DOS Games Discussion

[Interon]

I guess that goes for any machine that supports IDE (or is there variant standards in IDE, like EIDE, ATAPI, UDMA, etc. that may not allow DVD-ROM drives to run on 486s)

Even so, maybe the 486 can't keep up with the transfer speed of the mighty DVD drive, even at 1x, that's a lot of data running up the pike.

[Guest]

Thanks mate

[Da BIG PIG]

What is a motherboard

[Interon]

A motherboard is flat planar board which connects almost all computer components together. It allows the computer parts to connect with each other. Without it, your computer is just a pile of parts that won't do anything. The motherboard takes power from the power supply and powers devices that are not directly connected to the power supply like the CPU, BIOS, chipset, expansion cards, etc. As well it provides the bus and connections so the CPU can communicate with the rest of the computer.

More information on http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/mobo/index.htm (hopefully a better explanation than what I provided above)

[Hood]

THanks for the answer

[Robot_Maker]

If anyone's interested, I picked up an SGI Indigo2 workstation a few months back, and that has EISA slots fitted, though they seem pretty much worthless. It already has a high-quality sound system and LAN ports built into the motherboard and most of the slots are also blocked by the multi-tiered graphics unit anyway, whose proprietary slots share the same space. Perhaps it was to add a bog-standard ISA VGA card for having a seperate text-only console monitor next to the enormous graphics monitor, that's just about the only use I can think of for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

A 32 bit bus certainly was needed in the early 90s, and EISA didn't fail for that reason. The two main reasons were that EISA components were price and performace. damn expensive, and weren't really all that much faster than ISA unless you were using SCSI or NIC adapters. However, SCSI has never been popular in the consumer market, and network adapters didn't come into common use in the home until the late 90s. The big problem with EISA was that while it could support transfer rates of up to 32MB/sec, it still clunked along at 8MHz like the old ISA bus.

I think you guys are forgetting about the most popular 32-bit bus of them all for the 486. The VESA Local Bus. These slots ran at 33MHz (hence the term local "bus"). While it wasn't as reliable as EISA is was certainly much faster for the one thing people needed it for: Video performance. Despite what you might hear, VLB was very popular during the 486 days. Not all 486s had it...but all the GOOD ones did.

[Unknown_K]