• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
  • From now on we will require that a prefix is set for any items in the sales area. We have created regions and locations for this. We also require that you select a delivery option before posting your listing. This will hopefully help us streamline the things that get listed for sales here and help local people better advertise their items, especially for local only sales. New sales rules are also coming, so stay tuned.

NUmber 9

The Diamond Viper maxes out at 2MB, its claim to fame was 256 color Win3.1 speed early on. The Weitek part was used in Win 3.1 acceleration and there is a seperate chip for VGA (and seperate ram, 512KB I think).
 
What I've got is the Viper Pro. I have the manual and it was used for both the VLB and the PCI version. 2MB standard 4MB optional VRAM. Claim to fame was that it could do 1600x1200 in 64K colors.

The Weitek processor is the Power 9100 with a 9130 on the back side of the card. The RAMDAC looks to be a standard IBM part. Pretty hot card for its time; I don't know what the SOJ expansion VRAM is for the extra 2MB. Anyone know?
 
Chuck(G) said:
What I've got is the Viper Pro. I have the manual and it was used for both the VLB and the PCI version. 2MB standard 4MB optional VRAM. Claim to fame was that it could do 1600x1200 in 64K colors.

The Weitek processor is the Power 9100 with a 9130 on the back side of the card. The RAMDAC looks to be a standard IBM part. Pretty hot card for its time; I don't know what the SOJ expansion VRAM is for the extra 2MB. Anyone know?
Click to expand...

http://82.114.193.227/vga2/index.ph...ticle&id=747:diamond-viper-pro-video&Itemid=1

8 x KM428C256J-7 from the picture of the PCI card I linked to.
 
I have a bunch of VRAM and DRAM for older cards, somebody gave me a bunch they saved for cards they recycled. You can also sometimes use 1MB Mac Video RAM sticks (PCI 7500-9500 era Mac) and removed the chips from there (they are/were pretty common and cheap).

While you can get some decent resolution and color depth, the speed of these old cards is not anywhere near as fast as anything PCI made a few years later. Scrolling can be painfull at 24 bit high rez. Still fun to see what you can do in Windows 3.1 on those old systems.
 
Chuck(G) said:
What I've got is the Viper Pro. I have the manual and it was used for both the VLB and the PCI version. 2MB standard 4MB optional VRAM. Claim to fame was that it could do 1600x1200 in 64K colors.

The Weitek processor is the Power 9100 with a 9130 on the back side of the card. The RAMDAC looks to be a standard IBM part. Pretty hot card for its time; I don't know what the SOJ expansion VRAM is for the extra 2MB. Anyone know?
Click to expand...

That was the later (9100) version. I've got the Power 9000 (VLB) adapter, with no further VRAM expansion and no chips on the reverse side. It is 2Mb, in sixteen 4 x 256Kb ZIP chips. The RAMDAC is a larger ("Bt") square chip, but not the fancy IBM version.

I've heard the cards were innovative, but suffered from a lack of driver updates. When I ran it, it seemed to do what I wanted. At some point I plan to put it back into service.
 
Yeah, I'm not wanting for PCI video cards. While it might be fun to see what this would do under Win2K (there exist drivers), it's pointless as my systems where Win2K is loaded are all AGP.

Funny to think that PCI video cards may soon be "vintage".
 
There are quite a few interesting PCI cards (ET6000 Tseng based for one), my collection ends with AGP around 2000 when most of the smaller players went bankrupt.
Sometimes I wonder how many 3rd parties used the S3 chipset for PCI, there are so many varieties. Old CAD cards (PCI/AGP) were kind of interesting before ATI/Nvidia took over.
 
The last card I used with a fixed-frequency RGB SOG monitor was a Tseng ET6000 based one with a special ROM and 4MB RAM. I also have the comparable S3 model (don't recall the chip number).
 
Back to the Number Nine brand, different bus, I have their GXi microchannel adapter. It had one TI 34020, with a socket for a second, and for adding more VRAM than the stock 3Mb.

809a_1.jpg


No Windows 95 drivers existed, you had to use the 3.1 files. Just watching the demo was neat to see. And that was on a 16-bit adapter.

All for the list price of $2,295.00 when brand new...
 
IBMMuseum said:
Back to the Number Nine brand, different bus, I have their GXi microchannel adapter. It had one TI 34020, with a socket for a second, and for adding more VRAM than the stock 3Mb.

809a_1.jpg


No Windows 95 drivers existed, you had to use the 3.1 files. Just watching the demo was neat to see. And that was on a 16-bit adapter.

All for the list price of $2,295.00 when brand new...
Click to expand...

Did you snag that TIGA MCA card offered on the PS2 newsgroup?
 
Unknown_K said:
Did you snag that TIGA MCA card offered on the PS/2 newsgroup?
Click to expand...

I can neither confirm nor deny such rumors at this point...

I was also mixed-up about the GXi specs, it is 4Mb base VRAM, with the ability to add another 3Mb...
 
Another interesting VLB video card was the Media Vision ProGraphics 1024 (despite the standard Cirrus Logic 5402 chip). Composite video in and out, S-Video in and out, VGA out up to 1024 x 768 x 16.7m. The SOJ VRAM (3 stock chips, 6 expansion sockets) was marked in some RGB scheme.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top