Just got an EISA mobo

Felt I had to get an EISA motherboard aftering seeing one on Ebay I could resist to snipe
What I didn't know about these beast is that you need a EISA config disk to set up the system when changing cards etc..can these still be found or am i "cooked"?
There's no model name or anything on the motherboard (as usual) just the "Made in Taiwan"....wonder how people put up with paying lotsa $$ for unbranded stuff back then

You can often find the mother board manufacturer by looking up the chipset.

The EISA config files are all out there, you just need to look. Several years ago I found a few large archives, but I haven't saved the bookmarks since I didn't buy any new EISA cards and have all the files I need. I'll be happy to help you look if you need help.

Can you post a picture of your board? Most of the EISA boards that I have seen are made in the USA and are very high quality. Though, I've seen a few asian "mini EISA" boards that don't support the full EISA implementation.

Tinkerer said:

You can often find the mother board manufacturer by looking up the chipset.

Click to expand...

Think it has some SiS 4xx numbered chips...will look into it tomorrow

Anonymous Coward said:

The EISA config files are all out there, you just need to look. Several years ago I found a few large archives, but I haven't saved the bookmarks since I didn't buy any new EISA cards and have all the files I need. I'll be happy to help you look if you need help.

Can you post a picture of your board? Most of the EISA boards that I have seen are made in the USA and are very high quality. Though, I've seen a few asian "mini EISA" boards that don't support the full EISA implementation.

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That would be awesome if you could help me out with those files...I've done a mega google search after EISA config stuff without any success

I'll take some nice photos tomorrow of the mobo and post here..

It now feels like there's hope for this motherboard

I have a HINT EISA G486HVL motherboard and would like to know where
to find the EISA config utility. Hopefully its in that database mentioned
earlier Thanks.

Mikey99, do you just need the ECU, or do you also need the CFG and OVL files that go with your motherboard? I think yours is the http://www.lemmus.eu/th99/m/I-L/31129.htm. In the case of the configuration files you may have a problem, but the utility itself is widely available online. Usually the best thing to do when you can't find the exact configuration files you need is to use one from a board that uses the same chipset (in your case HiNT). I'll keep my eyes open for the files you need (!GIT0001.CFG or !HIT0001.CFG).

From what I read, HiNT isn't really a good implementation of EISA. Have a read:

2.43 What disadvantages are there to the HiNT EISA chip set?

[From: ralf@alum.wpi.edu (Ralph Valentino)]

The HiNT Caesar Chip Set (CS8001 & CS8002) can come in three different configurations. All three of these configurations have EISA style connectors and are (sometimes incorrectly) sold as EISA motherboards. The differences should be carefully noted, though.

The rarest of these configuration uses a combination of the first HiNT chip (CS8001) and the Intel chip set. This configuration can support the full EISA functionality: 32 address bits, 32 data bits, level sensitive (sharable) interrupts, full EISA DMA, watch dog (sanity) timer, and so forth.

The second configuration is called Super-ISA, which uses both of the HiNT chips. This configuration is very common in low-end models. It supports a very limited functionality: 24 address bits, 32 data bits, edge triggered (non-sharable) interrupts, ISA (16 data, 24 address) DMA, and no watch dog timer. Some EISA boards, such as the Adaptec 1742A EISA Fast SCSI-2 host adapter, can be configured to work in this mode by hacking their EISA configuration file (.CFG) to turn off these features. Other EISA cards require these features and are therefore unusable in these systems.

The final configuration is called Pragmatic EISA, or P-EISA. Like Super-ISA, both HiNT chips are used but external support logic (buffers and such) are added to provide a somewhat increased functionality: 32 address bits, 32 data bits, edge triggered (non-sharable) interrupts, ISA (16 data, 24 address) DMA, and no watch dog timer. The full 32 bits for address and data allow bus mastering devices access to the complete range of main memory. As with Super-ISA, there may be incompatibilities with some EISA cards.



It seems that the archive I found in the past is no longer online. I think it may have been located here:

http://lin.fsid.cvut.cz/ftp/drivers/eisa/ <---gone


Sometimes I also use this website, as there are a few CFG files floating around:

http://www.mpoli.fi/files

That EISA file site you listed that is gone is archived at www.archive.org, just copy that link to get to it (last revised in 2001 I think).

So how does this EISA config stuff work? do you program a ROM chip on the motherboard with some utility?

Ok, guys

Here's some pics..hope you can help me identify this mobo











btw. noticed that this mobo hs a 50mhz FSB clock crystal....maybe I can beef her up with a step down voltage socket and put an AMD 5x86 in it :mrgreen:


The cache ram is located in a long vertical row just on top of the empty CPU socket, didn't want to remove the motherboard from the case when I took the pics..
Here's a pic from the auction I won it in

Amigaz, your board looks very similar to UnknownK's EISA 486 board. If for whatever reason you can't locate the exact EISA config file for your board, the one for UnknownK's board should work for you. They both use the SIS406 EISA chipset and have AMI BIOS. SIS406 is a damn nice chipset. The memory scores on my SIS406 board are among the highest I've seen on a pre PCI 486 board.

I just wanted to add that I found a link of 386 and 486 chipset/bios manuals.

http://www.filewatcher.com/b/ftp/63.147.10.6/archive/Other_Manuals.0.0.html

Anonymous Coward said:

Amigaz, your board looks very similar to UnknownK's EISA 486 board. If for whatever reason you can't locate the exact EISA config file for your board, the one for UnknownK's board should work for you. They both use the SIS406 EISA chipset and have AMI BIOS. SIS406 is a damn nice chipset. The memory scores on my SIS406 board are among the highest I've seen on a pre PCI 486 board.

I just wanted to add that I found a link of 386 and 486 chipset/bios manuals.

http://www.filewatcher.com/b/ftp/63.147.10.6/archive/Other_Manuals.0.0.html

Click to expand...

Thanks!

One question though...how do I "use" these configs and which one did UnknownK use?

Slightly different from mine, I have 2 Dallas chips, and my slots are all EISA while he has 2 ISA (different placement of parts as well).

I can email the EISA configuration files I have, just PM me your email.

The EISA setup sees my board as a prototype and doesn't have much to configure, but it does allow you to setup EISA cards which is something you need to do if you have any.

haha!

Thanks to you guys I'm up an running now with this board and my Ultrastor 24F and Elsa Winner 1000 card are properly configured

Now the fun starts

I'm really glad everything worked out well for you, and I'm happy that now there's another member running an EISA system. EISA users are probably about as uncommon as MCA users. On the surface EISA doesn't really appear to be much better than ISA, but when you get a couple of nice EISA cards in there you can see that it's really great since you don't have all kinds of board stinking up the memory area just under 16mb. Personally I find EISA graphics board to be pretty quick also, and it's a real shame that there isn't much to choose from, that's why sometimes it's nice to have one or two VLB slots as well so you can run both buses at the same time.

The ELSA winner 1000 is one of the better boards for EISA. I have the Winner 2000 which is the same card but with 4mb. I was surprised how fast the S3 928 chipset is on an EISA bus. It's just a real shame the DOS performance isn't too good because of the VRAM.

You might want to consider a new SCSI host adapter though. I don't know that the Ultrastor is really such a great board. It's usually not to hard to find a good HP, buslogic or adaptec host adapter for EISA.

The 24F has some cache on the card to speed things up, come to think of it I think I have that board too as a spare (currently using a caching IDE EISA card with 16MB of cache).

Amigaz if you have the original driver disks for the ultrastor 24F I would like some disk images (Winimage would be fine) of them.

Anonymous Coward said:

I'm really glad everything worked out well for you, and I'm happy that now there's another member running an EISA system. EISA users are probably about as uncommon as MCA users. On the surface EISA doesn't really appear to be much better than ISA, but when you get a couple of nice EISA cards in there you can see that it's really great since you don't have all kinds of board stinking up the memory area just under 16mb. Personally I find EISA graphics board to be pretty quick also, and it's a real shame that there isn't much to choose from, that's why sometimes it's nice to have one or two VLB slots as well so you can run both buses at the same time.

The ELSA winner 1000 is one of the better boards for EISA. I have the Winner 2000 which is the same card but with 4mb. I was surprised how fast the S3 928 chipset is on an EISA bus. It's just a real shame the DOS performance isn't too good because of the VRAM.

You might want to consider a new SCSI host adapter though. I don't know that the Ultrastor is really such a great board. It's usually not to hard to find a good HP, buslogic or adaptec host adapter for EISA.

Click to expand...

So did you go to the Olympics (your in China currently)?

No, I really have no interest in going to Beijing. I moved all the way out to southwest Yunnan province just to escape the nasty pollution along the east coast. I'm also pretty pissed off about all the changes immigration policy due to the olympic games that have been wasting a lot of my time and money. I've been watching some of the games on TV though. The opening ceremony was pretty good (CG fireworks and all).

Anyway, to get back to the topic of EISA. I am not really sure that having a caching controller is very useful on an EISA system. I would think that because EISA is pretty good at bus mastering, having more memory on the motherboard would be more useful. Then again I've never used an EISA caching controller. Do you have any good comparisons?

I would think cache on the card would be usefull under some use, would have to do benchmarks under different setups to realy know.

Hopefully there are some old magazines articles around that showed the benefits of cache on that particular card when it was new. Still using a newer wide card and newer SCSI drive would probably squash any speed gains the older 50 pin card with cache would have.

Anonymous Coward said:

I'm really glad everything worked out well for you, and I'm happy that now there's another member running an EISA system. EISA users are probably about as uncommon as MCA users. On the surface EISA doesn't really appear to be much better than ISA, but when you get a couple of nice EISA cards in there you can see that it's really great since you don't have all kinds of board stinking up the memory area just under 16mb. Personally I find EISA graphics board to be pretty quick also, and it's a real shame that there isn't much to choose from, that's why sometimes it's nice to have one or two VLB slots as well so you can run both buses at the same time.

The ELSA winner 1000 is one of the better boards for EISA. I have the Winner 2000 which is the same card but with 4mb. I was surprised how fast the S3 928 chipset is on an EISA bus. It's just a real shame the DOS performance isn't too good because of the VRAM.

You might want to consider a new SCSI host adapter though. I don't know that the Ultrastor is really such a great board. It's usually not to hard to find a good HP, buslogic or adaptec host adapter for EISA.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the DOS performance is quite dissapointing....have benchmarked the performance with differenr programs...I get around 3-5mb/s

I've already went for another SCSI controller :mrgreen: an Adaptec AHA 2742AT...waiting for it to arrive in the mail
The Ultrastor 24F is rock solid though, have it hooked up to an IDE drive with a 50pin SCSI--> IDE adapter....a Plextor Ultraplex 40x cd-rom drive
What made me go for the Adaptec card is that the Ultrastor is a full length card which isn't good for the airflow inside my cramped case and it seem to have a 1gig limit even with Ontrack Disk Manager (latest version)