Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Today's additions to the collection are:

-Cyrix 5x86 120MHz quad flat package version on PGA adapter
The 120MHz chip isn't nearly as common as the 100MHz version. I am hoping this one is a later stepping that will work with branch prediction turned on. I also heard some of the 120mhz Cyrix chips have a 4X multiplier.

-TI 486SXLC 40MHz (unsoldered)
This is to replace the CPU on my 40MHz 386SX motherboard. I originally bought a 486SXLC2-50Mhz for this purpose, but because that chip is still soldered to a PCB it may not fit in my 386SX socket after I desolder it.

-Cyrix 387SX Fasmath 40MHz
I didn't know the SX version went up to 40MHz. Maybe it's a fake. I guess I'll try it out in my 40MHz 386SX motherboard and see.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I have finally finally finally FINALLY!!!!!!!....

....found the 2meg upgrade module for ATi Mach64 ISA and VLB VRAM cards. Now I am glad I didn't go through with the fabrication of my own. I can't even begin to describe how many goddamn years it took to get one of these things. They were practically impossible to buy even when the Mach64 was brand new. I guess this will probably go on the ISA Mach64 in my "ultimate" 386.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

huh, hard as hell to find? i saw 10 of them last year! hell i have a set im currently not using, since my mach 64 went belly up. i wish i had my 4mb vram in 386 again, i used it for modding directX vid games texture .tga files since it was the only machine that'll run photoshop v4

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Right now there aren't any mach64 ISAs on ebay, but they usually go for a reasonable price when there isn't a 4mb module attached. However, right now there are several Mach64 VLB cards for $10 each. If you can't get the ISA version, the VLB is also a pretty nice card...especially when coupled with the 4meg module. 4meg VLB cards aren't common either. More common than ISA at least. I think I have four 4meg VLB cards, but only two 4meg ISA cards (one of which doubles as EISA).

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Today's find is an AMI 386SX Series 20 motherboard with 32kb cache. 386SX motherboards with cache are relatively uncommon. I'm hoping this board will go up to 16mb of system memory, but it looks like it might be limited to just 8mb. I plan to install a removable CPU socket on this board, and see how a 50MHz clock doubled TI486SXLC2 with 32kb L2 fares against a TI486SXL-40 with no L2 cache. Both CPUs have 8kb L1 cache.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Where are you finding these gems?

If I am lucky I shall be getting some IBM PS/2 model 60/65/80's with a bunch of extra cards and addons this week locally. MCA cards are kind of cool.

Anybody like PS/2 systems (I have a 9595 P66 currently)?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Surprisingly, the VRAM module and 386SX cache motherboard came off ebay. I find most people are too lazy to track down all the stuff hidden in the ebay stores that isn't listed during a typical search. I think the name of the store I got both of these items from was "lamcsales". I was actually looking for an AMI FastDisk VLB controller at the time.

I like to get my stuff in China if possible since the shipping usually only costs me about 50 cents or so, but these days there hasn't been a lot of good stuff aside from CPUs. I'd still like to find one of these computer recycling places, but I just don't have the time to do it.

I never really got into the PS/2s, but actually I think they're pretty neat. But, you really need the 3rd party stuff to make them interesting. It's never been easy or affordable to get PS/2 stuff though, which is probably the main reason I haven't bothered.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

When I search for items I am looking for and find something I generally check out the rest of that guys current inventory and have found some nice items that way.

Not that many decent VLB cards lately, last one I snagged was a caching SCSI card. Mostly I look for mac Nubus cards that I do not have.

China is one heck of a big country, I would think there are tons of recycling centers there but they might not have internet sales and be too far to drive to.

I would love $.50 cent shipping here in the US. Shipping actually takes up quite a bit of my collecting budget.

By 3rd party PS/2 stuff you mean accelerators and video cards? I think some of those units have 486 upgrades from 3rd parties but I won't know untill they show up (if they do).

386/sx with cache is odd because cache was generaly used for the last generation 386 DX chips not the early SX budget releases. My 386 DX40 motherboard has 128K or 256K cache, was a later generation unit and has the math coprocessor. I have a 386 SX/33 motherboard with 4 RAM slots, not sure if there is cache on that one (the chip is surface mount I think).

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I guess for 3rd party stuff PS/2 stuff, that would include graphics adapters, CPU upgrade boards and Reply replacement planars.

Hmm, almost all of the 386DX motherboards I've seen have cache or at least empty cache sockets. The exceptions being the very early ones or some of the very late ones designed to screw unsuspecting buyers. In general I think most people considered a cache-less DX system to be of poor design.

The 386DX also had a much longer run than the SX. I think the DX came out in early 1986 and the SX in late 1988. I think the 386SX was pretty much done for by 1991 while the am386dx 40MHz continued to sell well until about 1994. I believe it was actually the very early SX motherboards that had the cache on them. I guess at that time the price difference between SX and DX was still pretty large. I suppose when the 486 came out the prices became too close to justify giving expensive L2 cache to a "budget" CPU.

Unfortunately there are risks involved with a 386SX cache system. Because most of them are fairly old they seem to be a little buggy and lacking in features. Perhaps an optimized cache-less 386SX would be faster. I want to try, because I've never seen a 386SX with L2 cache before (though I have heard of them).

If experience is anything to go by, then this AMI board I got should be pretty decent. A long time ago a friend of mine had a AMI 386DX motherboard, and it had a lot of neat settings in the BIOS. I believe it also supported clock doubling directly on the motherboard. From the small ebay photo my board appears to have solder pads for a removable 386SX socket (hopefully with pinout matching the ones I already have). I plan to clip off the existing CPU, solder on the socket, and drop in this TI486SXL chip of mine to see what happens. I have only seen photos of 386SX motherboards with sockets, but I occasionally see boards with the solder pads. Anyway, a 386SX with both L1 and L2 caches should be pretty neat if I can pull it off.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I tested out the ARK1000 today without much luck. Like the seller said, it's really picky about bus speed. I tried this card in two systems. On my 486 40MHz vlb system, the card would not even work with a waitstate added. Text modes were fine, but graphics modes mostly didn't work. The card wouldn't work at all on my Pentium VLB system at 33MHz. Very picky card. Even though faster than ET4000, the tseng is probably better since it is more tolerant of faster speeds.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

I ended up getting 4 PS/2 systems recently

Model 60, 65sx, 2x80's full of cards and a box of extra cards. 2 of them have a cool 200MB IBM WORM drive and I have a couple boxes of unopened media for them.

I managed to find 10 6V batteries for the units, but also found out the 65SX has a DALLAD RTC soldered to it thats dead, now I have to find one to rework it.

VLB SCSI cards are picky about bus speed as well, some will not work at 40Mhz or more, but I never had a video card that was that picky on VLB.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

These pages may help with the battery situation:

http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm

http://www.tavi.co.uk/ps2pages/battery.html

Come to think of it, I need to replace the battery in the PS/2 Model 80 I have; it ran Win95 pretty stable as I remember (even though it's just a 386DX/20)...

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

T-R-A wrote:

These pages may help with the battery situation:

http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm

http://www.tavi.co.uk/ps2pages/battery.html

Come to think of it, I need to replace the battery in the PS/2 Model 80 I have; it ran Win95 pretty stable as I remember (even though it's just a 386DX/20)...

Thanks for the links.

The model 80's use some standard 6V camera batteries, I ended up snagging 10 new ones in retail packaging for $12 shipped on ebay (good till 2011), walmart wanted $10 for 1.

Any special cards in your 80? Both of mine have 486 upgrades (Mcmasters)

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Sadly, the only "special" card was the IBM 16/4 Token-Ring network card, which I never could get recognized, even when using the correct .adf file (and having formatted the disks in DOS). It was pulled (and consequently misplaced) after that. It did also have the 8514/A display adapter card, which worked really well in Windows 3.1 (albeit interlaced), but never found the correct driver for use in Win95 (A). As mentioned, it was about the most stable Win95A system I ever had (even though it only had 10MB of RAM and a 161MB SCSI HDD). Possibly because I used the "13-floppy" version of Win95 instead of the CD-version (less crap installed). Found out early on after getting this machine (which was abandoned after the owner found out it couldn't be upgraded to play some high-end game she had) that floppy-drives are notorious for going bad in them (though easily repaired); and that any MCA sound card has to be one of the most rare (and expensive) things on the planet. Guess IBM didn't intend these for "home-use" in 1987. I know it takes a camera-type battery (installed under the speaker) and it's fairly generic battery as well. Just haven't gotten around to it (been too busy tinkering with my "new toy"---an Asus Eee PC 700)

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Have a link for fixing dead drives? I have one that doesn't read disks in a model 80.