I've got a LAPC-I, RAP-10, and SCC-1 in my Roland ISA collection. No Roland branded MPU-401s, but I have at least a half dozen or more MidiMan MM-401s. I thought that they would have been a good investment, but now we have things like PC-MIDI, so there will probably be a cap on them as far as collectors value.

dionb wrote on 2025-01-23, 23:56:

Got myself an interesting one: […]
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Got myself an interesting one:

The attachment mediagx.webp is no longer available

A Cyrix MediaGX board with Cx5530 chipset, but which one... it doesn't match with any of the ones on TheRetroWeb. And then there's this:

The attachment general_softwar.webp is no longer available

General Software Inc. Embedded BIOS 4.3 instead of the usual AMI/Award/Phoenix. Inside the BIOS setup, there's an 'About' tab that says this is an evaluation board, so possibly specific to General Software.

Unfortunately only a very limited number of EBIOS modules were compiled for the image on it, so only drives and ROM shadow config can be set, nothing about the integrated devices like SB16.

If I can ever find sources to build my own EBIOS I could have a lot of fun with this. But I haven't been able to so for. So...

After backing up the EEPROM, I flashed it with ECS P5GX-M BIOS, given that the boards appear functionally identical and yes, it works.

Audio is interesting, a very metallic-sounding FM synth, but pretty decent SB16 otherwise, with absolutely no software needed to work in DOS - just set resources in BIOS and point games to it. Haven't been able to test compatibility a lot yet, Civilization failed to produce any audio (old AdLib game, maybe the audio is only listening to 0x220 not 0x388...), Ascendancy failed to run due to failed memory check (60MB free was too much for it 😉 ) and OMF also failed to run without error message. Will try a bit more (including MIDI) tomorrow...

Did you spot this doc...

Also - https://web.archive.org/web/20020224010250/ht … ets/mediagx.htm

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2025-01-24, 10:21:

Did you spot this doc... […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2025-01-23, 23:56:

Got myself an interesting one: […]
Show full quote

Got myself an interesting one:

The attachment mediagx.webp is no longer available

A Cyrix MediaGX board with Cx5530 chipset, but which one... it doesn't match with any of the ones on TheRetroWeb. And then there's this:

The attachment general_softwar.webp is no longer available

General Software Inc. Embedded BIOS 4.3 instead of the usual AMI/Award/Phoenix. Inside the BIOS setup, there's an 'About' tab that says this is an evaluation board, so possibly specific to General Software.

Unfortunately only a very limited number of EBIOS modules were compiled for the image on it, so only drives and ROM shadow config can be set, nothing about the integrated devices like SB16.

If I can ever find sources to build my own EBIOS I could have a lot of fun with this. But I haven't been able to so for. So...

After backing up the EEPROM, I flashed it with ECS P5GX-M BIOS, given that the boards appear functionally identical and yes, it works.

Audio is interesting, a very metallic-sounding FM synth, but pretty decent SB16 otherwise, with absolutely no software needed to work in DOS - just set resources in BIOS and point games to it. Haven't been able to test compatibility a lot yet, Civilization failed to produce any audio (old AdLib game, maybe the audio is only listening to 0x220 not 0x388...), Ascendancy failed to run due to failed memory check (60MB free was too much for it 😉 ) and OMF also failed to run without error message. Will try a bit more (including MIDI) tomorrow...

Did you spot this doc...

The attachment x86-ebios-43.pdf is no longer available

Also - https://web.archive.org/web/20020224010250/ht … ets/mediagx.htm

Yes, found both. Great info, but no downloads :'(

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-24, 09:36:

I've got a LAPC-I, RAP-10, and SCC-1 in my Roland ISA collection. No Roland branded MPU-401s, but I have at least a half dozen or more MidiMan MM-401s. I thought that they would have been a good investment, but now we have things like PC-MIDI, so there will probably be a cap on them as far as collectors value.

Hi

Speaking of "midiman"
I recently found this device

does anyone know what this is ?
Does it have any interest from a retro computing point of view ?

Thank you

Nuno

At the local second hand shop something showed up! A Creative labs fan, full-size PCB, and nVidia written on it. Without completely knowing what it was I took it home for around 5€. Apparently it's a GeForce 4 4800 (a 4600 with AGP 8x support)!

It was dusty as hell and at this point I have no idea if it works.
According to wikipedia, it0s supposed to have a max TDP of 43W and I'm a bit suspicious about the small heatsink/fan...

Nunoalex wrote on 2025-01-24, 17:37:

Hi […]
Show full quote

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-24, 09:36:

I've got a LAPC-I, RAP-10, and SCC-1 in my Roland ISA collection. No Roland branded MPU-401s, but I have at least a half dozen or more MidiMan MM-401s. I thought that they would have been a good investment, but now we have things like PC-MIDI, so there will probably be a cap on them as far as collectors value.

Hi

Speaking of "midiman"
I recently found this device

does anyone know what this is ?
Does it have any interest from a retro computing point of view ?

Thank you

Nuno

It looks a lot like a MIDI timepiece, like the MOTU Micro MTP.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2025-01-24, 18:03:

At the local second hand shop something showed up! A Creative labs fan, full-size PCB, and nVidia written on it. Without completely knowing what it was I took it home for around 5€. Apparently it's a GeForce 4 4800 (a 4600 with AGP 8x support)!

It was dusty as hell and at this point I have no idea if it works.
According to wikipedia, it0s supposed to have a max TDP of 43W and I'm a bit suspicious about the small heatsink/fan...

Wow, nice find! Not sure what it is about Creative, but I like their graphics cards 😀 And a 4800 at that price is great if it works (or you are able to fix it). Not sure how big a hsf they needed though - I think I have one in my large collection (probably not Creative branded though), but it's going to take me all year to convert my garage into a computer workshop (health and money being the limiting factors) so I can sort through, organise and test everything in my collection (that will take a few more years if I only test one or two CPUs and GPUs a day). Got to test and slim down my collection before my income is further reduced to pension levels 😀

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2025-01-24, 18:03:

At the local second hand shop something showed up! A Creative labs fan, full-size PCB, and nVidia written on it. Without complet […]
Show full quote

At the local second hand shop something showed up! A Creative labs fan, full-size PCB, and nVidia written on it. Without completely knowing what it was I took it home for around 5€. Apparently it's a GeForce 4 4800 (a 4600 with AGP 8x support)!

It was dusty as hell and at this point I have no idea if it works.
According to wikipedia, it0s supposed to have a max TDP of 43W and I'm a bit suspicious about the small heatsink/fan...

Wow... I had no idea that Creative was still putting their name on video cards beyond the Geforce 2 generation. That is crazy!

It looks to be the exact same card as the MSI GF4 Ti 4800, right down to the stickers, but I believe MSI was the board maker for a lot of Creative cards going back to probably the Geforce 256 or earlier.

Apparently they also did some FX series cards too, though it's hard to say exactly which models. One site says they did a 5600 XT, another has a picture of what they say is a Creative 3D Blaster 5 FX 5600 Ultra (a scam site, so I won't link it), but there is another almost identical card on another site being called a Creative 3D Blaster 5 FX 5200 Ultra.

I'm thinking these were never released in the North American market.

EDIT: Also found mention of a 3D Blaster 5 FX 5900, and a 3D Blaster 5 RX9700 Pro... which is super confusing!

Well it was hard to notice creative cards even a bit earlier even since they just seemed to slap a label on reference designs most often.

8088-Motherboard:

Didn't buy it today, but fixed it today. Need help identifying the board. Please see also here:

Re: Unknown 8088 Motherboard - Pease help

EDIT: It is an AUVA MXM/10. Thank you!

More expansion slots there on your 8088 than most modern PC motherboards.

Bought a Intel D850GB (Garibaldi) with a mysterious 423 CPU and RDRAM sticks, waiting for it to arrive.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-25, 01:01:

More expansion slots there on your 8088 than most modern PC motherboards.

Kinda need them when nothing is integrated.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-25, 01:01:

More expansion slots there on your 8088 than most modern PC motherboards.

More need for them too. This board is unusual as it has onboard floppy, serial and parallel I/O, but your average 8088 needed a floppy controller card, a parallel/serial card, a hard disk controller card, and a video card just to boot. Playing with an old system like that we tend to add a network card, RTC card, EMS card and a sound card as well. That's eight cards containing stuff that your average modern PC motherboard has integrated. That could eat up all your slots, so actually you have less less than you would on a modern mITX board. Of course you could find combined mem/RTC/IO cards, freeing up slots - but bottom line is you needed those slots a whole lot more back then than you do now.

Just because it's true doesn't mean that I have to like it. I miss the days where we had motherboards chalk full of expansion slots top to bottom. PCIe slots were slowly getting there over the years until CPUs seemed to come out with less lanes each time the speed doubled. Even modern boards tend to be a mix of PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. And suddenly we have 5.0, still without any appreciable quantity of ports.

A lot of the available lanes get eaten up by onboard NVMe too, when we could just as well have had a slot with our choice of add-on card. It's just not the same.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-25, 02:10:

Just because it's true doesn't mean that I have to like it. I miss the days where we had motherboards chalk full of expansion slots top to bottom. PCIe slots were slowly getting there over the years until CPUs seemed to come out with less lanes each time the speed doubled. Even modern boards tend to be a mix of PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. And suddenly we have 5.0, still without any appreciable quantity of ports.

A lot of the available lanes get eaten up by onboard NVMe too, when we could just as well have had a slot with our choice of add-on card. It's just not the same.

They have less lanes simply due to lack of die space but they do have a solution to this issue ...HEDT. If you really do need the extra lanes and slots then well .. you have to go pay for it, bigger CPUs means bigger sockets and bigger boards to support everything means higher costs.

Modern PC however have little need for expansion slots beyond a pair of PCIe 16x slots and a few PCIe 1x/4x slots and PCIe 4x is pretty damn rare to see and 99% of people dont need more than one PCIe 16x slot.

As for NVMe eating up lanes . .well that's perfectly acceptable since it can actually use all of them and PCIe 5.0 drives need a direct connection to the CPU. I want SATA gone from boards honestly . .its pretty damn useless these days and far too slow, they could then use the SATA lanes for more .. uhh USB 3.0 I guess .. not that we need it. MY X870 board has 8 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 3.2 10g ports and a USB 4 40g port along with dual LAN, Wifi7 and Bluetooth 5.3 ....so im not sure why we need more exactly ?

why do we need expansion cards ? and what exactly do you want on them ?

-Video capture is one I can think of but not many people need that function.

Sound card. Capture card. Storage expansion for NVMe bifurcation or SATA/SAS (or both). A second video card for faster encoding. There's lots of good reasons.

I do understand HEDT as an option. Expansion slots used to be standard, and I miss those days. I specifically bought a Xeon system this last time around to work around this issue.

I wish that all PCIe slots were at least open-ended. Lots of cards would work just fine in a shorter slot but won't fit because it's blocked.

There is a limited number of PCIe lanes available for NVMe, but it's always possible to cram more SATA drives with another controller, if speed is not an issue.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-25, 02:55:

Sound card. Capture card. Storage expansion for NVMe bifurcation or SATA/SAS. A second video card for faster encoding. There's lots of good reasons.

I do understand HEDT as an option. Expansion slots used to be standard, and I miss those days. I specifically bought a Xeon system this last time around to work around this issue.

I wish that all PCIe slots were at least open-ended. Lots of cards would work just fine in a shorter slot but won't fit because it's blocked.

Your last point is a good one ..and I suspect its a money issue as in they want your money. But you can do a little modification with an art knife to work around this..have done it myself and yes many PCIe cards will work just fine in the smaller slots but there are limits to this.

*noticed you NVME addition, I get that but if you look at what AMD is doing with X870E boards where its gotten around this by adding a second south bridge, so instead of one its got two and the second is used for more 4.0 lanes .. I feel they could simply apply their chiplet tech to this and have 2, 4 6 or 8 south bridge dies if they wanted to. This solves the lane issue and these boards do have more PCIe slots and ports available, its rather cool tech AMD is using here.

I get your other reasons for wanting slots but you also need to ask . .how many end users actually need these things and is it cost effective to have it available on consumer based boards.
Its not and its why HEDT exists, I like to think of HEDT as a direct analogue to these older times where you had these extra slots and extra expansion options, I distinctly remember that even back then you had to pay extra for these highly expandable boards.

I have a LGA 2066 HEDT setup as my daily non gaming system so I do understand the feeling of missing something on non HEDT stuff but I also understand that your average Joe just doesn't need it and they build modern consumer stuff for the lowest common Joe and then slap a ton of Rainbow Unicorn puke all over it, its a sad state of affairs but I do see changes coming where RGB is ...uhh cringe now and fabs are removing a lot of it. (I do love me a sleek back board with good lines and zero RGB)

My 2066 PC is based around this beast of a board with a 10980XE in it, its a board that I feel will happily last me for a very long time as getting its expandability in anything consumer based would be impossible expensive.
https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-rampage … me-omega-model/

What Xeon setup did you buy .. its a bit off topic but Im curious.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-25, 03:15:

What Xeon setup did you buy .. its a bit off topic but Im curious.

I opted for an ASUS WS C246 Pro with a Xeon E-2278G. It was in my budget and had a good balance of performance to e expandability. I prefer Intel at this time because of an of the regression errata that Ryzen has with 16-bit virtualization. It's a shame how broken it is. I used to have a Ryzen 1800X, but I got rid of it for this reason.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-25, 06:39:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-25, 03:15:

What Xeon setup did you buy .. its a bit off topic but Im curious.

I opted for an ASUS WS C246 Pro with a Xeon E-2278G. It was in my budget and had a good balance of performance to e expandability. I prefer Intel at this time because of an of the regression errata that Ryzen has with 16-bit virtualization. It's a shame how broken it is. I used to have a Ryzen 1800X, but I got rid of it for this reason.

How does this error cause problems ?
I dont know a lot about Vm's so explain it like Im 5.

That Xeon E-2278Gis a nice little pocket rocket.

I work with both Intel and AMD and find each has its advantages and issues, Intel is usually better for workflow and AMD is better at gaming and heavily multi threaded tasks. I find Windows to be a bigger issue with high core chiplet CPUs since its thread scheduler is utter garbage still but this problem exists for both Intel and AMD CPUs it becomes a bigger problem with the X3D multi CCD AMD ones however. One day MS will figure out how to handle these asynchronous CPUs correctly but right now .. its hit and miss.

I had to pick one ...I can happily say the 10980XE has been a rock solid CPU and has to this date never had any show stopping problems and aside from it not being as fast as more modern CPUs I cant fault it.