Recently, I have been gathering old hardware at my parents’ house, notably PC extension cards. They do not take much room and make a nice display. Unfortunately, I never cared much about keeping things around. Of all the hardware I acquired over the years, only a few pieces remain.

Tseng Labs ET4000AX (1989)#

This SVGA graphics card was installed in a PC powered by a 386SX CPU running at 16 MHz. It was a good card for its time: pretty fast. It did not feature 2D acceleration, unlike the later ET4000/W32. This version features only 512 KB of RAM. It can display 1024×768 images with 16 colors or 800×600 with 256 colors. It also supported CGA, EGA, VGA, MDA, and Hercules modes. No contemporary games used the SVGA modes, but the higher resolutions proved useful with Windows 3. Tseng Labs manufactured this card directly.

AdLib clone (1992)#

My first sound card was an AdLib. My parents bought it in Canada during the summer holidays in 1992. It uses a Yamaha OPL2 chip to produce sound via FM synthesis. The first game I tried was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I think I gave this AdLib to a friend once I upgraded my PC with a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Recently, I needed one for a side project, but they are rare and expensive on eBay. Someone mentioned a cheap clone on Vogons, so I bought it. Sun Moon Star sold it in 1992 and shipped it with a CD-ROM of Doom shareware.

On this topic, take a look at “OPL2LPT: an AdLib sound card for the parallel port” and “OPL2 Audio Board: an AdLib sound card for Arduino.” The first article includes a more exact copy of an AdLib clone.

Sound Blaster Pro 2 (1992)#

Later, I replaced the AdLib with a Sound Blaster Pro 2. It features an OPL3 chip and can also output digital samples. At the time, this was a welcome addition, but less important than the FM synthesis the AdLib introduced.

Promise EIDE 2300 Plus (1995)#

I bought this card mostly for the serial port. I was using a 486DX2 running at 66 MHz with a Creatix LC 288 FC external modem. The serial port used an 8250 UART with no buffer. Thanks to Terminate, I could connect to BBSes from DOS, but not from Windows 3 or OS/2. I needed one of these fancy new cards with a 16550 UART, featuring a 16-byte buffer. At the time, finding one in France was difficult. During a holiday trip, I convinced my parents to detour from Los Angeles to San Diego to buy this Promise EIDE 2300 Plus controller card at a shop I found through an advertisement in a local magazine!

The card also features an EIDE controller with multi-word DMA mode 2 support. In contrast with the older PIO modes, the CPU did not have to copy data from disk to memory.

3dfx Voodoo2 Magic 3D II (1998)#

The 3dfx Voodoo2 was one of the first add-in graphics cards to implement hardware acceleration of 3D graphics. I bought it from a friend along with his Pentium II box in 1999. It marked a big step in PC gaming: games became more beautiful and fluid. 2D still required a traditional video controller. A pass-through VGA cable daisy-chained the video controller to the Voodoo, which was itself connected to the monitor.

3Com 3C905C-TX-M “Tornado” (1999)#

In the early 2000s, in college, a student association provided the campus Internet connection through a 100 Mbps Ethernet cable. If you wanted to reach the maximum speed, the 3Com 3C905C-TX-M PCI network adapter, nicknamed “Tornado,” was the card you needed. We bought them second-hand by the dozen and sold them to other students for around €30.