Hi guys,

Is anyone here willing to part with any of this quirky vintage stuff? I'm particularly interested in the gigabyte local bus. I have the motherboard, but nothing else!

Cheers guys in advance!

Another card with new bus popped up in an ebay auction. Don't know the name of it, but the FCC ID indicates this board was made by Acer. It uses a 2nd ISA slot similar to the Gigabyte local bus, but the slot is offset further back on the motherboard.

Some more photos of the Acer card. This time the rear. Looking around, this may slot into the Acer J1 motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/acer-j1

PC World January 1993 Page 113 Mentions it: https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World … anuary_1993.pdf

Needless to say, the Model 5657 took first place in every test. Aside from its high-speed CPU, it boasts all the right performance features, including 8MB of RAM , a 256K external memory cache, an EISA bus, and a video accelerator described by Acer's strategic planning manager L. Pablo Grodnitzky as "a proprietary local-bus graphics adapter using ATI's high-performance video chip and our own proprietary ASICs."

So this was firmly an OEM special bus.

NJRoadfan wrote on 2023-09-20, 02:16:

PC World January 1993 Page 113 Mentions it: https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World … anuary_1993.pdf

Needless to say, the Model 5657 took first place in every test. Aside from its high-speed CPU, it boasts all the right performance features, including 8MB of RAM , a 256K external memory cache, an EISA bus, and a video accelerator described by Acer's strategic planning manager L. Pablo Grodnitzky as "a proprietary local-bus graphics adapter using ATI's high-performance video chip and our own proprietary ASICs."

unsurprisingly nothing on that card is proprietary 😀 ATI TI Lattice National Excel IDT/Renesas OKI ST, everything off the shelf :] That was the beauty of VLB, you could build it from parts bin with no investment in new chip designs.

I ended up buying it. I kind of collect this sort of stuff and at first thought it might be a gigabyte local bus card. It is nice to have Mach32 card in all its bus variants (got ISA, PCI, VLB, EISA and this one, only missing MCA or more?). I think none of the other chipsets had so many bus options (maybe perhaps ET4000AX)

Maybe this is a mainboard it fits in:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/gigabyte-ga-386ps

I doubt it. That one is a 386 with memory expansion slot.

mpe wrote on 2023-10-06, 08:39:

I doubt it. That one is a 386 with memory expansion slot.

Year... 1992 (based on the date on the chips of the card) seemed a little bit too new for a 386.

Would you say its probably from a 486? That would make more sense as a 386.