Single board computers are still used and still around to this day. I am working for a company for the past thirty years that still used those cards. A Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.13Ghz using Windows 98SE, (3) AMD single board with ddr3 and ddr4 with CF cards running MSDOS 6.2, and a quad-core Celeron J1900 with ddr4 running Windows 10 and Windows 98. All of these cards have ISA buses and PCI buses. These cards control and collect date from heated ovens.
The CHIPS graphics chipset is made by Chips & Technologies (C&T).....one of the pioneering graphics companies in 1993-1994.....C&T was taken over by Intel in 1996...one of the founders of C&T was Gordon Campbell who went on to begin another graphics company called 3DFX.......C&T was a prolific producer of laptop,industrial PC and server graphics chipsets..😊
Oh boy.... Do I ever remember the good old days of Unreal Tournament... Me and a buddy of mine dominated that game. What a great video. I just found your channel with this video. What an introduction to retro PC. The good ol' days of "The time before". Well done and thank you for the content.
Really enjoy your videos. Would love to see a video that compares the different ways of playing DOS games. You've covered lots of ways to use DOS that find fascinating. Would be great to see a video that compares using modern PC vs Llama ITX vs Thin client vs Mister vs Emulation.
thanks for video. it looks interesting. only nick-picking is that it has Dallas battery without socket :) other then that it looks very good for what it does. cool~
This sort of thing is very common in EFTPOS designs. The idea was that they could use more or less standard PC components in a slightly odd form factor and save money over a full custom non x86 design.
I have Microbus MAT 990 with PC/104-Plus expansion, almost the same hardware, but the card is very small plus it has power connector and works without additional board. For case I used IBM 7207-001 external tape drive (29x29x5cm), it is tight fit, but it hosts the board, ES1686 PC/104 sound card, laptop HDD, fanless PSU and standard 3.5' floppy.
The first led is probably the 5v standby voltage, it's there to power the RTC, and for things like wake on lan and other ways for the computer to turn itself on.
Interesting case, because there was a discussion about "motherboard" and "mainboard", but its "backplane" and "motherboard". So the card is the "motherboard" and the "backplane" holds the "daughterboards". 😊
I remember tearing apart my old 286 when I was learning PC's back in the AMD athlon days. thats all it was. a main board with add on cards. I wonder now if that is because it was from an old aviation factory or if that is how they were in the early days of workstations.
Funny to see that build, Intel tried to push this with their NUCs years ago too with having the system on a daughter board sitting next to a regular graphics card connected via a third board that's only there for connection and power I believe. I believe aside from their NUCs being not super popular this exact model I mentioned had rather low sales too. Love the concept though because you could even put in the system board inside a full size tower and tape the contacts on the PCIe connector, so it'd only receive power from the PC's mainboard. It's kinda sad this concept never took off in the home PC space because it'd make replacements and upgrades even easier IMO. If anything, earlier home computers like those from Commodore and ATARI could be seen as the same, just on a different scale.
I remember that! I think it was the Dragon Canyon NUC. I was interested but it turned out to be super expensive :-( I definitely love the idea of a modular, swappable PC like this :-)
So we have desktops, laptops, notebooks, sub-notebooks, single-board computers (SBCs) and now a PC on a single card, which is a form of SBC. What's confusing about any of that?
i went looking for some recently, but wanted pci-e, i think they support it now, but it's a relatively old format that is really really useful these days... lot of sff systems could be done with vertically mounted cpu board and graphics card, they both face opposite sides, so LOTS of room for fans. however, they could be made really slim, not much larger than an egpu enclosure or a 4 slot backplane in a regular case, lot of wasted space then though. i was always interested in the pc/104 sockets, now pi gpio does what i need.
@@jamesfmackenzie yah, great for a retro channel, though they added pci to it later, the boards stack one way for isa, the other for pci, with the cpu in the middle.
I wonder what will happen if you manage to stick two computer cards into the backplane with with some extension cables (it looks like they won't fit side by side). My guess is horrible conflicts and nothing will work, but it'd be fun to try.
Disappointed by the prices online for PICMG computers :/ this looks like a good solution for retro, as I think these PCs are a bit sturdier than home ones.
Thanks for the kind words! Most of my games have survived by copied from one disk to the next, stretching all the way back to original installs from CD in the 90s/2000s 😎
wellp, there goes any chance of buying a sbc based machine, the prices will go up even more now. same thing happened with all the cheap 10g cards and the used data center ssds. or the book 8088 or the 386 one as well. I am starting to dislike retro hardware youtubers, the price of everything goes up when they cover stuff because all the rich 'valley' types buy up everything. even retro hardware is becoming a bit of an elitist club, either you can afford the exorbitant prices post youtube coverage or you're basically left with no options as a hobbyist. I want to see you covering/encouraging NEW retro PC hardware being made to increase supply and reduce demand. We need to start seeing 386, 486, pentium and pentium 2 boards using recycled/improvised/retrofitted chipsets like the chinese do with data center xeons. otherwise it's gonna be $300-$500 SBC boards forever.
If you search eBay for “picmg”, you’ll see a bunch of backplanes and single board computers. Sometimes they are v expensive, but often you can pick up a deal for less than $100. If you want to retro game, be sure to get a PICMG 1.0 variant with ISA and PCI connectors. The newer SBCs use PCI-Express. Hope this helps! Happy to answer more questions 😎
You’re right! The larger ones you can see on the video are floppy, parallel and 2x serial. Next to them is a much smaller row of 5 pins - which is the USB 1.1 header.
@@jamesfmackenzie damn im getting old. didnt even see that one. back in the mid to late 90's i had a bunch of clients from printing and cam, that used all kinds of smb's from 286 up to piii and i cant remember one of the piii smb's, that actually had usb onboard. if you wanted/needed usb u had to use a pci card; not that anyone actually used usb back then. keyboard/mouse over ps/2, monitor vga, then some usually serial or proprietary cards to connect with the machinery and if you needed external data, that was too big to write on a cd, like for printing, then you used an external scsi hdd, in all variations that scsi came during the 90's. still have a bunch of adaptec scsi 1542 b and c controllers and some 2940 in all variations from back then
@@alexandergross7132 I 100% agree it’s not really needed. Also I’m too scared to connect anything to it since the pinout varies so much 😂 I’ve only recently discovered the world of SBCs. Having great fun!
@@jamesfmackenzie ohh yeah. sbc's are usually a great, cheap, stable and very underrated solution for retro computing, especially if you have limited space. you dont need 20 computers to get your range from 286 up to athlon xp, like i did. just get 2 or 3 different era host boards and try to find all the smb's you want/need for them. might take a lil longer to get what you need, but you dont have to worry that much about getting all the isa/pci cards to get the pc running; you can always upgrade your graphics later. the only problem you might run into are the drivers. if you find a cheap smb card you should always check the ebay pics and information for the exact model and then check if there are some drivers around anywhere before you buy the card.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but when I watched the video back on replay I saw the same and scared myself. Lucky I got away with it this time! 😂
Single board computers are still used and still around to this day.
I am working for a company for the past thirty years that still used those cards. A Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.13Ghz using Windows 98SE, (3) AMD single board with ddr3 and ddr4 with CF cards running MSDOS 6.2, and a quad-core Celeron J1900 with ddr4 running Windows 10 and Windows 98. All of these cards have ISA buses and PCI buses. These cards control and collect date from heated ovens.
Nice! Is there a manufacturer who still makes these? I know ICOP/WDL do Vortex86 SBCs, but haven’t seen many others.
The CHIPS graphics chipset is made by Chips & Technologies (C&T).....one of the pioneering graphics companies in 1993-1994.....C&T was taken over by Intel in 1996...one of the founders of C&T was Gordon Campbell who went on to begin another graphics company called 3DFX.......C&T was a prolific producer of laptop,industrial PC and server graphics chipsets..😊
Thanks for the info! It actually seems like a very good 2D chipset - it’s fast!
Interesting info. I was a 3dfx fan boy back those says
Your channel is great, I reckon it'll blow up soon enough
Thanks for the kind words! I’ve really enjoyed making videos recently! 😎
So glad that one of your hobbies is hot wiring PCs and not hot wiring cars..! Loved this video Jiimmy!.
Thanks Tom! Glad you enjoyed it!! 😎⛵️🚤🛥️
Oh boy.... Do I ever remember the good old days of Unreal Tournament... Me and a buddy of mine dominated that game.
What a great video. I just found your channel with this video. What an introduction to retro PC. The good ol' days of "The time before". Well done and thank you for the content.
The slot arrangement is very similar to the VESA bus, interesting.
Yeah until he explained it, I thought it was VLB.
Really enjoy your videos. Would love to see a video that compares the different ways of playing DOS games. You've covered lots of ways to use DOS that find fascinating. Would be great to see a video that compares using modern PC vs Llama ITX vs Thin client vs Mister vs Emulation.
Thanks for the kind words! I like the idea of a comparison video too!
thanks for video. it looks interesting. only nick-picking is that it has Dallas battery without socket :) other then that it looks very good for what it does. cool~
Thanks!
Yes the Dallas battery bugs me too! Need to socket that guy! And maybe with a new replacement 😎
This sort of thing is very common in EFTPOS designs. The idea was that they could use more or less standard PC components in a slightly odd form factor and save money over a full custom non x86 design.
Awesome video thanks for sharing.
Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it!
I have Microbus MAT 990 with PC/104-Plus expansion, almost the same hardware, but the card is very small plus it has power connector and works without additional board. For case I used IBM 7207-001 external tape drive (29x29x5cm), it is tight fit, but it hosts the board, ES1686 PC/104 sound card, laptop HDD, fanless PSU and standard 3.5' floppy.
The first led is probably the 5v standby voltage, it's there to power the RTC, and for things like wake on lan and other ways for the computer to turn itself on.
Thanks for the info!
We have a couple of those cards that came with Pentium 1 CPUs.
Interesting case, because there was a discussion about "motherboard" and "mainboard", but its "backplane" and "motherboard". So the card is the "motherboard" and the "backplane" holds the "daughterboards". 😊
Agree! It’s fun to play with PC hardware that’s a little different from usual 😎
People have no idea how many things are still running on really old hardware and new old stock systems.
that board also has a socket for an industrial SSD behind the PS/2 ports
I missed that! Do you know the connector type? I’d be interested to try it out :-)
I remember tearing apart my old 286 when I was learning PC's back in the AMD athlon days. thats all it was. a main board with add on cards. I wonder now if that is because it was from an old aviation factory or if that is how they were in the early days of workstations.
The original IBM PC XT and AT machines did have the CPU on the motherboard (as did their clones). So you might have had an industrial PC too! 😎
Funny to see that build, Intel tried to push this with their NUCs years ago too with having the system on a daughter board sitting next to a regular graphics card connected via a third board that's only there for connection and power I believe. I believe aside from their NUCs being not super popular this exact model I mentioned had rather low sales too.
Love the concept though because you could even put in the system board inside a full size tower and tape the contacts on the PCIe connector, so it'd only receive power from the PC's mainboard.
It's kinda sad this concept never took off in the home PC space because it'd make replacements and upgrades even easier IMO. If anything, earlier home computers like those from Commodore and ATARI could be seen as the same, just on a different scale.
someone's trying to revive the external gpu thing for nucs, i think minisforum, might have been a thiojoe vid i saw it on, someone else maybe...
I remember that! I think it was the Dragon Canyon NUC. I was interested but it turned out to be super expensive :-(
I definitely love the idea of a modular, swappable PC like this :-)
Yep! The Minisforum B550 has a PCIe backplane for adding a GPU, and they also have an eGPU dock too 😎
So we have desktops, laptops, notebooks, sub-notebooks, single-board computers (SBCs) and now a PC on a single card, which is a form of SBC. What's confusing about any of that?
I have 2 SBCs: Pentium 233 mmx and Celeron 500 - both are great Retromachines! The Pentium is only half length ;)
The Fan doesn't sound right... You put also a cooling paste on the cpu. Nice video, for Pentium Four you a fitting SBC.
The Dell GX1 was set up like this.
i went looking for some recently, but wanted pci-e, i think they support it now, but it's a relatively old format that is really really useful these days... lot of sff systems could be done with vertically mounted cpu board and graphics card, they both face opposite sides, so LOTS of room for fans. however, they could be made really slim, not much larger than an egpu enclosure or a 4 slot backplane in a regular case, lot of wasted space then though. i was always interested in the pc/104 sockets, now pi gpio does what i need.
I’m very tempted to buy a PC/104 PC! Looks like you can still buy new from ICOP and a few others 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie yah, great for a retro channel, though they added pci to it later, the boards stack one way for isa, the other for pci, with the cpu in the middle.
@@felderup Nice! Do they do PCI through the PC/104 pins too? Or another interface for PCI?
@@jamesfmackenzie it's a second block of pins on the opposite side of the board from the 16 bit isa pins, 4 rows.
I wonder what will happen if you manage to stick two computer cards into the backplane with with some extension cables (it looks like they won't fit side by side). My guess is horrible conflicts and nothing will work, but it'd be fun to try.
I thought the same but I’m not brave enough to try! 😎
Great video. Don't mind sharing the backplane model number/brand? 🙏🙏
Disappointed by the prices online for PICMG computers :/ this looks like a good solution for retro, as I think these PCs are a bit sturdier than home ones.
Amazing build where do you get all your games from ?
Thanks for the kind words!
Most of my games have survived by copied from one disk to the next, stretching all the way back to original installs from CD in the 90s/2000s 😎
wellp, there goes any chance of buying a sbc based machine, the prices will go up even more now.
same thing happened with all the cheap 10g cards and the used data center ssds.
or the book 8088 or the 386 one as well.
I am starting to dislike retro hardware youtubers, the price of everything goes up when they cover stuff because all the rich 'valley' types buy up everything.
even retro hardware is becoming a bit of an elitist club, either you can afford the exorbitant prices post youtube coverage or you're basically left with no options as a hobbyist.
I want to see you covering/encouraging NEW retro PC hardware being made to increase supply and reduce demand.
We need to start seeing 386, 486, pentium and pentium 2 boards using recycled/improvised/retrofitted chipsets like the chinese do with data center xeons.
otherwise it's gonna be $300-$500 SBC boards forever.
Check my last video on the ITX Llama 😎
Where's the best place to find one of these?
If you search eBay for “picmg”, you’ll see a bunch of backplanes and single board computers. Sometimes they are v expensive, but often you can pick up a deal for less than $100.
If you want to retro game, be sure to get a PICMG 1.0 variant with ISA and PCI connectors. The newer SBCs use PCI-Express.
Hope this helps! Happy to answer more questions 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Nice to know. What are your thoughts on PC/104?
Can Crysis play it?
usb on a pentium iii sbc ...
i would bet its floppy on the top, parallel in the middle and the 2 bottom ones are 2 serials
You’re right! The larger ones you can see on the video are floppy, parallel and 2x serial. Next to them is a much smaller row of 5 pins - which is the USB 1.1 header.
@@jamesfmackenzie damn im getting old. didnt even see that one.
back in the mid to late 90's i had a bunch of clients from printing and cam, that used all kinds of smb's from 286 up to piii and i cant remember one of the piii smb's, that actually had usb onboard. if you wanted/needed usb u had to use a pci card; not that anyone actually used usb back then. keyboard/mouse over ps/2, monitor vga, then some usually serial or proprietary cards to connect with the machinery and if you needed external data, that was too big to write on a cd, like for printing, then you used an external scsi hdd, in all variations that scsi came during the 90's. still have a bunch of adaptec scsi 1542 b and c controllers and some 2940 in all variations from back then
@@alexandergross7132 I 100% agree it’s not really needed. Also I’m too scared to connect anything to it since the pinout varies so much 😂
I’ve only recently discovered the world of SBCs. Having great fun!
@@jamesfmackenzie ohh yeah. sbc's are usually a great, cheap, stable and very underrated solution for retro computing, especially if you have limited space. you dont need 20 computers to get your range from 286 up to athlon xp, like i did. just get 2 or 3 different era host boards and try to find all the smb's you want/need for them. might take a lil longer to get what you need, but you dont have to worry that much about getting all the isa/pci cards to get the pc running; you can always upgrade your graphics later. the only problem you might run into are the drivers. if you find a cheap smb card you should always check the ebay pics and information for the exact model and then check if there are some drivers around anywhere before you buy the card.
Why not add both, and host a LAN game with yourself :)
😂
where do i buy it?
You can buy different spec units on eBay. Just search for PICMG
Btw, please put down your screwdriver when you are explaining about the board....i have destroyed a motherboard once in a similar situation.....😄
I didn’t think about it at the time, but when I watched the video back on replay I saw the same and scared myself. Lucky I got away with it this time! 😂
install Windows 95