A new thread 🧵:
I bought a job-lot of ISA and VLB video cards (and a random legacy PCI one). They arrived today as you can see the packaging was absolutely terrible, they shoved all 9 cards into an anti-static bag and hoped for the best (Grr😡), What's wrong with these sellers?
Jeez, wish me luck peeps 😭
No loose or damaged parts floating about, so before I go any further I'm going to closely inspect every card and then give them a quick IPA clean.
So, I bought the lot for the VLB cards, but damn there's a Tseng Labs ET4000AX ISA card in here! If this works, I've doubled my money in value on its own. Talk about silver tuna, I'm never this lucky!
Jeez, there's a Paradise PVGA1A Professional in here with the 4x Oscillators, damn!
The only physical damage from the poor packaging is on a VLB card, where the traces have been scratched, I'll check it over, but doesn't look like any have been cut.
So I've decided I can't wait to see if the Tseng works, to test the VLB's I'll need my 486 rebuild, which I'll need to get out of storage. So I'm going to use this Pentium III board with a 16bit ISA slot to do some testing:
The Tseng ET4000AX works, well so far, more testing needed, also hopefully I can add more RAM too!
Check-It seems happy, all the tests passed, looking great!
This thing is so crisp! Crystal Caves 3:
MS-DOS gaming heaven RN ☺️
Quake in standard resolution mode:
Quake in maximum (Dos) resolution mode:
I'm pleased that the Paradise video card also works well too, passed all the Check-It tests.
Unfortunately the Trident TVGA9000 ISA card is dead, the machine won't even post with it inserted, I'll try to diagnose this at a later date.
The PCI Advance Logic ALG2302.A works and it will be good as a spare, I have too many PCI cards as it is, but nice that it works.
Time to test the VLB cards, this system didn't come with a VLB video card, so I need to check the manual to see if there are any related jumpers.
Well there are two jumpers related to the VL Bus:
I have 4 of these Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 cards and none of them are working. The machine does post, but no video output at all. I've even taken the bracket off so it sits lower, but it's a no go unfortunately.
What a shame 😞
This Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 card, however.....
I'm installing dos 6.22, before putting it through its paces, but I've not seen any corruption etc, looks ok so far.
Happy Friday folks, I'm testing the difference between my Cirrus Logic VLB card and Tseng ISA card, before making my final Video card selection on this 486 build
First up is the Tseng, 25.6 FPS on my 486DX2 66Mhz:
Now for the VLB Cirrus Logic card, that's an impressive performance bump!
40.0FPS!
I had a CF card with Windows 95, so I gave it a whirl, impressively responsive for 8MB of RAM!
@Gammitin sadly
@OS1337 will likely need at least 16MB RAM...
@kkarhan @OS1337 looks interesting
@Gammitin well, OS/1337 is just a little project where I aim to build a minimalist #toxbox+#musl / #Linux distro as a basis for clean, reproduceable and auditable systems.
Gammitin (Ben) 💾
Kevin Karhan 