Uncreative Labs

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

I can understand how you might be having problems with PCchips boards, they have a pretty aweful track record. Have you ever been to the "PCchips Lottery" website?

I am beginning to think that perhaps my chipset only does support up to 64mb of memory. TH99 says that my board supports 128mb, but the EISA Config file I finally found for my motherboard the otherday only has settings for up to 64MB. That's okay though, because I think my motherboard has issues anyway. I don't think it ever really worked 100% correctly. I am currently looking for either an AIR 486EI, or this Tyan VEISA 486 board I found that supports up to 256MB of 30pin SIMM. It's only a Baby AT formfactor!!!!! These 16mb 30pin SIMMs are pretty awesome if you can find a motherboard that supports them. They sell sets of (4) for $20 with buy it now on ebay.

One other thing I am beginning to wonder is if my memory scores are where they should be. On a gateway 2000 486 EISA system with 33MHz BUS, it scores 25MB/sec. My board only gets 15MB/sec at 33MHz and 21MB/sec at 50MHz. I wish I had proper jumper settings for my motherboard, so I could tell where the waitstate jumpers are.

Anyway, I will be interested in MS DOS 7 and 8 once I get a motherboard that isn't so flakey. Even at 33MHz it's not terribly great. I'm not even running VLB!!!

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

WFW v3.11 with IE5 works well on MS-DOS 7.x (from Win98.) It works fine even on my Athlon system, apart from the lack of drivers for my onboard sound or AGP video card. Wink

There are Win3.1x drivers for the TNT1, by the way.

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

Wait, there is actually a version of IE5 that works on windows 3.11? How is that exactly? I was not aware of a win32s version of IE5.

Anyway, I am pretty certain now that I require a new motherboard. My powerleap adapter works, but it's creating a short on a neighboring terminator package. I also managed to break the terminator, and I doubt finding replacement will be easy.

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

Yes, there is a version of IE5 for Win3.1x. It's a little hard to find a copy of it these days, and you might have to mess around with the .ini file(s) used by the installer.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Looks like it's still here:

http://www.cintek.com/download/ie5.htm

Personally, it's a half-hearted attempt at a browser (use NN3.04 or Opera 3.62)....

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

Actually IE5 is probably the least outdated browser available for the Win16 platform.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

But also the least stable, and biggest memory hog...

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

Memory is not really a problem for me. When I get the appropriate motherboard, I will be running 256mb in 30pin SIMM. Maybe I should dual boot this sucker with Windows NT 4.0. Unfortunately, my current drive is not large enough. I don't even have this system running yet. Evil or Very Mad

I think I am going to have to find a new terminator package for my current motherboard, because it doesn't look like I am going to be able to locate another EISA motherboard for quite a long time. I think I am going to have to get a smaller VRM until I can locate my Tyan S1437 V2.x motherboard. My current VRM is a real headach. I think I may have a half decent solution though. I have noticed some unused socket3s for sale on ebay recently. I am thinking about buying one, and sticking it into the socket on my motherboard (which is technically a socket2 without the ZIF).

Oh yeah, I am pretty happy to announce that I am the winner of an ELSA Winner 2000 dualbus card with 4MB. Unfortunately it comes at a cost. Shipping from Germany is 30 Euros. But it's worth it!!! To my knowledge, this is the best EISA graphics adapter ever made. For those not familiar with it, it's located here on TH99: http://docs.van-diepen.com/th99/v/E-H/51387.htm

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 6:01 am

Your system is more than capable of running windows 95, if you haven't already, install it and see if all your memory is counted and used.

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

Windows 9x will never see the light of day on this computer. Windows 9x deserves a very special place in software hell. Twisted Evil

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

Well, I probably won't be receiving my ELSA card for a while, but in the meantime I have finally gotten around to doing some testing on a couple of devices in my system. I have figured out that my regulator adapter is somehow fried. I can't quite figure out how. It must be a bad VRM or capacitor. Anyway, I don't think I am going to bother with this adapter anymore, because it's clearly a piece of crap. I wore out the socket on my board and busted a terminator trying to get the stupid thing working. Thankfully I found another terminator. For now I am running an Intel DX4 overdrive processor at 100MHz. The increase in internal clock frequency helps some apps, but the 33MHz bus slows my memory transfers considerably. I am guessing that running a 5x86-150 must be roughly 75% faster than this chip overall!!! Still, GTA runs about twice as fast in 24-bit mode as it did at 50MHz!!! That's not bad. I figure it should be running pretty smoothly at 150! Since I now have the BUS down to 33MHz, I also thought I would do some testing with the windows video driver...It still seems to crash under wintune. I am pretty sure that this ET4000 card works properly at 50MHz now. Does anyone know where I can get a good, stable, generic driver for an ET4000W32/P in Windows 3.x? Also...I WANT A NEW VRM!!!!!

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

Ah, I have finally found one. The ultimate Desktop AT Case

http://i20.ebayimg.com/03/i/03/1d/15/11_3.JPG

I still haven't been able to do any playing around with new hardware. I seem to have found a new problem with getting my AWE32 to work though. All the jumpers seem to be set accordingly, but it doesn't seem to operate at all. I guess I should run the Creative Labs diagnostics to see what's up. I really hope it's not a compatibility issue with my SCSI controller.

I have also finally gotten around to ordering a 68-pin PLCC socket for my make it 486 adapter. So in about two weeks I am going to dust off the old 286 and install the upgrade chip as well as a caching IDE controller. I think that will just about put the finishing touches on my 286 system, because at this point I really can't think of anything else I would want to do to it.

My Elsa Winner 2000 card should be arriving in a day or two, so hopefully I will have something interesting to say about that later. There isn't a lot of useful information available on the card when used as a coprocessor only. I wish I had the original documentation for it.

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

I have recieved the ELSA winner 2000, and so far I am pretty impressed with the results. I first tested the card separately. The VGA graphics are acceptable, but the windows graphics are quite good. They are among the best I have witnessed of ISA/EISA/VLB cards so far. I managed a score of 5 megapixels/sec in wintune at 1280x1024@16k colour depth. My ATi managed a score of 4 megapixels/sec at 1024x768@16k. I think my et4000w32p wasn't much better.

This card also seems to work in combination with my ET4000W32p card. However, because I do not have a VGA terminator, I have not yet been able to get a picture. I believe the terminator is nothing more than some 75ohm resistors inserted between several of the pins on the VGA port. I also need to construct a VGA cable. I think this cable may me no more than seven inches long. I should be able to do this easily by hacking apart a standard IDE ribbon cable. I was a little bit dissapointed to learn that the feature connector will not allow me to do more than 8-bit graphics. Thankfully the only two applications I have that use those depths are Fractint and GTA. Anyway, I think it's time to get to work.

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

I am getting pretty annoyed. I ordered a second 5x86 chip. This time I went with an evergreen 5x86 upgrade chip. Its the surface mount variety with the built in regulator. Unfortunately this damn thing doesn't work correctly. It causes some NMI timer errors at startup. The system is able to boot to the prompt, but a lot of my software causes the system to lockup. I have all of my system settings toned down. I am wondering if perhaps I have the Cyrix 5x86-133 model. There were limited quantites of these chips produced. The only problem is that the manufacturing date on my CPU seems to be from 1998. REV K is stamped onto the underside. The only way I can verify my processor type is to tear off the heatsink. I don't really feel like doing this at the moment. Perhaps I should resell it on ebay. It looks like I'm stuck with this damn DX/4 overdrive for a little while longer. Why does this have to be so damn difficult?

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

Damnit!!! I have the worst luck. I got bored and decided to rip off the heatsink on my evergreen upgrade CPU. It turned out to be an AMD 5x86 afterall. I read that a lot of people have problems with these damn evergreen upgrades, so perhaps I will have to try again. I'm wasting a lot of money on these CPUs!!!!

Things left to buy still:

-Gateway 2000 AT desktop Case
-Gateway 2000 programmable keyboard
-Tseng ET4000W32p ISA 2mb (just to see how they compare to VLB)
-A working voltage regulator
-Tyan S1437 V2.x motherboard
-Plextor caddy loading 32x SCSI CD-ROM drive