I have recently bought Microway PC164 Screamer motherboard on ebay and waiting for it to arrive. It should be in Vilnius in next one or two weeks.
This motherboard is based not on typical Intel or AMD CPUs, but on DEC Alpha CPU. Specifically, this one have 500 MHz 21164 model. It is quite old board featuring eight SIMM slots with up to 512 MB of RAM (currently 256 MB installed), two PCI, two PCI-X and two ISA slots. There are two IDE interfaces, however, they probably are slow (not EIDE). You can find PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, one LPT and two COM ports on the back plane.
I was dreaming to have at least one system, which was not an x86 architecture for a long time. There were several options to choose from, however, most of them disappeared in not so long period. Most of them was quite pricey. The first option was Q60 - Sinclair QL compatible system. However, when this quite slow and very expensive system was available i didn't have enough money to buy it. A year later these motherboards wasn't available anymore. Other options were more powerful, cheaper, but more harder to get, for example, Pegasos PPC or AmigaOne systems. Production of these stopped some time ago. When I saw Screamer motherboard on the ebay I got excited. People who buys on the ebay, knows how you need to win a item and was ready to do this. The price was doubled in the end of auction, but I knew that it could happen and significantly changed the maximum bid the last day. So, I won but the price was higher than I expected.
Firstly, I was happy. I found some information about it in several articles and everything looked quite interesting. However, I can call this purchase now like the one then you buy something and only then you are trying to understand what you get. Yes, I knew that Alpha is dead. Even HP doesn't not sell Alpha systems any more. Intel, the company that bought Alpha's IP, are not interesting in developing them. Still and all, I thought that there are some communities who uses these systems and discussing it. It was not a case. Open source development is almost inactive. NetBSD FAQ and other documentation seems outdated, FreeBSD dropping alpha support in forecoming 7-th release, alpha news sites and some linux distributions aren't updated for long periods too. Hardware support probably ends up with devices from 1998-2000 years (I am happy that I have my old and good ATI Rage PRO video card). I didn't checked other software but I don't think so that a situation is very good in this area.
What is more installation of open source operating systems requires specific SRM console which is not available on all systems. I don't even know what is that and will I have it in this motherboard. Actually, I don't know if this motherboard will boot at all :) (but I hope that would be mentioned in the auction)... So, the situation is quite uncertain. If it will work without problems, I don't know if I will manage to install any operating system on it. As you know, hardware without software is useless. I will need to wait and see...
This motherboard is based not on typical Intel or AMD CPUs, but on DEC Alpha CPU. Specifically, this one have 500 MHz 21164 model. It is quite old board featuring eight SIMM slots with up to 512 MB of RAM (currently 256 MB installed), two PCI, two PCI-X and two ISA slots. There are two IDE interfaces, however, they probably are slow (not EIDE). You can find PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, one LPT and two COM ports on the back plane.
I was dreaming to have at least one system, which was not an x86 architecture for a long time. There were several options to choose from, however, most of them disappeared in not so long period. Most of them was quite pricey. The first option was Q60 - Sinclair QL compatible system. However, when this quite slow and very expensive system was available i didn't have enough money to buy it. A year later these motherboards wasn't available anymore. Other options were more powerful, cheaper, but more harder to get, for example, Pegasos PPC or AmigaOne systems. Production of these stopped some time ago. When I saw Screamer motherboard on the ebay I got excited. People who buys on the ebay, knows how you need to win a item and was ready to do this. The price was doubled in the end of auction, but I knew that it could happen and significantly changed the maximum bid the last day. So, I won but the price was higher than I expected.
Firstly, I was happy. I found some information about it in several articles and everything looked quite interesting. However, I can call this purchase now like the one then you buy something and only then you are trying to understand what you get. Yes, I knew that Alpha is dead. Even HP doesn't not sell Alpha systems any more. Intel, the company that bought Alpha's IP, are not interesting in developing them. Still and all, I thought that there are some communities who uses these systems and discussing it. It was not a case. Open source development is almost inactive. NetBSD FAQ and other documentation seems outdated, FreeBSD dropping alpha support in forecoming 7-th release, alpha news sites and some linux distributions aren't updated for long periods too. Hardware support probably ends up with devices from 1998-2000 years (I am happy that I have my old and good ATI Rage PRO video card). I didn't checked other software but I don't think so that a situation is very good in this area.
What is more installation of open source operating systems requires specific SRM console which is not available on all systems. I don't even know what is that and will I have it in this motherboard. Actually, I don't know if this motherboard will boot at all :) (but I hope that would be mentioned in the auction)... So, the situation is quite uncertain. If it will work without problems, I don't know if I will manage to install any operating system on it. As you know, hardware without software is useless. I will need to wait and see...