Uncreative Labs

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

I just snagged this:

http://cm.ebay.com/cm/ck/1065-29392-2357-0?uid=28241277&site=0&ver=EOIBSA080805&lk=ItemDescriptionANDimage&Item=290125693094

Anybody else have some interesting old high end ISA/VLB/EISA video cards?

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

I have 2, 1st - a diamond speedstar64 2mb vram 2nd- ATI MACH 64 with 4mb video ram, Four megabytes! Both these cards are in isa. these are the cream of the crop as for the isa video cards i own. I have alot more but there only half as powerful.

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

Yea, I heard of those. Rare but available.

Never seen a card like this as an example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=019&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&viewitem=&item=290126068278&rd=1&rd=1

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

holy cow! did that card have 4mb or 8mb of ram?

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

8MB, 4MB DRAM (wonder if it can use a bigger SIMM) and 4MB VRAM.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

hmm..... just the thought of a 36mb isa video card is scary, you could probly run Vista on that! Very Happy

but i doubt it will handle that, you'll be lucky if it will take 12mb of ram. neat card.

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

the DRAM is probably for CAD work or something, using that TI processor.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

4megs is still good anyway i can get 1280x1024x16.7m on my ATI mach 64

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

Moving that much data over ISA must slow you down a bit.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

only in windows 3.1 when i have a hi res wallpaper. its pretty fast in 256 color mode.

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

I saw that 4MB TIGA board on ebay the other day. It looks pretty nice, but I decided to pass since I already have an ISA board with 4MB, and a 3MB EISA TIGA.

My high end cards are as follows:

-ATi Mach64GX for ISA and VLB (both 2MB VRAM)
-ATi Mach32 for ISA and VLB (2mb DRAM and VRAM models)
-Tseng ET4000W32p 2MB DRAM
-S3 8c764 (Trio64) VLB 2MB DRAM
-S3 928 VLB and ISA (2MB and 4MB VRAM)
-SuperMac EISA 3MB TIGA

I have a dead Diamond S3 964 board for VLB with 4MB that seems to have a bad RAMDAC. I have unsuccessfully tried to located a VLB board based around the S3 968 chipset...hopefully one that is not a diamond. I have also tried to get the 4mb upgrade modules for my mach64s, but ATi seems to make several different models, and while I can find ones that fit...they never work because they are the wrong part number.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

Unknown_K wrote:

Moving that much data over ISA must slow you down a bit.

The whole point of some of these cards is that the data is not all moved over the ISA bus. Remember Diamond video cards? They gained popularity with people using PC-based XWindows because they were the first cards to include some hardware-assisted functions for things like scrolling windows, clearing memory, etc.

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

So trixter what special cards do you have hiding in the basement?

Friday I recieved a CompuVid Schoolboard Pro ISA card (Video in and overlay). It seems to have a Cirrus Logic GD5428 which I upgraded to 2MB, seems speady for an ISA card. In the setup it needs to specify the buffer RAM area and doesn't seem to like me putting it after my 32MB of RAM (its in a 386/40).

To load the School Board Driver:

sboard <options>

Options:
/S The School Board Driver accepts SVHS video only though V1 and C1.
Do not use this switch if using composite video.
This feature needs special School Board order.

/CI The School Board Driver is InfoWindows compatible.
or
/CM The School Board Driver is M-Control compatible.

/A<1-15> School Board video buffer starting address in megabytes.

So am I stuck using this card in a machine with less then 16MB? All I get is a purple screen no matter what input I chose.

Never heard of Infowindows or M-Control, any clues what they are for?

Would be nice if I had a manual.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

Unknown_K wrote:

So trixter what special cards do you have hiding in the basement?

My pride and joy ISA card is a new-in-box Hercules Dynamite Pro card. 16-bit ISA card, 2MB RAM, Tseng Labs W32I chipset (the "I" is for "interleaved memory"). It has 2D acceleration for Windows, OS/2, AutoCAD, and 3D Studio. It also supports monitor refresh rates up to 120Hz for 640x480 and 110Hz for 800x600 modes -- that's a really fast RAMDAC for an ISA card! And of course it's register-compatible with the ET4000 so a lot of older SVGA stuff works, including older DOS demos.

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

I have a et4000ax 1MB ISA card, its good for the old games. Used to have a Hercules Dynamite 2MB VLB card for my 486 back in the day, great DOS gaming card. My current 486/66 DOS gaming rig has a Miro VLB card with TV tuner, video in, 2MB RAM and the Tseng ET4000W chipset along with some other Tseng chip that does the capturing (have 3 of them, but only one set of manuals, drivers, and software).