, it should be Windows 2000 (possibly XP) compatible according to this FAQ document:
19.2. What is the composition of the boards? A: MB86296 and MB86297 evaluation boards are PCI adapter cards. These boards can be […]
19.2. What is the composition of the boards?
A: MB86296 and MB86297 evaluation boards are PCI adapter cards. These boards can be used on a
Windows (2000 for MB86296 and XP for MB86297) PC with Visual C++. MB86276 has a standalone
board that connects to a Fujitsu MCU board.
For some further reading, here is the datasheet for the MB86296 chip itself. I also have a few more documents I'd like to upload, but I will have to put those on the next post.
There is also this old archived page listing all of Fujitsu's evaluation board packages:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060313033350/ht … splay/devtools/
As mentioned earlier, inserting the card into my test system as I received it would prevent it from even reaching POST. No beeps, no display, just power and fans. After setting all the jumpers to defaults (I suspect the PCI reset jumper was to blame) the system will at least give a no-video beep with just this card installed. I'm thinking it lacks a proper VGA BIOS, so I just added it alongside a normal VGA card and the system works fine. Windows 98SE detects it as a "Standard PCI Graphics Adapter" but has no drivers for it. I will try it in an XP system but I doubt that will have drivers either.
If anyone has any idea where to find software for this, or knows of any devices that ended up using this chip or other Fujitsu 3D chips, please post here! Actually, go ahead and use this thread for anything related to Fujitsu's graphics endeavors. They aren't a name we hear much about with regard to the graphics industry, but it seems like they were doing some awesome stuff starting in the mid 90s!
(Also, I am aware that this is not a high performance graphics solution and was absolutely NOT meant for advanced desktop gaming in 2007... I think the 133Mhz SDRAM memory may even be on a 32bit interface. Most likely these were intended for use in automotive media\navigation displays or something similar. I still find it interesting though because of its roots in early 3D accelerators, and the fact that this eval board is intended for use in Windows.)