bmarsh@noscvax.UUCP (William C. Marsh) (12/03/84)
Does anyone out there in net.land have any experiance with this or any other of the 'make it yourself pc compatable' pc motherboards? This board seems to be the most advertised of the bunch, and my brother is looking to build a pc, so any comments on this board and the 'MEGA-BIOS' roms which are availiable with this board would be apreciated. E-mail to me and i'll summerize them to the net. -- Bill Marsh Naval Ocean Systems Center San Diego, CA ihnp4 \ MILNET bmarsh@nosc akgua \ UUCP decvax >------------!sdcsvax!noscvax!bmarsh dcdwest / ucbvax / "burning the candle at both ends, twice the light in half the time..."
yosh@hou2e.UUCP (M.CHING) (12/05/84)
Will anyone who has any info on the Mega-board please post their responses to the net. I just ordered one and I am curious to know if I made a big mistake........ Thanxxx Dave Bloom Bell Labs, Holmdel
bmw@aesat.UUCP (Bruce Walker) (12/06/84)
[Articles are packed by weight; contents may settle during shipping]
My info has it that the Megaboard is a pricey but safe route to getting a
PC-Clone. The MegaBios is a good BIOS in any event, and can be used with
other people's boards. In the Toronto area, there must be more than 10
or 20 PC-Clone boards for sale (no joshing!), and a lot of them have some
inherent design flaws (memory timing, DMA chip clock duty cycle problems, etc.)
but the MegaBoard is OK on that score. The biggest problem with the MB
(shared with others as well) is availability of parts. Just *TRY* to get a
74LS322 8 bit, all singing and dancing shift register some day (needed for the
keyboard serial port). It also uses two different analog delay line chips
which are anywhere from $8.00 to $15.00 (when available).
Moral: get a documentation package *FIRST*. Go through the parts list and
make sure that you have sources for all the parts. Otherwise, you could be
sitting on a bargain board that won't run 'cause one lousy LS part is missing.
Moral #2: Buy a populated board (with no memory, you can get that cheaper
yourself).
BTW, my 'clone has an LS299 designed into where the LS322 used to be, and
clocked logic where the delay line was.
---
Bruce Walker {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!aesat!bmw