Thread by @RetroTechChris

I have a few EIDE VESA Local Bus cards to check out. Let's do this and talk about it in a 🧵 here!

So, I figured I'd do a bit of a baseline. As such, I started out with a benchmark for my DTC 2278E card. And here it is! Now, in fairness, we are loading a DOS driver for this card, which puts it into 32 bit mode. Sadly, we won't be able to do that with the other cards.

First up, we have this QDI Vision QD6580. It has a nice presence on the Retro Web, complete with drivers and all, assuming you have the BIOS to go with it. theretroweb.com/expansioncards…

First order of business is to put in that missing standoff/screw. I think I have one around here somewhere. Ah, that's better 😂.

Unfortunately, I tried every way to Sunday to get this card to recognize IDE, and it seems to be broken. Oh well. That's a shame too, this card is actually one of the few VLB cards where the XTIDE BIOS supports them!

Since I (foolishly) don't give up easily, I thought I would try to pop the BIOS in. I bought a SN74LS138N chip (since it is needed with the BIOS) and programmed up a Winbond W27C512 chip with XTIDE 32-bit support. Sadly, no difference. Oh well, on to the next.

Next we have this CMD CSA-6210/KX, which seems to work well enough! You can find it on the Retro Web here: theretroweb.com/expansioncards…

And next, we have this Aresys Precision AV150 V1.1, which also gets the job done. You can find it on the Retro Web here: theretroweb.com/expansioncards…

So, yea, neither of these cards we tested just now are as fast as the DTC, but they also don't have DOS drivers, so there is that too! But they are nice basic EISA VLB cards!

Anyway, that's what I have for now, thanks for following along!

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