Uncreative Labs

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Have any idea of what brand EISA UWSCSI card will work with the ATI card?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Are there actually Ultra Wide cards available for EISA? I'll take it that you just meant "wide". As far as I can remember, it was only the adaptec cards that had a problem with the EISA version of the ATI GUP. The Adaptec AHA 2740W is the only wide card I've ever used on an EISA system. I suspect that if indeed other wide cards were actually produced they would be made by Compaq, Mylex or something similar. Infact, there is a wide compaq card on ebay right now. I've heard that the old compaq cards are pretty good, but I don't have any experience with them.

http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-Compaq-003529-001-EISA-Wide-SCSI-32-bit-Controller_W0QQitemZ120128303530QQihZ002QQcategoryZ39969QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

I just paid for an EISA caching IDE controller somebody is shipping to me from England, that should be interesting (if I can find the correct drivers and it shows up here in the US in one piece).

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I made a little progress today with the EISA 486.

-ARK1000VL card upgraded to 2mb. Later when I have time I'll slice off the 70ns DIPs and install 45ns parts in their place. This card is now working well in my 486, though I had to add one waitstate to get it to boot. Even with the 1WS it's a damn fast card. Maybe equal to the ET4000. I bet without the waitstate it would be faster.

-I built a VGA pass-through cable and hooked up the ARK1000VL to the Supermac Spectrum/24. It mostly works but the colours in DOS are a bit funky. This is probably because I didn't use a terminator. I built a terminator, but with 10ohm resistors rather than the 75ohm ones. This didn't work out too well and the DOS graphics are now purple. I'll have to fix that soon.

-I grounded pin B13 on my AMD 5x86 to force it into write-through mode. The default is write-back, and it causes DMA issues with systems that don't support L1 cache in WB mode. The floppy drive now works properly again.

-I moved the 486 into a classy full height tower chassis. My goal is to use all black 5.25" faceplates for my drives. I currently don't have a black CD or DVD ROM drive to go with it. I plan to buy a good quality black DVD-ROM drive and hook it up to the SCSI adapter via an ACARD SCSIDE adapter.

The next step in the plan:

Figure out why the hell my Yamaha daughter board isn't fitting on my SB16. I want to use this combination rather than the AWE32 which is a nightmare.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I finally got the Yamaha daughterboard connected to the SB16. I guess one of the pin holes on the daughterboard was bent preventing it from fitting properly. It's a pretty good sounding board, and the sierra games that support MPU401 sound terrific.

I'm having good luck with my VGA feature connector though. For some reason I can't get the VGA output to look right. It almost appears as though only 64 out of the 256 colours are coming up on screen. I rebuilt the VGA terminator using the 75ohm resistors but it didn't change the results. I'm wondering if maybe the pinout on one of my cards is slightly non-standard. It might not be easy to find the pinout for the Spectrum/24 as it wasn't a very popular card.

UPDATE:

I went over my cable again and found that I had made a small mistake. The feature connector is now working properly Very Happy

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

So what do you think of the setup? What is your main video card? Is the spectrum fast?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Right now I have the ARK1000 as my VGA board, but it's possible I might go back to the ET4000W32P. I'll need to get some benchmark software. I think vidspeed is the one to use. I think the two are pretty similar in terms of performance, but the Tseng might have better compatibility in games. Also, I am currently lacking the DOS configuration software for the ARK card. The Hercules Stingray Pro software works in Windows, but the DOS software rejects it. My biggest complaint about my ARK1000 board is that it requires one waitstate no matter what the bus speed is set at. Even at 33MHz, which I f ind pathetic. In my opinion the waitstate really degrades video performance. I'm hoping it won't be necessary if I upgrade the memory chips.

My opinion is that the Spectrum is pretty fast. It's faster than my Mach64s. The Elsa Winner 2000 board that is based on S3 928 (a much older design) was somehow faster than the Mach64, but not as fast as the Spectrum. I think the S3 968 VLB board may be about equal, though I've only tested it out in my Pentium, not in the 486. I really wanted to use the Elsa board, but it has issues when configured as a secondary. The only real problem I see with running the Spectrum is that it doesn't do anything except 24-bit colour modes. So if you have software that demands 8-bit colour mode you're out of luck. However, I find that games and screen savers tend to be the only apps that have this problem. In the case of games it's usually not difficult to find the DOS version. Screensavers are generally a waste of time. The other option is to go into the windows setup and switch your display driver to your VGA board.

I know that you have a Spectrum too, so you should at least try it out. I think it's pretty neat myself. It's not every day you get to see a TIGA in action. There are just a few things you need to remember. The EISA bus must run at 8MHz, running faster will cause video corruption. Not installing the board in a bus mastering EISA slot may cause it to not be recognised by the ECU. You may have to hand crimp your own feature connector cable. I don't think a standard IDE cable will work because it flips the rows of pins. A VGA terminator will be required for text modes, otherwise your display might be mistaken for VGA monochrome by the software. The terminator can be built from radioshack parts for $5. If you don't have the a cable or the terminator you can still use the Spectrum, but you'll have to swap the VGA monitor cable between cards when you change modes. That's how I ran mine for a while.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I've made a little bit of progress on my full tower AT case renovations.

I was previously using an old Gateway 2000 full desktop chassis for the EISA 486, but I just felt that this case didn't really represent the true character of the machine. I feel that the full tower really represents a highend 486 machine from the early 90s. I've had this old generic full tower case sitting around for a long time that I haven't used since it has a few cosmetic problems. However it's made of good quality steel and the front plastic molding is painted to prevent yellowing.

The first problem was that all of the matching drive panels had turned yellow. Previously I hid this problem by installing four matching CD-ROM drives, but unfortunately that makes the machine quite heavy. Instead I have decided to switch to all black face plates. I found that I had some pretty nice seagate 5.25" to 3.5" mounting brackets to fill up the lower three slots. I intend to hook up the LEDs when I have a chance. The slot at the very top will use a 5.25" 1.2meg drive that will serve as the boot drive, followed by a 1.44meg drive and then a CD-ROM drive.

Another issue is the button/LED plastic overlay on the front of the case. Mine had turned a nasty brown and cracked. I removed it, but it has a very unfinished look. I have always intended to rework an overlay using black plexiglass, and today I finally found a place online that sells what I need to do it:

http://www.delviesplastics.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=DPI&Category_Code=Translucent_Cast_Acrylic_Sheet

I intened to remove the existing white reset and turbo buttons and instead fit some black ones to match. The black plexiglass is one of my favourite 486 case designs, and I really like the way that the MHz LED shines from behind it. I may rework mine as a three digit display rather than two in the future.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

This thread lives....

I've been making some minor progress lately, but things are slowly coming together as envisioned.

1. I located some 1mb cache chips for this board....FINALLY! I have been actively looking since 2003. But...I won't receive them for another six weeks.

2. I'm still working on my front panel replacement. I wasn't able to get smoked plexiglass that was both thin enough and dark enough. So I've had to resort to window tinting. I plan to install it on a 1/32" piece of clear lexan.

3. I'm still working on the ARK1000. I sliced off the 70ns chips. I located some 45ns replacement parts. I am currently in the process of removing the old pins. But I sliced a few traces in the process, and that will require some patching.

4. I installed some nice rubber feet on the bottom of the case. It previously was bolted to a plastic base which I junked.

5. I located a nice black pioneer atapi dvd rom drive to match my black panels. I intend to use this will a scside adapter. It will be interesting to test the functionality under windows 2000.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Where did you get rubber feet, do they look OEM?

I think I have an ARK1000 PCI card in the 486-160 PCI I am building. I am stuck on getting a DC5030 promise IDE PCI caching controller working on that 486.

I hate working with custom case plastics, pictures of what you have would be interesting.

Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:18 am

Unknown, how the hell did you get a 486 to 160mhz

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Easy, PCI motherboard with a AMD 486/133 (33x4) set to 40 FSB instead of 33 (4x40=160).

I would think some later VLB boards could do the same 4x40, still using the normal heatsink and fan with no overheating.

There were some later 133's made that ran cooler and were rated for a higher temp ABZ or some marking like that.

Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:46 am

was it stable? i've got one of those 5x86 133, that at 160 actually slows down the computer. Would an am486-120 run at those speeds?

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

k2x4b524p wrote:

was it stable? i've got one of those 5x86 133, that at 160 actually slows down the computer. Would an am486-120 run at those speeds?

Why would it slow down the system running at a faster FSB? If the motherboard was made to run at 40 FSB (like it would for 120 CPU 3x40, or the 80Mhz variety) then the cache should be fine with it.

Somebody had tried 50x3 but I don't recall how well that work if at all.

As far as stability I ran that setup for atleast a year in the 90's as a gaming rig and never had a crash. I kept the unit on the shelf untill recently and it still works fine *except for that caching PCI IDE controller that I could never get to work 100% in anything other then a Pentium.

I also have a Cyrix 5x86? 120 on a different PCI motherboard I might try to overclock.

Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:53 am

it's a pc-chips m919 no cache, takes the propriety coast thingy, i think it automatically reduces the isa and pci clocks then i set it to 40