Esoteric (rare) hardware from the past

swatbat

swatbat

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W3pbcA.jpg

Took it down and grabbed a pic. A small collection of some of the many styles of logos on the 486. Got two 386 upgrade chips, the sx, sx2, dx, dx2, dx4, and x5 chips covered.

The one thing I think I'm really missing is that I thought Harris made like a 33mhz 486 chip but haven't found one.
 
w1retap

w1retap

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cjcox said:
I owned the rarer/nicer iWill Zmax D2. Dual Opteron goodness and SLI (single slot width cards) dual PCIe. Powerhouse (at the time) in a shoebox.
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Nice, I'm still looking for that one. Haven't come across it anywhere yet. Very elusive. :pompous:
 
w1retap

w1retap

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Few more items I've added over the past few weeks.

Dual 500MHz Powermac G4 w/ Studio CRT, brand new.

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SIIG Suntouch XT/AT switchable keyboard (Alps White Switches)

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IBM 8-bit Floppy Controller for my 8088 Turbo XT

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Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB

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Some office software..

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And today, this scrap lot..

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..which contains an ATI Mach64 VLB -- hopefully I can bring it back to life, unless it still works.

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w1retap

w1retap

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It is in pretty dang good condition. Very small amount of yellowing, no cracks, no major scuffs/scratches, never been opened with the warranty seal intact.
 
w1retap

w1retap

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Got the Amiga up and running with a Gotek for external USB boot, and a Commodore 1084S-D2 monitor. Found a tank mouse too.

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Also just recently picked up a DEC Hinote Ultra CT475. Intel 486 DX4-75, 16MB RAM, ESS audio (SB Pro compatible), and TFT screen. Incredibly thin laptop for the era, even thinner than a post 2008 Asus laptop I have. This should make for an epic DOS gaming laptop. Internal 500MB hard drive still works surprisingly, but I think I'm going to do PCMCIA boot with a CF card.

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w1retap

w1retap

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Finally got a GUS. Paid about half what they go for on eBay.

This will be going in my DX2/66 build, along with a Mach64 VLB, SB Pro2, and IDE cache controller. It should be stacked.


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M

mvmiller12

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w1retap said:
It arrived, and it works.. already fired up some Doom on the 486 DX2/66.

View attachment 246074
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Hunt down Archon Ultra - it is one of the few games with genuine GUS support. Also, the GUS cards were generally best supported by the Demo scene (think Second Reality, for example). * Most * game support tended to be along the lines of treating it just like a SoundBlaster for digital, and maybe preloading a subset of MIDI patches for music (support for more games than officially supported could be hacked in by swapping out AIL drivers - AIL being a common audio library system used by many games back in the day - you'd just copy over one card's AIL drivers with the GUS's AIL drivers and select that original card in the game's config program).

If you have any GUS questions, I have had a GUS card continuously since 1994. It was a fantastic card that was brought to market well before it's time. It's many quirks would have been a lot easier for the average person to deal with had it been released in the Windows 95 era as opposed to DOS. Windows 95 beta drivers were released for it, of course, but the damage to the reputation of the card had already been done. For the programs that natively supported the GUS and it's unique features - nothing else even came close though. Truly amazing.
 
w1retap

w1retap

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486 is gettin' loaded. SB Pro 2, GUS, and Mach64 VLB installed. Man, baby-AT cases suck for wire management when you have 3 ribbon cables to run from the lower VLB slots all the way to the top of the case lol.

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w1retap

w1retap

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Firewire was like the USB 3.0 of its day, it was pretty awesome. :cool: Lower CPU overhead, faster data transfer, supplied more power.
 
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Nenu

Nenu

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w1retap said:
Firewire was like the USB 3.0 of its day, it was pretty awesome. :cool: Lower CPU overhead, faster data transfer, supplied more power.
Click to expand...
Yep, I bought a firewire hub to network my houses PCs together at 400Mb/s when LAN availability was only at 100Mbit.
(or was it 100Mbit 1394 when all we could get was 10Mbit ethernet? Price was a factor too.)
It worked great, I may still have the hub. It will have aged better than my memory.
 
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