Diamond collection
At the recent Electronics Flea Market somebody had a stack of Diamond ISA and VESA Local Bus video cards for sale. Which is funny because I had just been looking to maybe take the splurge and try to find a VLB card with an Tseng ET4000/W32 to put into my 486. I currently have a Diamond Viper VLB with 2 MB VRAM which was spendy back in its day, but had a basic Oak chip for regular VGA work so it’s aggressively average.
They weren’t what I was hunting for but interesting so I bought them all to at least archive manuals and disks. There was a Diamond SpeedStar 64 2000 ISA, Diamond Stealth 64 VLB 2120, a Diamond Viper Pro Video, and a Viper VLB. Unfortunately the latter was just an empty box of disks and manuals I found out later, but was still nice because it was everything for my exact Viper VLB card. These all apparently came from the old Halted / HSC Electronic Supply store in San Jose. All but one white box looked like regular Diamond retail boxes, but all the manuals inside were stapled photocopies with HSC markings and disks were generically labeled. I don’t know if this was some sort of HSC white box special or what.
The driver disks weren’t in great condition when I tried to make copies so I’m not sure if I’m going to post them to Internet Archive. I was able to at least add some original photos of the cards to The Retro Web, my first contributions! (Diamond SpeedStar 64, Diamond Viper Pro Video, Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM) Maybe someday I’ll get fancy enough to upload the contents of the ROMs.
The Viper Pro Video and Stealth 64 had some empty sockets for upgrading the video RAM so I wanted to max them out for giggles. I’ve never bought VRAM and the Diamond manuals did not cover at all what kind of memory was needed to upgrade the cards. After some searching through Vogons it seems the magic term was “256k 40-pin SOJ”. It’s not clear to me what the difference between “video RAM” and “DRAM” is, it would appear VRAM has some extra instruction lines but all the ebay listings seemed to just lump them together.
Diamond Viper Pro Video VLB
Diamond Viper Pro VLB
First was the Viper Pro Video. This had a Weitek 9100 chip on it which was an improvement over the other Viper card in my 486. It had 2 MB onboard with sockets to allow up to 4 MB, which should considerably bump up the color count and resolution it could handle.
I first ordered up some 256k x 16 EDO DRAM, V53C16258HK-40, but the card BIOS didn’t recognize the extra RAM at all on boot. DOS worked but Windows 95 got all glitchy with it installed.
After that I tried some 256k x 4 FP DRAM, KVM428C256J-7, that I had saw on a photo of the PCI version of the card. Luckily I happened to find a memory place in Santa Clara that had these old chips in stock.
All the megabytes!
This worked, 4 MB VRAM Installed! Looking at old memory prices these SOJ chips seemed to run around $30 each in 1995 so this would’ve been a $240 upgrade on top of a $649 card. In 2025 dollars thats $517 and $1400, respectively.
Diamond Viper Pro VLB with 4 MB VRAM installed
In Windows 95 this got me up to 1152 x 684 with 32-bit True Color, which was a pretty nice improvement.
1152 x 684, 32-bit color with 4 MB VRAM
Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM VLB
Next was the Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM VLB. This only had 1 MB of DRAM installed and only two sockets for an extra 1 MB of DRAM.
Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM VLB
Here I just matched the part number that was already on the existing RAM, Samsung KM416C256BJ-6.
Diamond Stealth64 with 2 MB DRAM
I didn’t do any testing in Windows with this one, I just verified it worked.
