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Wanted: Good ISA video card for 486DX computer

RaptorZX3

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 29, 2013
Messages
347
Location
Quebec, Canada
i'm looking for a good ISA video card for my 486 computer (i'll upgrade it to 486DX 66Mhz soon). I'm saying ISA because it's all it can take (riser card have 3 x ISA 16-bit slots), and my only ISA video card (Cirrus Logic GD5320) doesn't seem to support UNIVBE (Universal VESA driver).

I heard the cards with a Tseng ET4000AX are great for DOS gaming, so...i'll be looking for one of them now.
 
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ok i got my card. The chip is written Tseng ET4000AX on it, yet with UniVESA/UniVBE, it detect ET4000.

Strangely it seem to have color problems with at least 2 of my Cryo games (tested with Megarace and Commander Blood), and those problems seem to always change everytime i boot the game...another game which seemed to have problem is Hexen, but i'm not sure if it's just the game or the card. Though all other games i tested it with seem to be ok (Doom 2, Heretic, Relentless, Gabriel Knight 2, Raptor: Call of the Shadow, Tyrian, Rise of the Robots, Mortal Kombat 3, Descent.)

There is almost no info about the Diamond Speedstar Plus on the net, though i think the dip switches are the same as the Speedstar 24:
http://ftp.isu.edu.tw/pub/Hardware/Diamond/display/speedstar/speedstar.24/s24adndm.txt
So the main dip switches are the 2 and 4, which seem to be "Turbo" and "Normal". But how much "turbo" those swithes give to the normal speed exactly? we may never know... (tried different settings but didn't fixed the color problem in both of those tested Cryo games)

BTW, if you use that card, i checked the heat of the GPU with the back of a finger, and it seem to get very hot! so if you use the card horizontally, you can just use a small chipset heatsink with thermal pad or paste (that's what i did on mine). For vertical use, use thermal glue.

Here's a picture of how it is in my PB Legend 125 case:
pb_legend125_addons.jpg

Speedstar Plus 1mb video card on top (+ chipset heatsink with some kind of thermal "gum" under it that stayed there when i removed it from the previous board), SB AWE64 Value below, 486DX2 66Mhz Overdrive (DX2ODP66), below those, and 16mb EDO RAM 60ms.
 
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A little late but I just found this. I have that exact same computer and et4000 cards give me issues as well. I've tried 2 diffrent et4000 based cards in it and some game (ultima VII) give me VCR like tracking lines and static looking glitches. I replaced it with a CL based diamond speedster and no more issues.
 
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