Sorry to bring up this old post. I noticed from you photo that you are running a local bus card with the ARK1000 chipset. A few questions for you:

1. Who made your card? 2themax? Hercules? WD Paradise?
2. What is the date of your video BIOS?
3. Is your chipset ARK1000PV or ARK1000VL
4. Does it work well with the jumper set to 0WS?
5. What do you think of the card overall?

Aw man, this stuff went to the recycling centre a few weeks after that pic was taken. I'm really sorry! 🙁 One day I just got so fed up with the whole VLB thing, that I decided to just concentrate on PCI-based 486s and upwards. Also, space is a real problem, and that's the other reason nearly all my VLB stuff simply had to go. The only VLB stuff I have left are a few IO controllers for ISA/VLB/PCI "hybrid" 486 boards.

🙁

Damn...you realize for how long I've been looking for an Ark based VLB gfx card? 😢

I suppose the the one good thing that came out of this is that you recycled it, as opposed to throwing it out like any old rubbish.

Amigaz wrote:

Damn...you realize for how long I've been looking for an Ark based VLB gfx card? 😢

That's just silly! That Ark card was on ebay for months before I eventually picked it as a cheap buy-it-now from the USA. In fact, the seller had 2 of them. C'mon! (Edit: Sorry for the rant! 😦 )

@AC - I've found my ebay email:

You Won eBay Item:ARK VLB VGA ARK1000VL EMA0041000B0 Video Card ($6.00)

I do recall being a bit disappointed with it's general image quality.

prophase_j wrote:

I suppose the the one good thing that came out of this is that you recycled it, as opposed to throwing it out like any old rubbish.

You leave your unwanted computer bits on this large table, and lots of other nerds swarm about picking stuff up for free. Hehe. Works rather well. 😀

So I guess you found VLB pretty frustrating then? I have have wanted to build up a high spec 486 for a while, I know there isn't much you can do with them, I just think it would really cool to have. Things are just too hard to come by and I haven't really focused my attention to it at this time.

My personal reasons for abandoning 486 VLB in favour of 486 PCI was -

* Luckily, a good percentage of 90's era DOS games don't appear to be speed sensitive, and so they can be run on 'better hardware', such as Pentium-based mobos.

* DOSBox makes really old games look great! This makes building ancient PCs less of a necessity.

* Good PCI graphics cards (eg Matrox) have IMHO a better general image quality to most VLB graphics cards

* Some VLB boards have soldered on components such as a chunky (occasionally leaky) battery, and a CMOS chip (sometimes socketed). Some newer PCI boards just have an easy to replace button battery.

* Some PCI boards allow you to plug a CD-ROM drive in to its integrated IDE port. I'm not sure if a VLB board would let you do that.

* PCI boards allow you to install decent amounts of 72 pin RAM, some allow EDO RAM.

* Most VLB boards require a controller card. (Of course that's no big deal.)

* Stupid people, such as myself, get frustrated with the extra messing about you've got to do, to get a VLB-based system to work correctly.

Before some people go nuts 😉 , I appreciate that a really good VLB board is a better performer than most, if not all PCI boards. I just chose the inferior PCI type, for the handy reasons above.

That's a rather proper breakdown, RG100. I would say that my interest stems from my fascination with, and desire to collect old hardware. I tend to be pretty direct, I have some sort of master plan as far as what kind of hardware I want to have, with a 486 being on that list. It's also about as far back as I want to go.

I owned a 286 but didn't really do anything with it other than use it as a word processor, so my first real PC experience was with a 486, hence my desire to re-create it at some point. It's also the only project I haven't started really started yet, other then doing some basic research.

Prophase has some intentions like me, too ... Not acutually a masterplan, but a simple plan of what kind of HW do I wanna have in possesion. 486s are the best definitely, suits mostly fine for games of all kinds, few little exceptions. VLB really rock for its direct dependancy on the CPU, i.e. the clock. PCI is has more features like bus mastering and more, which makes it better than the VLB bus in certain ways, but when it meets the 50mhz VLB, who knows? 😀