Asrock is trying out add-in cards to upgrade your motherboard chipset and features

CVNet1 said:
I wonder if they could make a 486 add-in board with a direct mounted VESA compatible SVGA chip with 1-4mb vram with a vga header and hdmi connector on the bracket, and 64mb system dram, true sound blaster compatible and adlib chips, comm port headers, game port header, and parallel port header, 2x internal USB 1.1/ 2.0 headers and 4 USB ports, a floppy drive header, a 2x ide header, 2x sata port that are compatible with ahci and the legacy ide mode, and both dual isa and dual pci headers and a custom bios that can emulate ps2 and other legacy functions through the USB ports. Also have the bios support down clocking system the CPU and system for each prior generation all the way to an AT (286) machine clock speed, cache, and processor function.

If they could get the HDMI out, 4x usb ports, and the sound ports on the metal slot bracket, that should be a start.

It would need to support all the old AT voltages and draw power from the pcie or from a pcie 6-8pin connector.
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They had those types of PC's on a card for the Amiga back in the late 80's early 90's.
vortex486slc.jpg
 
CVNet1 said:
The Asus Proart B650 Creator has a TB4 header and accepts the Asus add-in card on a pcie 3.0 x16 slot (@x4 speed).

Not sure why they pushed TB4 into the add-in realm on b650 when last gen b550 had it without the board price being higher.
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Is the TB4 header pinned differently than a normal usb header that would require you to use it?

lopoetve said:
No; Asus isn't paying the licensing to say TBolt, but it's a tbolt controller on the USBC ports. Did a BUNCH of digging on this last week actually - folks on reddit tested and thunderbolt works fine, just doesn't SAY it because they didn't want to pay intel for some reason.
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Yeah, the X670e has the Intel JHL8440 and it will do video out both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the board. Still haven't been able to figure out what they are missing to not have the Thunderbolt certification.
 
ND40oz said:
Is the TB4 header pinned differently than a normal usb header that would require you to use it?



Yeah, the X670e has the Intel JHL8440 and it will do video out both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the board. Still haven't been able to figure out what they are missing to not have the Thunderbolt certification.
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$$.

That’s it. You have to pay Intel to use the trademark.
 
sk3tch said:
Shotgun 56K! Two POTS lines required
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Been there done that. Starcraft was actually playable doing shotgun and tying up both landlines. Single 56k was choppy as hell for me.

Right before I moved out the apartment complex got DSL (they had promised it was coming when I moved in.... it showed up 10 months later). 768k DSL was amazing compared to even shotgun. Sadly though, the upstream was weaksauce, about the same as 56k. Tried to let a friend download a cd iso from me (under 700mb) and 3 days later it wasn't done yet. I just gave up and burned it for him.
 
Zepher said:
They had those types of PC's on a card for the Amiga back in the late 80's early 90's.
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Bridgeboards! I'm particularly fond of the Amiga ones because you can use real ISA cards with them - VGA, Sound Blaster/GUS, the works - and have an LGR-worthy DOS gaming build in your big box Amiga, but finding the A2386SX like my friend has is a bit of a pain, never mind the pictured Golden Gate 486.

Macintoshes have a loose equivalent known as DOS/PC Compatibility Cards and third-party OrangePC cards, Sun SPARC workstations have SunPCi cards, and Acorn RiscPCs had x86 CPU cards to go alongside the main ARM CPU, so it's not just an Amiga thing. Kinda funny how non-x86 systems were just an add-in board away from becoming IBM-compatible in a sense.

That said, I do wish the PC Compatibility Card 166 and the SunPCi-III could pick up other PCI boards on the same bus; it'd make using them for gaming a lot easier if I could just give them some proper 3D acceleration. Alas, I don't think Apple or Sun were too keen on making an add-in PC outshine the host Mac or SPARC system in terms of performance.
 
I used to work for AST and I still remember the Six Pack ISA cards. Good times. Life was so much simpler back then.... well except for IRQ jumpers and config.sys
 
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