One sucess scored....yeah right and I was surprised.

From: jpero_at_cgo.wave.ca <(jpero_at_cgo.wave.ca)>
Date: Sun Mar 22 19:16:23 1998

Remember when I got first WD VGA plus 16 made by WD years ago in mid
91 and that died, too bad tossed out, that's was hacked to 512K too
and the PCB is yellow 2 layer type. Hee, hee, I did not throw out
manuals and that how I kept that 8 years old manual for that card!

I just got another one dead (green 2 layer). No boops-beeps even the
machine booted up with display blank, that is very telling clues...
Unsoldered that stupid RAMDAC, they usually are high-failure rate and
tried that on working junky generic and that chip worked. Borrowed
that working chip from it and socketed it in that WD card. Same
story, blank.

Thinking...freshly reminded to suspect unassuming components and
sometimes inductors abend often than resistors alone thanks to the
usenet readings. (!!? how that be?). Probed to
only 2 blue inductors. L1 is Open, and other one is living. Aha.
Scratching around finding one off a junked stepper IDE samsung and
it's tad small but same value for testing. Worked.

Uh?

I'm caught with that pants down on this...why inductors that uses
fine wire and used in low power area, hard to imagine that would
fail.

Now, looking for extra 8 x 64k x 4bit 80ns and one 33ohm 16 pin SMD
to up that thing to 512K as I already sucked out all solder out of
those holes when I was at it repairing it.

Btw, why I'm blathering around about this? Cuz this IS nearing 9
year mark and will hit 10 year next year or so. Also this has
signficence to me because I was so frustrated with junk 386 with
that similar card I had and this brought back memories. Oh,
I have this horrid IBM 8 bit VGA adapter card, slow and imcompatiable
with some boards that did not follow BIOS design properly.

Compared to many video cards, between that slowest Trident
16bit /CL 16 bit/IBM adapter 8 bit card and the quick Tseng et4000
card I have as well, this card no wonder is pretty reasonably quick
but no match for this old fashioned ET4000ax card. Ahem, IBM used
this Tseng chips also in few of their newer PS/1 486 series, that one
with flip open door and a hand-operated latch behind that door to
unlock and pull the case cover off.

Curious:
Is there's a FASTEST frame-buffered (S)VGA ISA 16bit card that beat
ET4000ax ones? The setup is tested using fast cached 386 or greater
with both BIOS and VIDEO shadowing enabled (the IBM bios is located
queerly so that shadowing did not work too well)

Jason D.
email: jpero_at_cgo.wave.ca
Pero, Jason D.
Received on Sun Mar 22 1998 - 19:16:23 GMT