thinking of the "ultimate" retro x86 PCs - what bits to seek/keep ?

[Cameron Kaiser]

> The ultimate gaming 486 would have an EISA+VLB motherboard. EISA for SCSI 
> caching controllers and 10/100 Ethernet cards, VLB for high end video cards, 
> plus room for an ISA sound card.

As it happens, this is nearly exactly what I have: EISA (with an AWE32 ISA
sound card) with a VLB video card. The CPU is an Am5x86 133MHz, which AMD
advertised as comparable to the 75MHz Pentium. This is fairly accurate for
integer games (it runs things like Doom and Heretic like buddah), but
obviously it chugs on FP and won't run anything requiring Pentium
instructions. On the other hand, this machine runs a lot of finicky older
games that don't like my PCI P75 (Bio Menace, I'm looking at yoooooooouuuu).

-- 
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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
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