What slot is this?

[jballew7]

I'm trying to get an old pc running windows 95 to run. The tower boots up and it sounds like the HDD is spinning. But nothing comes thru the display. It's not even "black" as in its just showing a black screen. The display looks the same as when it is off. It did work 1 time but then I accidentally bumped it and it went off. I know the display is good too because 1, it did work once, and 2, I tested it on my laptop. It has a dedicated gpu which I think is the culprit. I'm not familer with hardware this old. It even has two HDD's, which I didn't think pc's that old used two. One is thinker than the other...? idk why. I'd like to buy another GPU but I don't know what kind of slot this is. The mobo has poor labeling and I have no documentation. Couldn't get the image to work, but here's a link to the card I uploaded on a site.

Thanks

http://jacobballew.weebly.com/new-page.html

 

[m4ntl3]

AGP? Maybe.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Nope. That's seriously ancient tech. ISA slot card.
ISA cards

 

[azaran]

Wow, even older than AGP. That's an ISA card. Specifically TRIDENT KY2-JAX-TVGA8900 VGA 16BIT ISA. You can get replacements on Ebay for $40 and up. So the question is, why in gods name are you trying to get that thing up and running?

 

[techgeek]

Definitely ISA. Very old, it preceded VESA and EiSA. We are talking 90's, even early 80's. Much of my time in tech school was spent designing circuits to interface with this bus.

 

[sirstinky]

That my friend is a late 80's piece of PC tech called an ISA expansion card/device. ISA is a legacy technology that predates PCI. ISA is Industry Standard Architecture introduced by IBM. It was obsolete for consumer PC's by 1994 when PCI became the standard expansion standard. It was still used on servers and industrial or workstation PC's in the last 10 years, but has since been completely phased out of existence. If you have any PCI slots on your motherboard (they're usually beige in color and about 4 inches long with a keyed slot at the front), then get yourself a cheap PCI graphics card and you're done. ISA cards are rare and are either expensive or may have compatibility issues.

 

[dudio]

I remember my first Trident

 

[techgeek]

In fact I still have my final project that was built on an ISA card. I used it to interface with a 4 channel radio control for a RC plane. I wrote the software in Pascal with embedded assembly to control each of the channels via the keyboard. It worked well though I never ended up flying the plane with it. All the front end was done in graphics which wasn't an easy task for an executable that ran in DOS.

 

[jballew7]

Wow, even older than AGP. That's an ISA card. Specifically TRIDENT KY2-JAX-TVGA8900 VGA 16BIT ISA. You can get replacements on Ebay for $40 and up. So the question is, why in gods name are you trying to get that thing up and running?

Thx for the reply. I want to get it up running because I have a fascination with old operating systems. My first was Windows ME. I missed a whole bunch.

 

[jballew7]

Thanks for the prompt replies everyone! I have a fascination with old operating systems. My first was Windows ME. So I missed a whole bunch. I'll probably try in find another GPU. Will any ISA card work. Obviously I know there are compatibility concerns just like today's card. But, at that old of a card was there many concerns regarding compatibility? I'm betting there is.

 

[azaran]

You might have a better time running the older OS's in a virtual machine. It's going to save you a lot of headaches with hardware. You'll get new headaches with trying to get the VM to run sometimes but at least you wont be trying to get ahold of hardware from the dawn of time.

 

[jballew7]

You might have a better time running the older OS's in a virtual machine. It's going to save you a lot of headaches with hardware. You'll get new headaches with trying to get the VM to run sometimes but at least you wont be trying to get a hold of hardware from the dawn of time.

i may go the VM route. There's something neat about having the real, original hardware though. I have the CRT and mouse with a ball to go right along with it. But yeah, I'm a poor CS student so VM may be how it gets done. Plus, I'm not 100% sure its the gpu and not the HDD's dead. I'd replace them but I don't which has the OS or if one has a special function.