EBAY: SBC 486 50MHz (not mine)

[nicholas]

Would be cool if one of those Pentium Overdrive chips that fit in a 486 socket would work on one of these as $50 is very cheap.

There is a similar board with a Pentium 100 and onboard SCSI for sale on eBay for £99.

[nicholas]

Pretty nifty.  In my experience, a 486DX2-50 will also run Windows 98 (provided the drivers for the hardware are available.)  It's a shame this can't share resources with the Amiga side, otherwise it would have a bit more value to me, personally.

You say you found a manual; I assume the ISA bus is active and it would make use of other ISA peripherals in the Amiga?  And is that on-board networking?

I'd like to run OS/2 Warp on one of these things.

[nicholas]

OK, I got myself brand new ISA sound card today from my local PC store. Plugged in the second ISA slot, fired up the board, and Win95 recognized it, so the ISA slots are active and working, Cool!
so far, very nice, looks like I have full 486 PC inside my Amiga.
I have couple game installed on it and work great, the only thing I don't like is that WWF Wrestlemania and Descent 2 requires a CDROM to work. I was planning to install the games, remove the CD drive and play.

Try to get yourself an ISA Gravis Ultrasound card.

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

[nicholas]

Hey Nicholas,
Haven't seen you around lately.

Great Vonnegut quote.


I'd had that thought before in relation to a '386 or '486 bridgeboard, but Warp really requires a VGA card (at least version 3 does).
You can also run Win3.1 under later versions of Warp.

Use of an ISA VGA card is possible, but then you are dealing with two separate displays.

Has anyone tried to use a Sigma Designs ReelMagic card in an ISA slot with a bridgeboard or sbc?

Under Warp that should allow Mpeg decoding at 640x480 in 256 colors.

Hi Iggy,

Hope you are well, I was busy with real life for quite a a while but the opiate-like Amiga addiction can't be ignored!

Reelmagic cards are a blast from the past. i remember testing one under Windows "Chicago" in 94 and being blown away by the full screen MPEG playback.

[nicholas]

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 used to have one of them in my old Commodore 486 with Paradise VGA card and Gravis Ultrasound.

It ran DOS, OS/2, NT 3.51 and Yggdrasil like a dream.

I even ran a trialware copy of SCO Unix on it for a while.

[nicholas]

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 had the original ISA GUS too and I remember ripping DRAM chips off my video card and installing them on the GUS to beef it up.

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. Still got my old Borland Turbo Assembler boxset somewhere I think.

I even had a GUS PnP with the Interwave DSP chip in my K6-II machine in 97/98.

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

Now that is cool!