EBAY: SBC 486 50MHz (not mine)

[bbond007]

Try to get yourself an ISA Gravis Ultrasound card.

0% CPU usage.  Made my 486 sx25 fly back in the day!

I had a ISA GUS. I actually had it following the release of that board and was a pretty early adopter.

It was great for playing MODs and had really good general MIDI, but native support was really pretty bad and the SoundBlaster compatibility did in fact use a lot of CPU, sounded strange and never worked particularly well. I ended up having two soundboards in my PC for this reason. I eventually gave up (gave it away..) on the GUS and bought an Ensoniq Soundscape.

It was good hardware, and I wanted to like it, but really not well supported at all and was overall a big headache. I'd much rather have an Ensoniq. Also consider a Roland MT32 and Soundblaster/MPU-401 compatible sound card (or Sound Canvas).

I guess GUS is well supported in the demo scene but commercial support was never that good, unless I just gave up to soon...

I got MT32 for 32 bux. I use it with DOSBOX with USB midi.

[bbond007]

I can't say I ever used the SB emulation in DOS much, if at all to be honest.  I used it purely for watching (listening to?) demos and coding them.

Now that you mention it, I remember doing the same thing with the DRAM It's funny that you mention having a K6-II because I ended up getting the K6-III.

The SB emulation was not done in hardware but by a driver TSR. There are a number of problems with that.

First, it did tend to use some additional CPU which, while discouraging, was not the end of the world. Next, it(FM emulation) just sounded different... Some instruments sounded better, but usually at least one would just be really off making the whole thing sound bad. Or the timing or cadence would be off. Again, not a show-stopper... FM stuff never sounded that good anyway.

Probably the bigger issues were that the TSR would tie a chunk of that precious 640K making it difficult to run some 16bit stuff or just made some programs prone to crashing.  

Also, I could not find stable windows drivers. I also seem to recall the TSR conflicting with windows.

A lot of people did what I did and installed both SBpro and GUS, but because ISA could not share IRQs it was a PIA finding a combination that worked and you usually ran out of IRQs long before you ran out of ISA slots.

It was great hardware spec wise, but ownership was overall very disappointing. True, there were a few demos and trackers that sounded fantastic, but that was also kind of discouraging to get a taste of what the hardware COULD do... if it only had support.

[bbond007]

I used to have two of those overdrive chips.
Curious hybrid between '486 and Pentium.
Smaller then a Socket 7 processor.

Wound up throwing them away when I inadvertently bent the pins.

I had the 83MHZ overdrive chip that I bought for super cheap. On day one I just happened to have my MB clock set to it ran at 100mhz, so I always ran it at that speed without an issue.

A lot of people thought the who P24T "overdrive" thing was a scam, but it really worked well except it cause the floppy drives not to work on a lot of MBs I tried it on. I'd say it ran faster than a real P75....

[bbond007]

Those are industriual-PC-boards which work in many environments. They are available with nearly all CPU-variants (yes, even Core-CPUs like i7 QuadCore etc.) and should work in all Amigas with ISA-slots (provided the PSU is fit enough). Sometimes it needs a small modification to the ISA-slot (there is  thread on http://www.a1k.org according this topic).

I had some of those cards and it was very funny to operate a 2 GHz-system in a 8/50 MHz A2000

Unfortunately they are not very cheap.

if you got a Core one, you could run WinUAE which would really freshen up that A2000

AllocVec, I assume that would work with that nice mint "German Engineered" A2000 you were selling?

[bbond007]

Loved that series.
I had about a half dozen K6-III+ at one point.
All would clock at at least 550MHz.
And one I got over 600.

mine was 400 and was under the impression that they were not very overclockable, so I never tried.

It was pretty fast though. I had a Pentium 450mhz at work an I do recall DVD playback being smoother on the K6... Most of the 4D games were slightly slower, but still a nice CPU.

Seems to me that I upgraded from a 166mmx that I ran at 200mhz and was able to keep the same MB. DVDs were a slideshow at 200mhz all I really wanted to do was play DVDs which were the new hot thing without springing for a new MB, RAM, etc...

I guess the benefit to using the ISA CPU board is that you could keep the Amiga intact and even run deinterlaced it in a window if you used a USB capture card and something like AmigaManiac's svideo adapter.