Rooting through old hardware is fun to watch. There is so much out there to experience. However, like you said, most of it was boring, low end stuff. I think a RAM-test extravaganza would be fun to watch as well!
Well, 486 motherboards with SRAM cache are fun, to rip out those RAMs to use as VIC-20 expansion memory. Naturally not for the speed but because they are often 32kx8 chips. And DRAM cards can be fun if you want to upgrade a REU to 512K.
Time for a RAM testing marathon! We could make a game of it! Tally up the passing / failing types, see which chips are the worst / best! Plus that RAM tester is just gosh darn cool. :0
Ugh, why? I have a bunch of old RAM, testing it was no fun, took hours, and was just repetitive as hell and took most of a day to do. But now I have a grocery bag full of tested working ram. Best part of it was finding 60ns 32mb 72pin modules in there, 4of them and working, that was some super expensive stuff back in the day, probably still is. Fun running a 486 with 128mb - have 64mb in it now just for brag factor lol.
@@noth606 Then just don't watch! Some of us don't have a 'bag-o-chips', thus hard to justify getting the chip tester. So it'd be neat to live vicariously thru his effort. 🙂
board at 31:05 is probably a cpu/controller board for a Tektronix high end dye sublimation printer. looks as if it has an SCSI port on the back. As well as maybe a parallel port? all those ROMS are probably a Postscript implementation. SIMM sockets also make me think that.
In the early 90s I ran a two node RemoteAccess BSS with FrontDoor on a 386SX 25MHz board with 4MB of RAM. Everything ran under DesqView and there was even spare memory for a disk cache using Norton Cache. Because the machine had a generous amount of storage, I also ran Netware Lite on it in order to connect over coax Ethernet. Thanks for revitalizing those memories!
Those "manuals" with the product key came with the computer that already had the OS installed. If I remember correctly, for a while during the 90s, MS insisted on those silly booklets. I just tore off the front page and archived that. But in 97-98 the OEM machines had the Windows product key on stickers instead.
Hi Adrian !! I had mentioned that this Dallas clock chip has a battery embedded and its possible to replace it… just carefully cut the plastic case (top) or tear down the package by opening the bottom…
This! I was almost shouting angrily while the Yamaha OPL chip is clearly to be seen on the board right of the large mixer chip. That is pretty much as good as most SB16 cards with real OPL.
28:44 - sometimes it's worth checking the underside of the motherboards, there might be a sticker or a silkscreen marking that help you identify it. Lately I'm into motherboards that have both AT and ATX PSU sockets, it's a fasticanting idea. I think the cache that goes in a slot is called Cache on a Stick. I gasped when you opened the Slot1 CPU box, I love the Slot1 form factor, because the first PC that my brother bought/built had a Slot1 Celeron inside :) This whole episode is like christmas!
I need to get a better board for my slot 1 machine, it only has PCI and is quite slow. I have a 600mhz Piii in it and it gets beast by a slot 1 compaq i have with a 500mhz Piii. It's out of an HP and has the AGP bus taken up by a slow onboard chip. I'm Thinking an Asus P3B-F if i can find one.
The AMD29000 is a bit slice microprocessor, It ran at up to 10MHz IIRC - I designed a maths co-processor VME rack card for matrix operations (add, multiply) around one for my MSc Dissertation in 1990. The ROM chips hold the microcode which is why there’s so many of them
@@boardernut I’m referring to the 29k series bit slice architecture, not the 2900. I used the AM29325, AM29331, AM29332 and AM29334. I constructed a matrix ALU board with these components that plugged into a VMEBus rack. The primary processor (a 68030) wrote two matrices to a shared memory area, the board performed an operation in the background (add, subtract or multiply) and then wrote the result to the same area before triggering a bus interrupt to indicate that the result was available. Designed to accelerate 3D graphics calculations in 1990.
@@philh9421 that is very interesting to me, I kind of joined too late to the RISC era, although I was lucky enough to be at the right place for a few years, unfortunately for me I also saw them first hand fade very quickly. At the TELCO I worked for I had time in my hands to play with sun ultra 2 , HP9000-712 , Alpha stations and with was already obsolete VAXstations 4000/60 (not risc tho), I did a lot of csh programming, pure nostalgia now
The Sigma Designs RealMagic cards were also really useful if you wanted clean NTSC video playback from a PC. They were used by a number of AMV tech people in order to play back the videos for conventions and the like, without having to worry about playback issues. In the box with all the cables, the svideo to composite adapter is a specific pinout for these cards, and differs from what you would get with some VGA cards that had similar adapters. It made it frustrating when you collected these cards, ensuring you had the adapters. The RCA jack on the card is digital audio, not video.
Wow! A GN reference! Wasn’t expecting that. And the importance of Ensoniq (to the retro community) is that they were the engineers who made the C64 SID.
Indeed, they really brought their big-synth experience down into the SID and helped make it what it was :D Though apparently it was originally going to have even more voices, but Commodore’s strict Christmas deadline made them limit it to 3. It’s already so amazing with 3 voices, so imagining a world where it had 6 or 8 out of the box is pretty intense!
In the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed computer-based training programs and we used Broadway Real Magic MPEG playback cards. The Real Magic card utilized a loopback cable. The cable was connected to the video card monitor cable connector and the other end was plugged into the DIN connector. The monitor was then connected to the Real Magic card. The reason why we went with the Real Magic card versus straight computer playback of MPEG video is the card allowed for smoother video playback as you noted but more importantly allowed for time-location tracking. Using exact frame-location of the video playback, the program-developer, meaning yours truly, could select specific frames and sections of the video for playback. These were used for feedback. If a student clicked on the wrong answer during the module test, that portion of the video, linked and marked by the timecode, would then play again before continuing on to the next question. HA, HA! I see you found a complete kit for the newer or older Hollywood card instead of the Broadway unless they were two different products from the same period.
@@ryanvoots9827 Yes, indeed. Initially, we used the laser disc system before the Broadway cards were available. It's a good thing because those players were discontinued anyway, and were very expensive as well. The alternative was AVI but that was too slow and required the CPU and very slow video cards used in the day, which I think were those awful Trident or S3 cards! The Broadway cards were a very popular option with the customers and eventually we only supported those and gave up the AVI option for customers.
Perhaps the ISA bus on that 386 board was running at 10 MHz (FSB/4), vs. 8.33 on the Slot-1 board (on PCI motherboards, the ISA clock is usually PCI/4, and PCI is 33.3 unless overclocked). That would explain the faster performance of the ISA VGA card. Fun fact: when I was playing around with overclocking a Pentium MMX, at 83 MHz FSB (41.7 PCI, 10.4 ISA) it was actually a 3COM ISA NIC that made it unstable -- the PCI cards were fine! With the NIC removed it would boot but would eventually fail Prime95. It was rock-solid at 75 MHz though, which at 3.5x multiplier brought a 233MMX to 262.
42:00 Those Lot 1 CPU are actually not build to ease the handling of the processors ... but because they could not (yet) include enough cache on to the die but had to put the bigger cache in to a separate chip... That's why they came as a package on a circuit board .. called a "Slot 1" cpu. ;) Later on, caches got fully integrated into cpu dies so the extra PCB was no longer necessary. ;)
My first 3D accelerator was an AGP Diamond Viper V550, which used the nVidia TNT1, in a PII-450 machine. It was a beast at Half-Life, but Unreal was a bit buggy for a while because the engine wasn't originally created with nVidia GPUs in mind. That machine also had a Sound Blaster PCI128, which I'm pretty sure was pretty much just a rebadged Ensoniq design. I have a strong feeling that Creative bought Ensoniq as a way to get into the PCI sound card market.
Ensoniq's 1370 is a very DOS compatible sound card, even it's in PCI. Creative rebranded them to SB PCI64 and PCI128 and Ensoniq's AUDIOPCI DOS drivers were used as the basis for the Live! and Audigy excellent DOS drivers.
The Advansys SCSI card is cool. I used to have a very similar one, probably still do have it somewhere. This model ABP-970 IIRC is also compatible with PowerPC Macs, if you flash its BIOS with a MAc-compatible firmware. Advansys were even better performing than Adaptec of the time, unfortunately they were a small company and eventually Adaptec bought them.
The adaptec AHA 131u2 is an ultra-II SCSI card, basically one of their "server grade" cards (hence the cache memory on it)... very nice, not cheap card back in the day. (That's from memory, but that card is pretty powerful).
I loved my slow Trident with that colorful Bios boot screen, my very first PC, 286 instead of XT and color monitor instead of typical amber as I convinced parents to get 286 color at the expense of smaller HDD (got massive 40MB). Of course I upgraded through S3 Virge, Cirrus-Logic and some weak 3d-capable S3, drooling over first nvidia and 3dfx cards. I remember I had some very early ATI Radeon, poorly performing in 3d. Computers were so exciting back then.
Part of this looked like a walk through the hardware in my 1990's computer systems. I had the various AMD accelerated chips, those Trident video cards, probably a couple of the sound cards, and the weird adapters. Lost a lot of my old parts in a house fire.
48:00 When I get dead coin batteries, I sharpie a big X on both sides. 1:10:00 You might want to break up that RAM bag into separate bags by connector type so you don't have to dig so hard next time.
There are 2 additional possibilities, why the trident might be slow: There's a Waitstate and / or 8/16-Bit-jumper set wrong. Or the ISA-implementation on this newer board might not work particularly great together with this graphics chip.
The Tektronix board looks like the control board to one of their printers like the phaser series. The centronics connector is a good indicator, but I am not sure.
The Ensoniq 1370 card was the first general purpose PCI sound card. As far as DOS compatibility goes, early steppings of the K6 processor had hang issues with some specific DOS setups. AMD updated the processor and fixed the issue early on. Defective chips could be returned to AMD for a replacement. Sometimes it's not the sound card :)
@27:03 That is an Acer AP5C motherboard, 4 pin connector in the corner is for CPU fan power. We had some of those where I used to work back in the Windows 95 era. Supports like a 133Mhz P1 processor. I think that jumper is for the keyboard lock = KLock. Yes a barrel style lock / switch that prevented keyboard input if I remember correctly, @28:02 That looks like / similar to a DFI P5B motherboard. Will probably take one of those K6 350MHZ processors.
brings me back to the old days, each company had its own solution to the problem, hardware that didn't work together because of irq or dma conflicts, ten floppies just to get software installed, getting stuff that was not "as advertised". Thanks Adrian, from Hong Kong!
Yeah....was screaming "look at the chip....it says YAMAHA". He even looked at the card for problems at around 1h and missed it. I can't believe I know something more than him.
@@mateiberatco500 I also have more hardware experience than he does, because I was an assembler od PC's from 89 to 98, preetymuch handled boards very somilar to all those :) but still, credit to him for providing such fun content, $DEITY knows how much we need that type of content right now
That reference to Linux drivers on that 1996 Advansys SCSI card would have to be one of the earliest (if not the earliest) inclusion of Linux drivers on a commercial product that I've seen. Linux in 1996 was super niche geekware.
our 1995 (passive)isdn card had linux drivers. driver support for linux in 1995-1998 was actually better than say in '01-'03, somehow magically. probably due to that companies weren't trying to hide what they were doing in software vs. in hardware. voodoo had linux drivers too(well, glide lib).
AM29000 is an AMD RISC processor, often used in printers... They were famous for their phaser line of solid ink(wax i think) printers, i think the printer business is now sold to Xerox... Check the chip around the db25 and centronics connector, they might be SCSI chips for external HDD to store more fonts.
Some of that laptop memory can also be used in older printers that served on networks I had a phaser 5400 from Xerox that use this stuff. Combined with a bank of 500 sheet paper trees, that thing was a beast
Oh yeah, I used to service printers for a few years and forgot about the laptop SIMM in there. My office used to have a bunch of laserjet 4's, 5si, 4000's, all networked and some local, I loved working on them, especially the older ones. unfortunately we got moved over to a half dozen large central printers and we didn't get to service them anymore. That job went from awesome to a dead bore in the span of 10y due to outsourcing all the printing and PC hardware to leases.
It's been a while since we have seen Adrian bust out the memory tester and tell stories. Would be great to watch a test/sort video for all of that memory!
Later boards used a PCI to ISA bridge as things on the board moved to LPC. This often broke older ISA cards and Ive had it stop ISA post cards working. The large Adaptec carc is a RAID card, check to see if it has a Dell, HP or Compaq P/N
The AMD K6-II really brings back memories. The first PC I ever built back in 1997 when I was 10 used the 400MHz version of that CPU. I built the PC all by myself. Good times.
That was my 2nd CPU! Wait no, it was a K6-3... My first was a Cyrix MII (PR 233) I forget it's real clock, I upgraded to the K6-3 400 a few years later. I loved the socket 7 days. I eventually blew up the AMD trying to overclock it and had to switch to an old pentium 90. 3 cpu's from many generations all on the same board.
That Adaptec AAA-131U2 is a SCSI Hardware RAID card, and the RAM is there for caching reads and writes. That was an *expensive* card back in the day! Hardware RAID + Cache = $$$$$$ There is a version of that card that also has a battery on it so that if the power went out, the RAID array could be rebuilt using the cached writes so that data was not lost. I would say that based upon the cards in your collection, the SCSI and network cards were pulled from a Novell Netware network system with a fairly high end Novell Server.
Don't knock those Trident and S3 cards too much. They were great for us Linux users, back in the bad old days of early XFree86 (lack of) compatibility and having to craft up and X86Config file and monitor timings and modelines and... (insert screaming into the void sound) Yeah the performance wasn't great, but then again we weren't really playing games on our Linux boxen (except maybe the occasional netrek match, which these handled with no issues.) But they performed reasonably well for most stuff, and most importantly were pretty easy to set up ("easy" being a relative term, we're talking about cooking up XF86Config modelines with the proper monitor timings and all that) and had great compatibility. Also back in those days alot of hardware would complain loudly and refuse to boot if a video card wasn't present, so these were great to stick into machines that normally ran headless. Same applies for those NE2000 ethernet cards. They were the go-to card for getting a Linux box on the network, because they were pretty easy to configure and they Just Worked(tm) and the Linux NE2K driver was stable and performed decently.
My Dad got a RealMagic DVD card back in the late 90s and installed it in his Pentium 166 computer, and we were allll blown away by how incredible First Contact looked! Yes, we got the same DVD! I actually have the cards with me, and I've wanted to try them out, but never actively gone to check if the software is available. I really should check. The whole kit was an amazing product, really!
The Creative dxr2 board was a rebadged ReelMagic, I believe. I got one of those in a DVD upgrade kit with a Matsushita 2X DVD-ROM. With the composite output cable, that was my sole DVD player for years - until it got replaced with a Sony PlayStation 2. :-)
The controller on those Ethernet cards at 7-8 minutes is a knock-off of the National Semiconductor DP83901. That was the follow-on to the DP8390 which was the most bog-standard chip of the day. You should certainly be able to get a generic driver to work there. Also: The AM29000 was a high end RISC processor when it was released, but it was quickly eclipsed along with Motorola's MC88000 and plenty of other chips. The 29000 eventually ended up in places like printer controllers, and the cache circuitry of the 88000 was combined with the IBM RS/6000 processor core to create the PowerPC line.
Adrian, those cheap Trident cards can be improved somewhat for DOS gaming performance by loading a VESA 2.0 framebuffer into high memory in your config.sys (or autoexec.bat I don't recall which, it's been over 30 years now) as the card only supported VESA 1.2 in hardware. I found it gave a good 10-20% performance boost in Doom and Wolf3D, as well as some Origin games. (NOT Wing commander, sadly). But it helps. At the time that card was popular for cheap clones, (1990-1995) 3D accelleration was all but unknown, and fast 2D cards extremely expensive. I remember yearning for a Matrox card around that time. ;-) EDIT: To add to the nostalgia for me, said Trident card was running in a PC that used the very same AMD 386DX-40 you have there! It's only a few hundred miles down the coast from Vancouver to Portland, could my old first PC have travelled that far?
Some of that double height "SDRam" might actually be EDO or FP DRAM DIMMs (3.3V or 5V). IBM and Apple used the 5V DIMMS extensively in mid 90s PPC computers and workstations. The 3.3V EDO DIMMS were sometimes used on early Pentium 1 systems.
I'm just in the second minute of the video, but man that's a treasure chest of boards just in the value of the memory chips and all. That box at one time was probably full of extremely valuable cards and motherboards, and today is going to possibly help be the missing link to old systems that need chips from there! Really nice of your friend to let you take that box of stuff he'll probably never use off his hands. I have 2 or 3 boxes like that in storage as well, one day I'll go through it and see what I have, it'll mostly be pc parts, I wasn't into Mac back in the day, nor am I today!
I didn't find this video boring. I learned a lot watching it. I'm 62 now and never had a chance to be around computers. To see each board separately. And see how they work was very interesting to me. It would be awesome to see you show a parts list of what we need to build a computer and how to put it together and test it like here in this video. It wouldn't be for you guys and gals who know. But I could learn a lot from it.
Thanks for this exxxtreme episode. It reminded me of a couple of PC cards that I also owned in the 90's. And that you needed to pay for HQ sound in a PC of that time.
The "SDRAM" module on the Adaptec card is a write cache. Probably got a battery connector on it somewhere. That SCSI/Sound Card may not actually be bootable, the combo of SCSI and Sound makes me think it's probably one of the cards that shipped with the early commodity CD-R drives.
That SCSI card likely has RAID capabilities, probably 0,1,5 maybe 10 if it's newer. Most RAID capable hardware cards had cache memory onboard, and the better enterprise ones had a battery backup for the cache memory so the writes could complete even if the power went out. In any case, the software onboard is soooo much better than jumpers and utils.
If I remember my 3dfx history, the first Voodoo setups they sold actually went into arcade cabinets - before the consumer release in 1996! I read an internal document claiming to offer custom 1, 2, and 3 TMU configurations as well as SLI, all using the 1st-gen frame buffer and texture mapping chips that ended up on the original consumer Voodoo card. Oh, and the 1st-gen TMU/FBI chips actually supported up to 4MB of RAM per chip - so what we think of as a Voodoo2 SLI setup with a total of two FBI's, four TMU's, and 24MB of total RAM - that was all possible back in 1995 with the original 1st-gen 3dfx hardware, provided you were an arcade manufacturer with sufficiently deep pockets of course. You could even have six TMU's in theory! Granted, the 1st-gen chips ran ~50MHz so not as fast as true Voodoo2 SLI but still WILDLY impressive for 1995!! Now I'm not familiar enough with arcade hardware to know whether 3dfx actually built anything that complex with the 1st-gen hardware, but they certainly advertised it to the arcade companies!
That's cool to know but I wonder if anyone would know what to do with 24 MB of VRAM in 1995. On the other hand, now we have games with no attempt of optimization that will gobble up 16 GB of VRAM. Oh how things have changed.
*Never* connect power to that Molex connector, Acer/ALi/AOPEN (All of them are Acer brands) mainboards used it to power the CPU *fan* for APM control. It's a male connector (pins tell the gender, not the housing) but back then most fans were wired to a short male-female extension cable to keep the molex power connector available for other devices so it was not a problem.
The 25,000 issue could also just be a "standard" of 2D for these cards, with the real differences simply being 3D related. Like polygons per second, fill rate etc. Also, that Vibra 16 does have a genuine Yamaha OPL chip on the board, so it's all cool for DOS games. I imagine you spotted that by now, but just in case.
For DOS games with software rendering: A S3 Virge PCI card on a Pentium 200 already does 25000 chars/ms on LandMark test. It supports up to 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color on windows. It is free from BGA chips. The no-return point for sophistication IMHO seems to be when video chips started to be BGA, and started to have a limited life.
@@evapowah Maybe there is a limitation in the software measurement. Besides, when the S3 Virge came out, people wanted to push graphics pixels. 25k chars/sec is plenty for any text mode
I definitely loved this video. I saw some items that I actually used in my first PC build (Asus AT/ATX MOBO, AMD K6 2 350, 3Dfx Voodoo (3000) AGP card). Thanks for the memories.
28:44 90% sure that's the mobo my first PC had which I still have. And the manual and drivers too (maybe even the box??). I'll dig them out tomorrow and get back to you on it.
Oooh... I love those "big LED" ethernet cards... back when I was playing with stuff like that, nobody had an outside-of-work use for Ethernet, so I had "hundreds" for pretty close to zero cost. Nice SCSI card.... Linux drivers in 1996 NINETY SIX!!!!! Wowzers! I went Linux about 2 years later and drivers for anything were rarer than a very rare thing.
@28:48 That's a PC Chips motherboard. Two variants PC100 and PC133 according to the ram speed or something. I used to have a AMD K6 2 Processor, Audio onboard c-media 8338 and vga from SiS integrated systems. I had one of those, still remember its drivers...
4:17 those decoder cards were - coupled with a DVD drive - less than half the price of a DVD player. I purchased a kit from creative labs I think that had both the card and the drive and ran 10 metre cables to my TV back in 1999.
Adrian, please post those RealMagic drivers up on the archive, software for those is incredibly scarce. I actually have a game that uses that board for playback and hopefully I'll get one of those cards in the future to play it.
The original Ensoniq Audio PCI is actually a decent card with very good DOS support for machines without ISA (and don't use later Creative drivers, use the ES1730 drivers) I'll admit the Soundblaster compatibility is spotty (the emulated SB16 music in Doom is pathetically bad), but General Midi and Ensoniq Soundscape emulation works well in games that support it
That Elsa with s3 savage4 pro chip is a good card , supports meTal API, hi-res texture in some games ,Unreal for example...Almost as good as Voodoo 3 ,although slower
I think that is an ultrawide SCSI card and not just a vanilla SCSI or SCSI II card. The giveaway is the connector on the back it looks on first glance like a SCSI 2 connector but it is WIDER and has more pins. Ultrawide in my experience is used mostly on servers.
Three information points. 15:50 - Adaptec AAx means some kind of hardware SCSI RAID, not just SCSI, the U2 means it does Ultra2 so 40/80 MB/s (narrow/wide). The memory is due to this being a RAID card, without extra memory write performance on RAID-5/6 will suck badly (this does RAID 0/1/5) - but it doesn''t need to be THAT large to help a lot. As a result all but the ultra-budget models came with memory in a slot (so they could sell hideously overpriced 168-pin EDO 66MHz 3.3V 60ns or better sticks) and high-end cards also had batteries via a connector to make the memory safe on abrupt power-loss (might be a connector or just traces for this on the PCB for this). I'm not that that familiar with the AAA-13x cards but from the dates I suspect it was quickly replaced by rebadged DPT cards under the new AAC model series - DPT was a rival RAID card manufacturer Adaptec bought becauase their older RAID cards had a reputation for not being competetive (I actually have used a DPT card), this card came out earlier the same year that Adaptec purchased DPT... Not sure if it's a rare card or not, AFAIK they kept selling their old RAID lines in parallel for a while because customers wanted compatible replacement - I think they later solved by making the firmware on the DPT-derived card also understand Adaptec's old AAA cards on-disk format (making them drop-in replacement). 31:43 - AM29000 aka 29k (1988-1995), a really popular RISC processor in the late 80s (at times second only to x86!). Fun trivia - AMD used parts of their final non-finished 29k model as the internal microarchitecture of the AMD K5, their first in-house x86 processor. AMD probably wouldn't exist today without these and the earlier Am2900 bit-slice ICs that other companies built CPUs with in the '70s - these AM29xx parts are still in production with both AMD and second sources! 38:30 - as it says it's a PC Card adaptor, so it takes PCMCIA/PC Card/CardBus cards and connect them to a desktop machine. PCMCIA was the name of the standard, while the actual cards was originally named PCMCIA Card but quickly changed to PC Card (in PCMCIA 2.0). And then when 32-bit PCMCIA cards (5.0, switched from ISA-derived to PCI-derived) came out these were named CardBus.
What a nice little nostalgia trip - I worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 90s/ early 00s and recognised a lot of these! You can test the dvd decoders w/o the breakout cable, you just need to swap the VGA cable from the monitor when you start the playback 👍
Number Nine produced some fantastic graphics cards in their day, but the one you have there I think is based on the S3 Savage IV graphics chip as opposed to their higher end in house imagine chips. Still a nice card to have though.
You got some good stuff! The graphics cards are the most interesting to me, and the PCI Riva 128 is actually a really nice one. The Voodoo3 2000 is a good find too, and you're right about it being basically a suped-up PCI card on the AGP interface. It did not take advantage of any AGP features.
It was really fun to see you show and talk about the Diamond Riva 128 card, because I have that exact card in a drawer, saved from an old machine I encoutered at a site doing work.
Regarding the ram, do a timelapse recording of testing and sorting the modules, showing the boxes where the working modules get put into, the tester, and a dead-parts box for the rejects.
That old S3 GPU brings back memories. My first ever own PC (not the first PC I've ever used, but the first one that was mine) had a 4MB Trio3D AGP card. Not a good 3D card but worked well for DOS and some lighter Windows games. Also, from what I remember, the mainboard in that system also had an ATX plug in addition to AT (case was AT though).
58:30 Yes, that was an annoying thing with PCI, the slots were not idempotent as on ISA. Different IRQ's were routed on different PCI slots and not all cards worked correctly on every slot.
I found this video really cool to listen to. I grew up around the time these cards were coming out, but to hear them talked about in such detail is pretty cool. Maybe one day I’ll take this up as a hobby, but for now I’ll have to watch more of your videos. Lol
The card at 14:20 was the same that I had in my main PC in 1998ish Diamond Stealth III with an S3 Savage chip. I bought it because back then it had a huge price/performance payoff: ATI, 3DFX and Nvidia could not match the performance at the price ($50-70 back then IRRC). It was great for OpenGL, DirectX, etc. I recently picked one up from someone getting rid of all their old PC stuff The Trident cards were actually good enough though for Dos and Windows. I found many of them could easily overclock from the stock 83mhz to 200mhz :)
While some Vibra 16 cards don’t have a true OPL 3 chip, actually yours does, it’s visible when you show the card with its nice OPL logo. Actually the AzTeck modem/sound card combo that you did not test also had a true Yamaha OPL chip on it as well.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
Rooting through old hardware is fun to watch. There is so much out there to experience. However, like you said, most of it was boring, low end stuff. I think a RAM-test extravaganza would be fun to watch as well!
Agreed
Well, 486 motherboards with SRAM cache are fun, to rip out those RAMs to use as VIC-20 expansion memory. Naturally not for the speed but because they are often 32kx8 chips. And DRAM cards can be fun if you want to upgrade a REU to 512K.
Time for a RAM testing marathon! We could make a game of it! Tally up the passing / failing types, see which chips are the worst / best! Plus that RAM tester is just gosh darn cool. :0
Ugh, why? I have a bunch of old RAM, testing it was no fun, took hours, and was just repetitive as hell and took most of a day to do. But now I have a grocery bag full of tested working ram. Best part of it was finding 60ns 32mb 72pin modules in there, 4of them and working, that was some super expensive stuff back in the day, probably still is. Fun running a 486 with 128mb - have 64mb in it now just for brag factor lol.
@@noth606 Then just don't watch! Some of us don't have a 'bag-o-chips', thus hard to justify getting the chip tester. So it'd be neat to live vicariously thru his effort. 🙂
I'm totally down for some RAM testing!
This would be cool! Live stream!
I'd watch!
board at 31:05 is probably a cpu/controller board for a Tektronix high end dye sublimation printer. looks as if it has an SCSI port on the back. As well as maybe a parallel port? all those ROMS are probably a Postscript implementation. SIMM sockets also make me think that.
KLOCK is probably the Keyboard LOCK connector. What a collection of hardware! Keep up the great videos, Adrian!
16 megabyte of sdram man those cards were beasts of graphics cards you should get yourself one while there still out there🤣
If you ever make a third channel it needs to be called Adrian's Digital Basement Exxtreme. 😆
fun fact: he has a 3rd channel but only posts once in a while through patreon and they never go public, only for patrons.
I'd rather like to see his Analogue Attic 👍
Adrians Onlyfans channel :D
@@StenEriksson I think he's cute too
Beyond Adrian's Digital Basement
In the early 90s I ran a two node RemoteAccess BSS with FrontDoor on a 386SX 25MHz board with 4MB of RAM. Everything ran under DesqView and there was even spare memory for a disk cache using Norton Cache. Because the machine had a generous amount of storage, I also ran Netware Lite on it in order to connect over coax Ethernet. Thanks for revitalizing those memories!
17:45 those combined SCSI and sound cards were usually for CD-ROMs and CD writers. Not sure if they'd work with a regular old hard drive.
Those "manuals" with the product key came with the computer that already had the OS installed. If I remember correctly, for a while during the 90s, MS insisted on those silly booklets. I just tore off the front page and archived that. But in 97-98 the OEM machines had the Windows product key on stickers instead.
Hi Adrian !!
I had mentioned that this Dallas clock chip has a battery embedded and its possible to replace it… just carefully cut the plastic case (top) or tear down the package by opening the bottom…
That Vibra card is actually one of the better Vibras... there's a real OPL3 chip on it unlike the later ones when they switched to CQM!
was screaming at the screen when he never noticed it, glad someone else did
One of the better Vibras... that's like having one of the better diseases.
The Vibra gave me flashbacks to LGR messing with that Quantex 486 and the Vibra utterly mangling/freaking out on Jill of the Jungle
This! I was almost shouting angrily while the Yamaha OPL chip is clearly to be seen on the board right of the large mixer chip. That is pretty much as good as most SB16 cards with real OPL.
@@TheGrunt76 Agree, there's nothing really wrong with this one! Even if it says Vibra on it!
28:44 - sometimes it's worth checking the underside of the motherboards, there might be a sticker or a silkscreen marking that help you identify it. Lately I'm into motherboards that have both AT and ATX PSU sockets, it's a fasticanting idea. I think the cache that goes in a slot is called Cache on a Stick.
I gasped when you opened the Slot1 CPU box, I love the Slot1 form factor, because the first PC that my brother bought/built had a Slot1 Celeron inside :) This whole episode is like christmas!
I need to get a better board for my slot 1 machine, it only has PCI and is quite slow. I have a 600mhz Piii in it and it gets beast by a slot 1 compaq i have with a 500mhz Piii. It's out of an HP and has the AGP bus taken up by a slow onboard chip. I'm Thinking an Asus P3B-F if i can find one.
@@EvilTurkeySlices The chipset has a lot to do with the speed of those Slot 1 boards. I always tried to get a Intel 440 BX board if possible.
@@TheLionAndTheLamb777 the one I have is a 440bx.
28:32 There is a white sticker on the black 16-Bit ISA/AT connector (at the edge of the motherboard).
The AMD29000 is a bit slice microprocessor, It ran at up to 10MHz IIRC - I designed a maths co-processor VME rack card for matrix operations (add, multiply) around one for my MSc Dissertation in 1990. The ROM chips hold the microcode which is why there’s so many of them
Yup, by far the most interesting board in the bunch, it would be real fun and challenge to bring that one to life!
no, you are refering to the Am2900 series, otoh the 29k in that board is a completely different animal, it's a much modern 32bit RISC processor
@@boardernut I’m referring to the 29k series bit slice architecture, not the 2900. I used the AM29325, AM29331, AM29332 and AM29334. I constructed a matrix ALU board with these components that plugged into a VMEBus rack. The primary processor (a 68030) wrote two matrices to a shared memory area, the board performed an operation in the background (add, subtract or multiply) and then wrote the result to the same area before triggering a bus interrupt to indicate that the result was available. Designed to accelerate 3D graphics calculations in 1990.
@@philh9421 that is very interesting to me, I kind of joined too late to the RISC era, although I was lucky enough to be at the right place for a few years, unfortunately for me I also saw them first hand fade very quickly. At the TELCO I worked for I had time in my hands to play with sun ultra 2 , HP9000-712 , Alpha stations and with was already obsolete VAXstations 4000/60 (not risc tho), I did a lot of csh programming, pure nostalgia now
“Klock” is probably “keyboard lock” - the little ring-shaped keys that locks out keyboard input when the key is removed, introduced by the IBM AT
The Sigma Designs RealMagic cards were also really useful if you wanted clean NTSC video playback from a PC. They were used by a number of AMV tech people in order to play back the videos for conventions and the like, without having to worry about playback issues.
In the box with all the cables, the svideo to composite adapter is a specific pinout for these cards, and differs from what you would get with some VGA cards that had similar adapters. It made it frustrating when you collected these cards, ensuring you had the adapters. The RCA jack on the card is digital audio, not video.
Seeing the colors of the bios screen on the 386 board (at approx 1h12m) triggered some memories of building my first PC around '89/'90.
Wow! A GN reference! Wasn’t expecting that.
And the importance of Ensoniq (to the retro community) is that they were the engineers who made the C64 SID.
Indeed, they really brought their big-synth experience down into the SID and helped make it what it was :D
Though apparently it was originally going to have even more voices, but Commodore’s strict Christmas deadline made them limit it to 3. It’s already so amazing with 3 voices, so imagining a world where it had 6 or 8 out of the box is pretty intense!
@@kaitlyn__L They founded Ensoniq and developed keyboard synths _after_ leaving Commodore/MOS.
In the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed computer-based training programs and we used Broadway Real Magic MPEG playback cards. The Real Magic card utilized a loopback cable. The cable was connected to the video card monitor cable connector and the other end was plugged into the DIN connector. The monitor was then connected to the Real Magic card.
The reason why we went with the Real Magic card versus straight computer playback of MPEG video is the card allowed for smoother video playback as you noted but more importantly allowed for time-location tracking. Using exact frame-location of the video playback, the program-developer, meaning yours truly, could select specific frames and sections of the video for playback. These were used for feedback. If a student clicked on the wrong answer during the module test, that portion of the video, linked and marked by the timecode, would then play again before continuing on to the next question.
HA, HA! I see you found a complete kit for the newer or older Hollywood card instead of the Broadway unless they were two different products from the same period.
So a pot like how dragons lair used the laser discs back in the day?
@@ryanvoots9827 Yes, indeed.
Initially, we used the laser disc system before the Broadway cards were available. It's a good thing because those players were discontinued anyway, and were very expensive as well.
The alternative was AVI but that was too slow and required the CPU and very slow video cards used in the day, which I think were those awful Trident or S3 cards!
The Broadway cards were a very popular option with the customers and eventually we only supported those and gave up the AVI option for customers.
I thought this was just a great video. It captured the excitement we all feel with encounters with new hardware!
Perhaps the ISA bus on that 386 board was running at 10 MHz (FSB/4), vs. 8.33 on the Slot-1 board (on PCI motherboards, the ISA clock is usually PCI/4, and PCI is 33.3 unless overclocked). That would explain the faster performance of the ISA VGA card.
Fun fact: when I was playing around with overclocking a Pentium MMX, at 83 MHz FSB (41.7 PCI, 10.4 ISA) it was actually a 3COM ISA NIC that made it unstable -- the PCI cards were fine! With the NIC removed it would boot but would eventually fail Prime95. It was rock-solid at 75 MHz though, which at 3.5x multiplier brought a 233MMX to 262.
The Vibra 16 at 15:20 has an OPL chip on it @Adrian's Digital Basement ][
42:00 Those Lot 1 CPU are actually not build to ease the handling of the processors ... but because they could not (yet) include enough cache on to the die but had to put the bigger cache in to a separate chip...
That's why they came as a package on a circuit board .. called a "Slot 1" cpu. ;)
Later on, caches got fully integrated into cpu dies so the extra PCB was no longer necessary. ;)
For anyone 45+ this is not a mystery, its nostalgia ♥
36+ as well., my first machine I have seen opened was 1990 😂😂
55+ it starts moving from nostalgia to a mystery due to a failing memory. "0_o"
36 here, this video brings so much memories
31 here and still remember some of these from my childhood :D
42+. 486 we still ♥U!
My first 3D accelerator was an AGP Diamond Viper V550, which used the nVidia TNT1, in a PII-450 machine. It was a beast at Half-Life, but Unreal was a bit buggy for a while because the engine wasn't originally created with nVidia GPUs in mind.
That machine also had a Sound Blaster PCI128, which I'm pretty sure was pretty much just a rebadged Ensoniq design. I have a strong feeling that Creative bought Ensoniq as a way to get into the PCI sound card market.
The first versions of Unreal were a pain in OpenGL and even DX.
Glide was the prefered render.
Ensoniq's 1370 is a very DOS compatible sound card, even it's in PCI. Creative rebranded them to SB PCI64 and PCI128 and Ensoniq's AUDIOPCI DOS drivers were used as the basis for the Live! and Audigy excellent DOS drivers.
The Advansys SCSI card is cool. I used to have a very similar one, probably still do have it somewhere. This model ABP-970 IIRC is also compatible with PowerPC Macs, if you flash its BIOS with a MAc-compatible firmware. Advansys were even better performing than Adaptec of the time, unfortunately they were a small company and eventually Adaptec bought them.
The adaptec AHA 131u2 is an ultra-II SCSI card, basically one of their "server grade" cards (hence the cache memory on it)... very nice, not cheap card back in the day. (That's from memory, but that card is pretty powerful).
I would like to have a it ☺
It's a RAID controller.
I loved my slow Trident with that colorful Bios boot screen, my very first PC, 286 instead of XT and color monitor instead of typical amber as I convinced parents to get 286 color at the expense of smaller HDD (got massive 40MB). Of course I upgraded through S3 Virge, Cirrus-Logic and some weak 3d-capable S3, drooling over first nvidia and 3dfx cards. I remember I had some very early ATI Radeon, poorly performing in 3d. Computers were so exciting back then.
Part of this looked like a walk through the hardware in my 1990's computer systems. I had the various AMD accelerated chips, those Trident video cards, probably a couple of the sound cards, and the weird adapters. Lost a lot of my old parts in a house fire.
Just livestream it. You can chat with viewers while doing boring stuff. That’s exactly why live-streaming is perfect.
Play some cool music and chat while testing ram
Yes! Came for this comment. Live stream it please! :D
48:00 When I get dead coin batteries, I sharpie a big X on both sides.
1:10:00 You might want to break up that RAM bag into separate bags by connector type so you don't have to dig so hard next time.
There are 2 additional possibilities, why the trident might be slow: There's a Waitstate and / or 8/16-Bit-jumper set wrong. Or the ISA-implementation on this newer board might not work particularly great together with this graphics chip.
“I’m going to have to speed this up or the video’s going to go long.”
Don’t threaten me with a good time. 😂🍿
The Tektronix board looks like the control board to one of their printers like the phaser series. The centronics connector is a good indicator, but I am not sure.
The Ensoniq 1370 card was the first general purpose PCI sound card. As far as DOS compatibility goes, early steppings of the K6 processor had hang issues with some specific DOS setups. AMD updated the processor and fixed the issue early on. Defective chips could be returned to AMD for a replacement. Sometimes it's not the sound card :)
@27:03 That is an Acer AP5C motherboard, 4 pin connector in the corner is for CPU fan power. We had some of those where I used to work back in the Windows 95 era. Supports like a 133Mhz P1 processor. I think that jumper is for the keyboard lock = KLock. Yes a barrel style lock / switch that prevented keyboard input if I remember correctly,
@28:02 That looks like / similar to a DFI P5B motherboard. Will probably take one of those K6 350MHZ processors.
brings me back to the old days, each company had its own solution to the problem, hardware that didn't work together because of irq or dma conflicts, ten floppies just to get software installed, getting stuff that was not "as advertised". Thanks Adrian, from Hong Kong!
that Vibra16 does have the OPL3 chip in it (15:21)
Yeah....was screaming "look at the chip....it says YAMAHA". He even looked at the card for problems at around 1h and missed it. I can't believe I know something more than him.
@@mateiberatco500 I also have more hardware experience than he does, because I was an assembler od PC's from 89 to 98, preetymuch handled boards very somilar to all those :)
but still, credit to him for providing such fun content, $DEITY knows how much we need that type of content right now
That reference to Linux drivers on that 1996 Advansys SCSI card would have to be one of the earliest (if not the earliest) inclusion of Linux drivers on a commercial product that I've seen. Linux in 1996 was super niche geekware.
our 1995 (passive)isdn card had linux drivers. driver support for linux in 1995-1998 was actually better than say in '01-'03, somehow magically. probably due to that companies weren't trying to hide what they were doing in software vs. in hardware.
voodoo had linux drivers too(well, glide lib).
It’s no surprise it’s on a SCSI controller haha
AM29000 is an AMD RISC processor, often used in printers... They were famous for their phaser line of solid ink(wax i think) printers, i think the printer business is now sold to Xerox...
Check the chip around the db25 and centronics connector, they might be SCSI chips for external HDD to store more fonts.
Some of that laptop memory can also be used in older printers that served on networks I had a phaser 5400 from Xerox that use this stuff. Combined with a bank of 500 sheet paper trees, that thing was a beast
Oh yeah, I used to service printers for a few years and forgot about the laptop SIMM in there.
My office used to have a bunch of laserjet 4's, 5si, 4000's, all networked and some local, I loved working on them, especially the older ones. unfortunately we got moved over to a half dozen large central printers and we didn't get to service them anymore.
That job went from awesome to a dead bore in the span of 10y due to outsourcing all the printing and PC hardware to leases.
It's been a while since we have seen Adrian bust out the memory tester and tell stories. Would be great to watch a test/sort video for all of that memory!
Later boards used a PCI to ISA bridge as things on the board moved to LPC. This often broke older ISA cards and Ive had it stop ISA post cards working. The large Adaptec carc is a RAID card, check to see if it has a Dell, HP or Compaq P/N
I can't tell you how many days I spent trying to get games working with those changes.
@@kjrchannel1480 later boards also changed the ISA bus clock too, personally had this cause issues with NICs and an ESS Audiodrive
The AMD K6-II really brings back memories. The first PC I ever built back in 1997 when I was 10 used the 400MHz version of that CPU. I built the PC all by myself. Good times.
That was my 2nd CPU! Wait no, it was a K6-3...
My first was a Cyrix MII (PR 233) I forget it's real clock, I upgraded to the K6-3 400 a few years later.
I loved the socket 7 days. I eventually blew up the AMD trying to overclock it and had to switch to an old pentium 90.
3 cpu's from many generations all on the same board.
@@volvo09 I loved the Socket 7 too.
The network cards are NCR 92C901 10base2 cards.
11:00 in that brings back childhood. It was used in packard bells for years.
33:16 a beautiful book/manual!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! great video
That Adaptec AAA-131U2 is a SCSI Hardware RAID card, and the RAM is there for caching reads and writes. That was an *expensive* card back in the day! Hardware RAID + Cache = $$$$$$ There is a version of that card that also has a battery on it so that if the power went out, the RAID array could be rebuilt using the cached writes so that data was not lost. I would say that based upon the cards in your collection, the SCSI and network cards were pulled from a Novell Netware network system with a fairly high end Novell Server.
That's probably where the taller RAM sticks came from too.
Don't knock those Trident and S3 cards too much. They were great for us Linux users, back in the bad old days of early XFree86 (lack of) compatibility and having to craft up and X86Config file and monitor timings and modelines and... (insert screaming into the void sound) Yeah the performance wasn't great, but then again we weren't really playing games on our Linux boxen (except maybe the occasional netrek match, which these handled with no issues.) But they performed reasonably well for most stuff, and most importantly were pretty easy to set up ("easy" being a relative term, we're talking about cooking up XF86Config modelines with the proper monitor timings and all that) and had great compatibility. Also back in those days alot of hardware would complain loudly and refuse to boot if a video card wasn't present, so these were great to stick into machines that normally ran headless. Same applies for those NE2000 ethernet cards. They were the go-to card for getting a Linux box on the network, because they were pretty easy to configure and they Just Worked(tm) and the Linux NE2K driver was stable and performed decently.
My Dad got a RealMagic DVD card back in the late 90s and installed it in his Pentium 166 computer, and we were allll blown away by how incredible First Contact looked! Yes, we got the same DVD!
I actually have the cards with me, and I've wanted to try them out, but never actively gone to check if the software is available. I really should check. The whole kit was an amazing product, really!
The Creative dxr2 board was a rebadged ReelMagic, I believe. I got one of those in a DVD upgrade kit with a Matsushita 2X DVD-ROM. With the composite output cable, that was my sole DVD player for years - until it got replaced with a Sony PlayStation 2. :-)
The controller on those Ethernet cards at 7-8 minutes is a knock-off of the National Semiconductor DP83901. That was the follow-on to the DP8390 which was the most bog-standard chip of the day. You should certainly be able to get a generic driver to work there.
Also: The AM29000 was a high end RISC processor when it was released, but it was quickly eclipsed along with Motorola's MC88000 and plenty of other chips. The 29000 eventually ended up in places like printer controllers, and the cache circuitry of the 88000 was combined with the IBM RS/6000 processor core to create the PowerPC line.
Adrian, those cheap Trident cards can be improved somewhat for DOS gaming performance by loading a VESA 2.0 framebuffer into high memory in your config.sys (or autoexec.bat I don't recall which, it's been over 30 years now) as the card only supported VESA 1.2 in hardware. I found it gave a good 10-20% performance boost in Doom and Wolf3D, as well as some Origin games. (NOT Wing commander, sadly). But it helps. At the time that card was popular for cheap clones, (1990-1995) 3D accelleration was all but unknown, and fast 2D cards extremely expensive. I remember yearning for a Matrox card around that time. ;-) EDIT: To add to the nostalgia for me, said Trident card was running in a PC that used the very same AMD 386DX-40 you have there! It's only a few hundred miles down the coast from Vancouver to Portland, could my old first PC have travelled that far?
The sound card with SCSI is non-bootable. It was mainly for SCSI CD-ROMs at the time, but disks are supported. Just no BIOS feature.
Some of that double height "SDRam" might actually be EDO or FP DRAM DIMMs (3.3V or 5V). IBM and Apple used the 5V DIMMS extensively in mid 90s PPC computers and workstations. The 3.3V EDO DIMMS were sometimes used on early Pentium 1 systems.
Some nice stuff in that box. That big ram bag was hilarious :)
I'm just in the second minute of the video, but man that's a treasure chest of boards just in the value of the memory chips and all. That box at one time was probably full of extremely valuable cards and motherboards, and today is going to possibly help be the missing link to old systems that need chips from there! Really nice of your friend to let you take that box of stuff he'll probably never use off his hands. I have 2 or 3 boxes like that in storage as well, one day I'll go through it and see what I have, it'll mostly be pc parts, I wasn't into Mac back in the day, nor am I today!
I didn't find this video boring. I learned a lot watching it. I'm 62 now and never had a chance to be around computers. To see each board separately. And see how they work was very interesting to me. It would be awesome to see you show a parts list of what we need to build a computer and how to put it together and test it like here in this video. It wouldn't be for you guys and gals who know. But I could learn a lot from it.
Thanks for this exxxtreme episode. It reminded me of a couple of PC cards that I also owned in the 90's. And that you needed to pay for HQ sound in a PC of that time.
The "SDRAM" module on the Adaptec card is a write cache. Probably got a battery connector on it somewhere.
That SCSI/Sound Card may not actually be bootable, the combo of SCSI and Sound makes me think it's probably one of the cards that shipped with the early commodity CD-R drives.
That SCSI card likely has RAID capabilities, probably 0,1,5 maybe 10 if it's newer. Most RAID capable hardware cards had cache memory onboard, and the better enterprise ones had a battery backup for the cache memory so the writes could complete even if the power went out. In any case, the software onboard is soooo much better than jumpers and utils.
If I remember my 3dfx history, the first Voodoo setups they sold actually went into arcade cabinets - before the consumer release in 1996! I read an internal document claiming to offer custom 1, 2, and 3 TMU configurations as well as SLI, all using the 1st-gen frame buffer and texture mapping chips that ended up on the original consumer Voodoo card. Oh, and the 1st-gen TMU/FBI chips actually supported up to 4MB of RAM per chip - so what we think of as a Voodoo2 SLI setup with a total of two FBI's, four TMU's, and 24MB of total RAM - that was all possible back in 1995 with the original 1st-gen 3dfx hardware, provided you were an arcade manufacturer with sufficiently deep pockets of course. You could even have six TMU's in theory! Granted, the 1st-gen chips ran ~50MHz so not as fast as true Voodoo2 SLI but still WILDLY impressive for 1995!! Now I'm not familiar enough with arcade hardware to know whether 3dfx actually built anything that complex with the 1st-gen hardware, but they certainly advertised it to the arcade companies!
That's cool to know but I wonder if anyone would know what to do with 24 MB of VRAM in 1995. On the other hand, now we have games with no attempt of optimization that will gobble up 16 GB of VRAM. Oh how things have changed.
*Never* connect power to that Molex connector, Acer/ALi/AOPEN (All of them are Acer brands) mainboards used it to power the CPU *fan* for APM control.
It's a male connector (pins tell the gender, not the housing) but back then most fans were wired to a short male-female extension cable to keep the molex power connector available for other devices so it was not a problem.
That seems like important information that should be on the silkscreen
The 25,000 issue could also just be a "standard" of 2D for these cards, with the real differences simply being 3D related. Like polygons per second, fill rate etc.
Also, that Vibra 16 does have a genuine Yamaha OPL chip on the board, so it's all cool for DOS games. I imagine you spotted that by now, but just in case.
For DOS games with software rendering: A S3 Virge PCI card on a Pentium 200 already does 25000 chars/ms on LandMark test. It supports up to 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color on windows. It is free from BGA chips. The no-return point for sophistication IMHO seems to be when video chips started to be BGA, and started to have a limited life.
@@evapowah Maybe there is a limitation in the software measurement. Besides, when the S3 Virge came out, people wanted to push graphics pixels. 25k chars/sec is plenty for any text mode
The Aztech and the Vibra16 cards actually have real OPL2 chips on them. You can clearly see them in the video.
Really enjoyed simply 'spending the afternoon' with you as you went through the box of parts. Great video!
13:00 the history of ensoniq is really cool tbh. ive got an ensoniq synth and its really cool and a dream to work on
I definitely loved this video. I saw some items that I actually used in my first PC build (Asus AT/ATX MOBO, AMD K6 2 350, 3Dfx Voodoo (3000) AGP card). Thanks for the memories.
28:44 90% sure that's the mobo my first PC had which I still have. And the manual and drivers too (maybe even the box??). I'll dig them out tomorrow and get back to you on it.
Oooh... I love those "big LED" ethernet cards... back when I was playing with stuff like that, nobody had an outside-of-work use for Ethernet, so I had "hundreds" for pretty close to zero cost.
Nice SCSI card.... Linux drivers in 1996 NINETY SIX!!!!! Wowzers! I went Linux about 2 years later and drivers for anything were rarer than a very rare thing.
I think the talking is the best part. Your knowledge is extensive and helps newbie like me to know what to look for.
Yeah, really enjoyed this kind of long video. Would like to see the ram testing. Keep it up👍
I want to see you test all of those memory modules! Some of those memory modules are super valuable and rare.
@28:48 That's a PC Chips motherboard. Two variants PC100 and PC133 according to the ram speed or something. I used to have a AMD K6 2 Processor, Audio onboard c-media 8338 and vga from SiS integrated systems. I had one of those, still remember its drivers...
32:00 Tektronix mades (makes?) high end printers, and that looks like a prime candidate for a large printer controller board....
4:17 those decoder cards were - coupled with a DVD drive - less than half the price of a DVD player. I purchased a kit from creative labs I think that had both the card and the drive and ran 10 metre cables to my TV back in 1999.
Adrian, please post those RealMagic drivers up on the archive, software for those is incredibly scarce. I actually have a game that uses that board for playback and hopefully I'll get one of those cards in the future to play it.
The original Ensoniq Audio PCI is actually a decent card with very good DOS support for machines without ISA (and don't use later Creative drivers, use the ES1730 drivers)
I'll admit the Soundblaster compatibility is spotty (the emulated SB16 music in Doom is pathetically bad), but General Midi and Ensoniq Soundscape emulation works well in games that support it
That Elsa with s3 savage4 pro chip is a good card , supports meTal API, hi-res texture in some games ,Unreal for example...Almost as good as Voodoo 3 ,although slower
I had a DVD decoder. I bought the Creative labs dvd blaster kit. It came with one. It worked really well too.
I think that is an ultrawide SCSI card and not just a vanilla SCSI or SCSI II card. The giveaway is the connector on the back it looks on first glance like a SCSI 2 connector but it is WIDER and has more pins. Ultrawide in my experience is used mostly on servers.
Three information points.
15:50 - Adaptec AAx means some kind of hardware SCSI RAID, not just SCSI, the U2 means it does Ultra2 so 40/80 MB/s (narrow/wide). The memory is due to this being a RAID card, without extra memory write performance on RAID-5/6 will suck badly (this does RAID 0/1/5) - but it doesn''t need to be THAT large to help a lot. As a result all but the ultra-budget models came with memory in a slot (so they could sell hideously overpriced 168-pin EDO 66MHz 3.3V 60ns or better sticks) and high-end cards also had batteries via a connector to make the memory safe on abrupt power-loss (might be a connector or just traces for this on the PCB for this). I'm not that that familiar with the AAA-13x cards but from the dates I suspect it was quickly replaced by rebadged DPT cards under the new AAC model series - DPT was a rival RAID card manufacturer Adaptec bought becauase their older RAID cards had a reputation for not being competetive (I actually have used a DPT card), this card came out earlier the same year that Adaptec purchased DPT... Not sure if it's a rare card or not, AFAIK they kept selling their old RAID lines in parallel for a while because customers wanted compatible replacement - I think they later solved by making the firmware on the DPT-derived card also understand Adaptec's old AAA cards on-disk format (making them drop-in replacement).
31:43 - AM29000 aka 29k (1988-1995), a really popular RISC processor in the late 80s (at times second only to x86!). Fun trivia - AMD used parts of their final non-finished 29k model as the internal microarchitecture of the AMD K5, their first in-house x86 processor. AMD probably wouldn't exist today without these and the earlier Am2900 bit-slice ICs that other companies built CPUs with in the '70s - these AM29xx parts are still in production with both AMD and second sources!
38:30 - as it says it's a PC Card adaptor, so it takes PCMCIA/PC Card/CardBus cards and connect them to a desktop machine. PCMCIA was the name of the standard, while the actual cards was originally named PCMCIA Card but quickly changed to PC Card (in PCMCIA 2.0). And then when 32-bit PCMCIA cards (5.0, switched from ISA-derived to PCI-derived) came out these were named CardBus.
A chill ram testing stream would be a good opportunity to just sit and have a meandering conversation about whatever. You should consider it.
I would definitely tune in to that stream!
What a nice little nostalgia trip - I worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 90s/ early 00s and recognised a lot of these! You can test the dvd decoders w/o the breakout cable, you just need to swap the VGA cable from the monitor when you start the playback 👍
28:01 that yellow motherboard looks like a PCCCHIPS M5xx, my first computer has the model M598 with an AMD K6-2 350MHz and it's still working good
I like your cap removal method. And enjoyed watching your procedure.
15:13 the Creative SoundBlaster Vibra 16 CT2260 has a separate Yamaha OPL IC :)
Number Nine produced some fantastic graphics cards in their day, but the one you have there I think is based on the S3 Savage IV graphics chip as opposed to their higher end in house imagine chips. Still a nice card to have though.
You got some good stuff! The graphics cards are the most interesting to me, and the PCI Riva 128 is actually a really nice one. The Voodoo3 2000 is a good find too, and you're right about it being basically a suped-up PCI card on the AGP interface. It did not take advantage of any AGP features.
It was really fun to see you show and talk about the Diamond Riva 128 card, because I have that exact card in a drawer, saved from an old machine I encoutered at a site doing work.
Regarding the ram, do a timelapse recording of testing and sorting the modules, showing the boxes where the working modules get put into, the tester, and a dead-parts box for the rejects.
Am29000 is a 32-bit RISC CPU made by AMD. Very fast at the time.
COAST - cache on a Stick. This box is like time-travel. The AMD K6-2 300 is a overclocking wonder. I had mine running at 400mhz
That old S3 GPU brings back memories. My first ever own PC (not the first PC I've ever used, but the first one that was mine) had a 4MB Trio3D AGP card. Not a good 3D card but worked well for DOS and some lighter Windows games.
Also, from what I remember, the mainboard in that system also had an ATX plug in addition to AT (case was AT though).
31:39 That’s not Analog Devices, but Advanced Micro Devices. It’s an AMD 32-bit RISC microprocessor.
58:30 Yes, that was an annoying thing with PCI, the slots were not idempotent as on ISA. Different IRQ's were routed on different PCI slots and not all cards worked correctly on every slot.
AdrianXX'xxs DigitalX BaseXXment is the best channel!
I found this video really cool to listen to. I grew up around the time these cards were coming out, but to hear them talked about in such detail is pretty cool. Maybe one day I’ll take this up as a hobby, but for now I’ll have to watch more of your videos. Lol
Ahh the memories… :P
It was a great video and I’d love to see more of this. Very satisfying thanks
The card at 14:20 was the same that I had in my main PC in 1998ish Diamond Stealth III with an S3 Savage chip. I bought it because back then it had a huge price/performance payoff: ATI, 3DFX and Nvidia could not match the performance at the price ($50-70 back then IRRC). It was great for OpenGL, DirectX, etc. I recently picked one up from someone getting rid of all their old PC stuff
The Trident cards were actually good enough though for Dos and Windows. I found many of them could easily overclock from the stock 83mhz to 200mhz :)
While some Vibra 16 cards don’t have a true OPL 3 chip, actually yours does, it’s visible when you show the card with its nice OPL logo.
Actually the AzTeck modem/sound card combo that you did not test also had a true Yamaha OPL chip on it as well.
28:44 - PCChips M571. SiS 5598 chipset, should have integrated VGA through one of the headers.