Uncreative Labs

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

Here's a picture of it here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/misterzeropage/MyVintageComputerStuff/photo#5171113244678386418

Unfortunately it looks like it makes use of a breakout box in order to get access to all the extra goodies. I have a feeling the box will not be coming with the card.

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

Yup, a breakout box. Mine just had standard inputs.

http://picasaweb.google.com/teozenios/VLBCards/photo#5171151269992787010

Atleast you have full RAM. What are you planning on using it on?

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

Hmm...that's a problem. I like the ET6x00, but I'm not sure what to use it in at the moment. Ideally I would want it in a 486 system paired up with a 24meg Obsidian2 SLI board. Unfortunately my prize 486 is VL/EISA. It's such a shame nobody ever bothered to produce a VLB version of the ET6000. The chip is actually capable of interfacing with the VL bus without extra support. In theory I could fabricate a card like this, but it would be expensive and I don't know enough to write my own BIOS. I might attempt it later after I finish my 80287 and SRAM projects though.

But, getting back to what to do with this PCI card, I think I might finish another 486 system I'm working with. I was hoping for this other system to be a 33MHz ISA 486SX/487SX, but currently that system has a dead DS1287 chip soldered onto the board. But, I've been thinking of converting it to a PCI 486 for a while.

I currently have three PCI 486 boards, and all of them are ASUS. A PCI/I 486SP3G, a PCI/I 486AP4, an a PVI 486SP3. I am pretty sure the first two with Intel chipsets (Saturn and Aries respectively) only do PCI version 2.0 which doesn't seem to do bus mastering properly. I'm still a little unclear on the PVI 486SP3 which uses an SIS chipset (I think it's 497?). But, I have a feeling it might also be PCI 2.0. I would really like to get my hands on a last generation UMC based PCI board which does PCI 2.1 (with 60 and 66MHz FSB support), but I still hear the PVI486SP3 is still a pretty good board. I even have two 64MB FPM SIMMs for it too.

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

I was using my et6000 on a pentium 200mmx before I switched in a Riva 128.

Can you find the pinout of that cable and make yourself a dongle for it?

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

Yeah, I remember considering the ET6000 when building my K6-200 system. I really regret getting the Mach64GT instead.

Building a dongle might be possible, but I am guessing it is not trivial. I noticed that this card doesn't have that magical metal box for handling the NTSC signals, so I'd probably have to examine another card to find out what's inside and how to connect it with that philips chip. The manufacturer still exists I think and I can probably get the pinouts from them.

They might still sell the dongles though. I believe all the cards they made use the breakout box, so I think it is likely they use the same part across the entire line.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

There was a SCSI SB16, I have one somewhere, never knew what to do with it since I never did have any internal scsi CD drives.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I've had an SB Pro 2.0 for years, but it wasn't until recently that I put it into a system. For the longest time I mistakenly believed it was an SB16. I only tested it to see if it was working. Is it that much better than a regular SB 2.0? I had an SB2.0 in my first PC, and I thought it was great in all of its snap-crackle n popping glory. When I decided to install a 2X CD-ROM drive, I bought one of those rip off unCreativelabs kits and upgraded to SB16. The SB 2.0 to SB16 upgrade was pretty underwhelming. The popping was a little less obvious, but I could never tell the difference otherwise..then again I am a little deaf. So what are some noticble differences between SB 2.0 and SB Pro 2.0 in terms of sound capabilities?

That Creative Labs CD-ROM kit still annoys me to this day. They made it look like such a good deal. Supposedly it came with all this "great" software, and they put it in a really enormous box to put emphasis on that. The box was mostly air, and the only games I got were Lemmings and Indycar racing....on floppy disks. I could never get Indycar racing going with the soundcard, and Lemmings didn't make use of the SB16 (just SB 2.0). It's pretty stupid to sell a multi-media kit and include software that doesn't even take advantage of it. The windows 3.1 software was equally bad. I think the highlight must have been the "mosaic" game (which I already had with my SB 2.0 anyway). After spending all my money on that worthless "kit", I didn't have any left to buy actual CD-ROM software. I didn't get CD-ROM games until 4X drives were common, and by that time they ran like crap on my system anyway. To make the situation even more enjoyable, my friend bought an almost identical kit a few months after me which included a superior 2X drive, and Syndicate Plus. Talk about a big kick in the cajones.

I'm really surprised that I still like unCreative Labs after that experience. I think if I had to do it all over again I would have started out with SB Pro, and added a SCSI 2x drive on an 8-bit controller later. Too bad there was no SCSI SB Pro.

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

When the SB16 first came out, all the of bigshots got the SCSI model. Usually with the ASP chip and the Wave Blaster expansion. The funny thing is that all of those three things are somewhat useless.

-no software ever supported ASP/CSP
-Wave Blaster midi just didn't sound very good and was more expensive than much better 3rd party modules
-the onboard adaptec SCSI was just an expensive option. 8-bit SCSI cards like Future Domain were not that expensive at the time, and almost nobody ran harddrives off the SB16 SCSI anyway.

Though, with all that being said I have a fully loaded SB16 SCSI in my 386 system anyway. You know, so I can feel what it's like to be a "big shot".

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Hmm, I always thought the card looked expensive, maybe I will have to find a SCSI CD drive somewhere so I have an excuse to use it. Smile

As for ASP/CSP I always thought that was just a form of compression (an unpopular one) and my genuine copy of wavestudio that came with my AST ADvantage Adventure 4/66d had those settings for compressed recording if I'm not mistaken. Maybe I am just getting senile, I will have to try and install that program on something old with a SB16 and see, though if I don't have asp I probably couldn't see the setting anyway.

It seems like there was a speech program for the SB16 also that wasn't popular I picked up at some point.

I will have to try to get a soundblaster of some type in my xt working so I can play back that amusing full screen full motion video on my xt.

I wonder if they will ever post a sequel or make a conversion utility for do it yourself xt register slamming videos Smile

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

There are only a handful of Creative Labs applications and *maybe* one or two 3rd party applications that actually use the chip. But for all practical purposes it is useless. It's a nice addition to the collection though.

Also, the video you are referring to is "8088 corruption" by Trixter. I could be wrong, but the last time I visited the site I was pretty sure he had already released the tools to encode your own videos.

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

Today I finally found what appears to be a nice PCI 486 board. Though, it's not in my hands yet so I can't confirm the condition or the specifics. But, I bought what appears to be a very late model half sized AT PCI board with UMC UM8881F chipset. From what I understand this one is PCI 2.1 compliant and supports EDO RAM. Both of these features are somewhat rare as far as 486 systems go. PCI 2.0 is pretty useless since many of the better cards don't work properly on it, and it doesn't always busmaster properly (which is the whole point of getting PCI in the first place).

The only downside is that the board only has 2 SIMM sockets and 512kb cache. Though, I have some nice 64MB SIMMs waiting at home. Here's what I plan to install so far:

PCI slot 1: TSENG ET6100 4MB VGA
PCI slot 2: Obsidian2 3D 24meg SLI Voodoo2
PCI slot 3: Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI

ISA slot 1: SoundBlaster AWE64G
ISA slot 2: 3com 10/100 NIC
ISA slot 3: undecided
ISA slot 4: unusable when PCI slot 3 is filled

I'm planning to run DOS/WFWG 3.11, but I may try out NT or 2000 just to see what it's like. Supposedly the UM8881F also has provisions to run the CPU at 60 or 66MHz with a PCI /2 divider, so I might give 180MHz a shot on a heavily cooled am5x86-133.

I tried looking on TH99 but couldn't find any layouts that match this board. I'll try again after I examine the board.

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

I have 2 nice PCI 486 boards, one has a 486/133 oc to 160 and the other has a cyrix 586/120. I think both are the last 486/PCI boards that came out, neither is in use since I prefer the older VLB ones and this EISA one that is being a pain currently (messing with a caching EISA IDE controller currently).

Not sure why you are trying to use a SLI voodoo 2 with a 486, they are better off in a P2/K6 machine.

If I was going to set a PCI 486 up I would probably keep that TSENG or get an 4MB Matrox Millenium and a rare mpeg card (works in Win3.x).

Nt4 might be interesting on that setup.

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

I definetly agree about the SLI voodoo2 being more appropriate for a P2/K6 machine. However, aside from the laptop I am using right now my next best system is a VLB Pentium. I really don't have any plans to build anything else. The SLI voodoo card goes into the 486 just because I have it, it's available, and because I can. I also have a 4mb Voodoo1 card, so I'll see which one can play more games. I thought about the MPEG card, but I am pretty sure the Viper chip on my board already takes care of that.

I think NT4 or Windows 2k would be interesting since I already have a VLB 486 and Pentium for Games. NT4 is great, but I think 2000 might be better for USB and wireless networking experimentation.

There's one other interesting thing I read about recently that I want to try with this system. It seems that there is a certain model of the amd 486DX 2 that is 3.3V, has 16kb of cache, a 0.35 micron process and a 3x multipier setting. Supposedly some people have been able to get this chip going at 2x60Mhz or 2x66MHz. Seeing as how the motherboard supports 60 and 66MHz front side bus speeds, I thought it would be pretty interesting to attempt.

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

I think people have done 3x50Mhz for 150 on PCI systems, that would not work on VLB since fre cards could do 50Mhz. Never heard of a 486 running 60/66 FSB, would be interesting to see that in action (better have some great cooling for it).

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

Running with 50MHz bus on PCI 486 systems is pretty tricky, but on the right board it can be done with everything running in spec. What's great about the UM8881 chipset is that it lets you run the PCI at 1/2 or sometimes (depending on the board) 2/3 the system clock. So I can run my CPU on the 60 or 66MHz bus without frying my PCI cards.

Running the 5x86 CPU at 180MHz is pretty tricky. I read you probably need to turn off the L1 cache to do it, which really defeats the who purpose of overclocking. Some crazy person managed 200MHz using peltier cooling, but I think that's just nuts. My 5x86 at 160MHz works well with passive cooling.

The nice thing about the AMD DX/2 fabricated at 0.35u is that it is probably just a 5x86 with a 2X multiplier. To compare, the original 486s were all 0.8u. The DX/4s were 0.6u. Hell, even many of the pentiums were not even 0.35u. This basically guarantees some crazy overclocking potential, and sure enough there are people who have done it successfully. If you think of the 0.35u DX/2 as a 5x86 in disguise, running at 2x66 wouldn't put it too far out of spec...at least the internal frequency will be within its ratings.

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

My ARK Logic 1000VL graphics adapter is currently equipped with 1MB 70ns DRAM. I want to upgrade to 2MB, but I also want to install 50ns RAMs.

The first MB of RAM on the card is in the form of ( Cool

4256 DIPs, and the second MB should be SOJ. I think it is not so easy to get 50ns DIP RAM and I am thinking to build an adapter to SOJ.

Before I build an adapter, I want to test 50ns memory first. to see if there is any benefit in having the faster RAMs when operating at 50ns. This would involve removing the soldered DIP chips and filling the SOJ memory banks. Is there any reason why this card should not be able to function if the RAM banks are swapped?