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EISA configuration

H

huubwen

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Joined
Jun 15, 2012
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45
Location
Netherlands, Europe
I own a TMC PET48PN 486 EISA mainboard. The board has 7 EISA slots and 2 of them have an VLB expansion slot. The mainboard is equipped with a 486DX-50 CPU.

After collecting for a few years I have acquired several EISA cards (VGA, network, SCSI). I thought it was finally time to build a nice EISA system of them using this mainboard. I don’t have an EISA sound card or EISA multi I/O. I used a ISA AWE64 for sound and an generic UMC VLB multi I/O card for floppy/IDE. I use a 2GB compact flash drive as a harddrive. The system is working fine and stable. I already have installed FreeDos on it without problems.

I’m not very familiar with EISA systems. At boot its complaining that the ESIA CMOS settings are invalid. Probably because the EISA settings are not configured. The mainboard has 2 Dallas battery chips. The regular BIOS is holding its date and settings without problems so I suspect that the ESIA Dallas chip also still has some charge in it.

I don’t have the EISA .cfg files for this board and cannot find them on the internet. Can some provide me with those files?

The VGA card is working fine. I have not tested the network card yet. I suspect it should be quite challenging to find the correct packet driver for the card.

What is the impact of not configuring EISA at all? Does the VGA card for example operate at full performance (32 bit bandwidth) or is it operating in regular 16 bit ISA mode?
 
They seem to be standardized. I was able to run the AMI EISA Configuration Utility on a Micronics board that originally came with the Micro Computer Systems one without a problem. I don't know if its the case for OEM boards like Compaq. Given that the TMC is a generic AT motherboard, you shouldn't have a problem running something like the AMI ECU, you just need the CFG files for the motherboard and the cards that you want to install.

CFG+ECU for your motherboard: ftp://ftp.necam.com/swan-zds-ftp/ecu/tmc/tmcecu27.zip

The ECU can be run from the DOS prompt.
 
I have a DEC Prioris MTE Server with EISA slots on the MoBo. I tried a EISA configuration utility from a Zenith machine and it wouldn't work. IIRC, the utility complained that it couldn't find the Zenith board and wouldn't go any further.
 
answering my own question from wikipedia (assuming it's not lying, again.)

Every EISA system shipped with an EISA configuration utility; this was usually a slightly customized version of the standard utilities written by the EISA chipset makers.
Click to expand...
 
You should really use the VLB slot on that board for VGA, and get EISA SCSI and Ethernet controllers.

I had the same TMC board in the past. It was okay.
I currently own a similar VL/EISA board but for 5V Pentiums based on OPTi chipset. The memory performance of OPTi just wasn't very good.
 
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