Strange old school VID card... (PIC)

[Surreal]

HI

This is a older diamond multimedia stealth 2500 with 2megs edo ram. This baby kicked the socks off of the compentition. (lol)

Question: what is the feature connection located on the upper right of the card. All i found out was it is some sort of VESA complient connection.

After reading around i believe it is some sort of pre DVI connection. Please help me put my mind at ease. I have seen these headers on vid cards for 5 years and never found out what they are used for and connect to.

thx

ss

 

[Nightingale]

I think it could be an internal video connection. It looks similar to have a moniter was attached to a the mobo of a one piece compaq not sure though. Just a thought


EDIT:Opps I was looking at the wrong part of the board. I believe that the connectors on the right are memory expansion slots.

 

[Movax]

Probably palette snoop

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/bios/set/pciSnoop-c.html

 

[voodoomelon]

I don't think this is the same connection, but it's very similar. It's on a 6 year old 10MB/s Trust Network Card. Dunno what the hell it is.

 

[Remove]

Those are plugins for the force shield generators.

 

[Captain Newbie]

I believe that's some sort of expansion connector that allows you to add additional features to older cards...hmm. My Am486 sitting over in the corner has a BUNCH of those on its cards.

 

[CamH]

I believe, on the video card, that is for extra memory. I think you can still buy memory for these older cards on some sites.

For the network card, I think that is for a BIOS so that you can boot from a remote network location.

 

[Th0r]

Those are plugins for the force shield generators.

You my friend watches to much Star Trek

 

[Nero]

CamH is right, that's most likely a place to add more video ram to the card. I remember buying an extra 1MB of video memory back in the day to be able to achieve 1024x768x16 on my old Packard Bell *shudder*.

 

[Axis]

I had that card and played Flight Unlimited. Yes that was for the extra ram if you wanted to buy it.

 

[ZedBias]

CamH im sure is correct on the netowrk card too, The expansion slot is for WOL (Wake on LAN)

 

[Surreal]

My bad i ment the LEFT side not the right. Those slots on the right are for 1meg edo ram expansion!

 

[ryuen]

I believe, on the video card, that is for extra memory. I think you can still buy memory for these older cards on some sites.

For the network card, I think that is for a BIOS so that you can boot from a remote network location.

i agree on this too. ive seen memory expansion for sale. not cheap i believe though

 

[Huckleberry]

Summary: used to connect the video card to other video devices such as 3D accelerators, MPEG decoders and video capture cards

Reference: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/video/ifFeature-c.html

In regards to the NIC, the socket is indeed meant to hold a BIOS chip used to boot from the network, as CamH said. It is not a wake on LAN feature, which is commonly found in more recent NICs. Handy if you have a diskless workstation.

 

[JDXNC]

I believe he is talking about this connector:

In which I have no idea what it is really used for, the other slots are for memory upgrades, so you could have a whole 4MB of Vram.. a LOT of the old S3 Virge cards had memory upgrade slots.

 

[ZedBias]

Are they not configurable jumper settings? For what I dont know tho. . . . .

 

[Huckleberry]

It doesn't appear that they are jumpers at all. The VESA cable that connects to this male set of pins is intended to go to another card that also supports the VESA video bus.

The pinouts for this connector can be found via a web search.

 

[Como]

on vid cards its for more ram, on netwrok cards its for an optional ROM to boot from, while i heard the pins on the vid card are for linking vid cards...never seen it dont and have no proof of useage...

 

[voodoomelon]

If i remember correctly, 2 seperate Voodoo 2's could be linked together via an SLI cable, which connected to pins like those.
Here are 2 pics of similar pins on a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. God I love that card!






And just to confuse everyone even more, here's a picture of a 1996 Matrox Mystique MGA 2mb Video Card. Now what on god's green earth, do all of those connectors do???!!?! My god...




EDIT: The top middle connector says "FEATURE CONNECTOR" beside it. And believe it or not, that black connector on the back plate is actually a joystick port.
"A joystick port on a video card?!" I know, that's what I said, but they just laughed at me...

 

[JDXNC]

ITs for a card that clips on like this:

Thats another Matrox card, dunno what it does but I've seen it a lot on older matrox cards.

EDIT:

Its the Ram upgrade on the matrox cards, this card is descibed as an 8MB card with a 12MB addon card: