DOS Days

Orchid Fahrenheit VA and VA/VLB

The Orchid Fahrenheit VA and Orchid Fahrenheit VA/VLB launched in April 1993 and used S3's 2nd-generation graphics accelerator chipsets, the 86C801 / 86C805, which could access memory via a 32-bit data path.

 Released April 1993
Bus ISA 16-bit (VA), VESA Local Bus (VA/VLB)
Chipset S3 86C801 (VA) or 86C805 (VA/VLB)
Standards Hercules, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA
Memory 1 MB or 2 MB DRAM (50 - 70ns)
RAMDAC AT&T ATT20C490, Sierra SC11483CV or Sierra SC15025CV
Ports 15-pin DSUB (analogue video out)
2 x 3.5mm jacks (microphone and speaker)
Part # 830-0116-X (Fahrenheit VA)
830-0112-X (Fahrenheit VA/VLB)
FCC ID DDS7EF0892-92-FVA (Fahrenheit VA)
DDS7EF1092-92-FLB (Fahrenheit VA/VLB)
Price Apr 1993: $299 (1 MB) street price
See Also Orchid Fahrenheit 1280

The "VA" in the name stands for "Voice Activated" - aimed at business users looking to control their PC via a microphone. The card came with Orchid's Voice Notes software that allowed you to speak words which it could then store as voice annotations to any Windows application. As we now know, this concept never really caught on, but it is interesting to look back on it as an idea. It's important to note that the audio side of this card *does not* provide Ad Lib or Sound Blaster compatibility, nor does its "multimedia" orientation provide the card with any CD-ROM interface. I did a review of this card in January 2023.

The Fahrenheit VA and VA/VLB were launched alongside the Fahrenheit 1280 Plus, which shares the same board layout but is missing the audio circuitry of the former and used DRAM instead of the faster VRAM on the 1280 Pluse.

They used the same 80 MHz RAMDACs as the Fahrenheit 1280 Plus, with 24-bit colour depth (16.7 million colours).

The Fahrenheit VA and VA/VLB both supported VESA VBE v1.2 in the BIOS chip itself, so there is no need to load a VESA driver.

 

Board Revisions

The Orchid Fahrenheit VA and VA/VLB cards came in a number of board revisions including:

  • Fahrenheit VA: 1/A1, 1/C1
  • Fahrenheit VA/VLB: 1/B4, 1/C4, 5/C4

 

Competition

The Orchid Fahrenheit VA competed directly with other high-end cards including the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro, Hercules Graphite, Number Nine GXE, and Diamond Stealth Pro.

 

In the Media

 

"The leader of the pack is the Orchid Fahrenheit VA, even though it does not accelerate raster operations or image transfers, nor does it do font caching. Priced at $299 with 1MB of RAM (no street discount), it achieves 13.40 megapixels-per-second at 800-by-600 and 12.61 at 1,024-by-768 in 256-color mode on our Graphics Winmark tests, better than many more-costly boards. At 16 colors, it racked up 10.20 and 10.16 megapixels-per-second in these resolutions, respectively.

The 86C801C-based $299 Orchid Fahrenheit VA, which comes with an audio option, is a little more expensive than other boards in its class. But with 1MB of RAM and Orchid's stable HyperDriver for Windows, this Editor's Choice winner delivered excellent Graphics Winmark scores in 256-color Super VGA and 1,024-by-768 modes, and it speedily handled our AutoCAD tests, unmarred by remnant pixels or an inability to clear the screen properly - something that plagued a couple of its competitors." 
PC Magazine, April 1993

 

 

Setting it Up

The 4 DIP switches on the side of the card have the following configurations:

SW1 and SW2 set the refresh rate for the specific resolution you are running in, as follows:

SW1 SW2 @ 640 x 480 @ 800 x 600 @1,024 x 768 @1,280 x 960 @1,280 x 1,024
OFF OFF 72 Hz 72 Hz 60 Hz NI 43 Hz I 43 Hz I
ON OFF 72 Hz 72 Hz 70 Hz NI 43 Hz I 43 Hz I
OFF ON 60 Hz 56 Hz 43 Hz I - -
ON ON 60 Hz 60 Hz 60 Hz NI - -

SW3 is factory configured and should not be changed.
SW4 sets the speaker type this is attached:

SW4 Speaker Type
OFF Mono
ON Stereo

In addition to the DIP switches, the audio portion of the card has three jumpers:

Jumper Meaning Settings
JP2 DMA Channel Pins 1-2 & 4-5 closed: DMA Channel 3
Pins 2-3 & 5-6 closed: DMA Channel 0
Note: pin 1 is the top-left, pin 4 is below it.
JP3 I/O Address Pins 1-2 closed: 354h
Pins 2-3 closed: 344h
Note: pin1 is the leftmost pin
JP4 IRQ Left two pins closed: IRQ 10
Middle two pins closed: IRQ 11
Right two pins closed: IRQ12

The cards also have a jumper, JP1, which is used to enable or disable the use of IRQ2/9 for tracking when the vertical retrace is happening.

If you have conflicts with a separate installed sound card, you can disable the audio portion of the Fahrenheit VA or VA/VLB by following these steps:

  1. Power down your system, and pull all of the jumpers off of JP2, JP3, and JP4 on the Fahrenheit VA board. (Leave JP1 alone.)
  2. Boot up to DOS, and erase the file SNDSETUP.CPL from your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory.
  3. Start Windows. (If you get error messages about the VA, click on the OK button until you can continue.) Look in your Startup group. If you see anything there for Orchid, or a program called Voice Notes, use the "file delete" option under the Program Manager desktop menu to delete it.
  4. Next, open the Drivers icon in Control Panel. You may get some error message when you open that icon. Just click "OK", "OK" until you get past them. Once it's up, if you see any lines there that say Orchid, or Fahrenheit, use the "Remove" button on that screen to delete them. The drivers on this screen are strictly multimedia/audio drivers so you don't have to worry that you'll be removing any of the Fahrenheit graphics drivers by doing this. It only affects the VA audio drivers.
  5. Once you remove the VA drivers, you'll be prompted to restart Windows. Go ahead and restart. You shouldn't get any VA error messages this time, and the audio portion of the board should be disabled.
  6. It's probably a good idea to reinstall a clean copy of your sound board drivers at this point.


Downloads

Note that BIOS v3.0 is required if using Fahrenheit Plus Series Driver Disk version 7.2 (the latest).
For OS/2 drivers, Orchid recommend you use the S3 801/805 drivers that came with Warp. The same goes for Windows NT - use the S3 ones provided with the operating system.

Operation Manual
(missing)

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Original Utility Disk
(missing)

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VGA ROM BIOS v1.1
(missing)

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VGA ROM BIOS v1.2
(missing)

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VGA ROM BIOS v3.0
(missing)

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More Pictures


An Orchid Fahrenheit VA/VLB (1993)


An Orchid Fahrenheit VA (1993)


Another Orchid Fahrenheit VA/VLB (1993)