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The Resurrection of an 18 year old PC - the 486DX2 66Mhz
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08-08-2012 1:43pm#1After comparing a Pentium 2 to a Pi, I started thinking about that old 486DX2 66Mhz chip on the mantelpiece. It was last in a PC back in 1993 and that was broken down for parts in 1995. I was thinking what if, just what if I could get that thing running again.
The Case: The case was still in one of the rooms, somehow a bird made a nest in it. It was covered in droppings and the case was missing.
Power Supply: The AT 180watt power supply was still in the case with the cables and the pc speaker magnet and ribbon.
Motherboard: The empty motherboard (made by SiS) was still in the case. 6 ISA slots and 2 Vesa Local Bus slots (extended ISA). No PCI slots in sight!
Memory: I had 8 sticks of 1mb simms(30x9) upstairs somewhere (the same ones that were ripped from it in 95). 2 sticks were stolen for a SoundBlaster 32 PnP.
Harddrive: The 240Mb Connor harddrive was no where to be seen. Thats ok, that 4.1Gb drive over there might do the trick. Think it was in a Pentium around '97.
Keyboard: Luckily I still had the keyboard as it uses a dplug connection. There is an old serial mouse with it.
Monitor: The Goldstar 15" monitor is not around anymore so I cheated using an old 15" LCD.
IDE Harddrive and Floppy drive controllers: The PC came with an ISA card. Looked like any soundcard - but what it did was house the IDE connectors & control logic for the hard drive and floppy drive.
Videocard:
The original video card, a Vesa Local Bus ISA video, with 1mb of Vram was in an old plastics Dunnes shopping bag with pins sticking through the plastic... might work says I. The beloved Tseng ET4000... Vesa Local Bus was before PCI or AGP or PCI Express standards came out. But was distinct from 16-bit ISA slots.
Soundcard:
The original one i had was an NX Galaxy Pro, an 8-bit "Soundblaster Compatible" card with ADLIB sound. This emulated SB fine but sometimes the cpu suffered.
A year later got a 16-bit Vibra 16 Soundcard (almost an exact SB clone) with a x3 CDROM reader (the caddy box tray kind). The motherboard has no IDE talking of. So the IDE connector was on the soundcard to connect the CDROM to the motherboard. The IDE controller on the soundcard emulated an matsumi cdrom. Which a Windows 98 boot disk in later years would actually detect. In this case dos drivers were supplied with the cdrom package.
Unfortunately, the soundcard I found was actually a Soundblaster 32 PnP designed for a plug and play bios when didnt really take off until 1996+. So no sound is possible for the moment but the pc speaker should do fine in games or utilities (not recommended).
This was a Reeves PC order from the UK, took a month to arrive and when it - it had to go back for a bios fix - the keyboard randomized keypresses - C would print Z and so on. This was an actual fault on the bios chip not the country region dos drivers.
What I did was:
1. Plugged in the CPU, slipped in the 8 sticks of ram. Put in the Power. Turn it on. 8 beeps. That means the cpu is ALIVE! It's ALIVE!
2. Brought down the LCD, slipped in the Tseng ET4000 vga card. Connected the vga cable. Turn it on. I see a bios flash up! 2 beeps. No Floppy or HDD which is expected.
3. Inserted the IDE controller card. Connected the floppy drive. Solid led light wrong way, flip around the cable still no joy. Tried a different card. Turn on - it finds the floppy drive!
4. Insert ms-dos 6.21 boot disk - it reads the disk upon bootup. No harddrive found obviously but works.
5. Rummage for a loose harddrive somewhere in the house. Ah 10Gb harddrive from 1998 - No Joy. Next a 4.1Gb drive from '97. Might work....
6. Boot up and ms-dos tells me I got a drive installed and would you like to install on it? Heck yes.. go for it! Whirrl Whirrrl...
7. I check the contents of the 4.1Gb drive... C:\Dos 5Mb installed, with config.sys, autobat.exec and command.com. Works.. with 241Mb free. I was expecting this..
8. Reboot fdisk (an old hard disk partition manager) tells me I have a 251 Hard disk installed. Ok......
9. Reboot - enter the Bios - under the hard drive - its entered as type 47 (well options from 1 to 46 gave different sizes). Type 47 is like user defined. You enter the number of Cylinders, Sectors etc and it calculated the drive. But this entry was for the old drive back in 1993. Its not auto detected or sized. So enforces the old size on the new drive.
10. I google the serial online and find the geometrics for the new drive. Now the bios says 4170Mb. Great, now lets format it.
11. Reboot. Fdisk tells me i have... 478Mb total when given a primary partitioned. Then I remember LBA... Large Block Addressing overcame the 501Mb limit.
12. This Pc does not support LBA. That's it a max of 478Mb on this. No Matter, it's still better than 248Mb which it had day one. It now nearly rivals the size of a CDROM disk.
13. Install Dos 6.2.1. It all works. Install Doom, works, Install Fractint for floating point unit work - works fine. Might install windows and see.
The CPU is quite hot and never had the basics of a mere heatsink. I would think it be more stable if it did. It did freeze rarely back then. But to think that I'd get this working after 18 years is amazing. A clock doubled 486DX2 66Mhz on a 33Mhz bus. With DosBox and an archive of 18,000 dos applications and games - might try a few benchmarks on it.
Alternatively perhaps a version of FreeBSD would work on 8Mb ram and install on 400Mb. No network and on an ISA architecture would be hard pressed to find such a card and even then the bandwidth would'nt be able to travel along the ISA bus.
When I was googling for drivers I saw this post on Vogons and my breath was taken away - Someone had done the same in 2010. The screenshots are very good, Board, memory (much clearer to see - the white banks of 8 rows). A smaller version of my ET4000 Tseng videocard, the onboard removable 256K cache on the motherboard. The same type 47 user set on the bios screen for the hard drive he had. He has a SoundBlaster Pro card so he'll have sound with the cdrom able to piggy back to the motherboard bus. The screenshots also show you can indeed install a 386SX or DX with/out a co-processor as well on the motherboard.
In screenshots I did the following:
The PC booting up with floppy and in the process of seeing if the harddrive is dead/alive or recognised. Notice the date on the soldered bios battery. It is still working after that length of time. Although when I turned it on - it was slowly losing track of time - 2000 instead of 2012, but still better than 1993. Set now and its fine.
A simple screen shot of the bootup screen when the floppy, harddisk and dos installed and then rebooted. American MegaTrends Intern (AMI) is the bios dated from 1992. The memory is 8Mb and im sure some of you know about the 640Kb conventional memory barrier where a program had to start and then access the memory beyond 1Mb either as extended or expanded memory (EMM386 was a driver that emulated such memory). Memaker works as does Defrag and Chkdsk from the prompt. It really does feel like a primative version of linux now. The help was there typing: help memmaker or whatever you wanted to read.
But to see the letters 80486DX2 again is just... magic!
There is the 1st bios screen - simply with the user defined entry (47) for the 4.1Gb drive i found - Note the bios calculates the size right but the bios can't allocate more beyond the 501Mb limit (which is LBA large Block Addressing issue - which was extended shortly before Windows 95 came along). It's also FAT16 which means you can only have 65536 files on the system. I did a bare check on the Raspberry Pi to see what a bare minimum install did (and i mean before anything) and it still installed 25k files. My Ubuntu system has 251k files. You could get around that limit partitioning the drives in separate drives with 65k files on each etc. But you still had an issue with slack space (where by a 1k file would still eat a 4k cluster, or a 5k file would eat 2 4k clusters (boxes)) FAT32 expanded this, NTFS gave security and now with ext3, ext4 etc we are spoiled for choice. File naming was limited in max length by: 12345678.123
This is inside the PC case. The long card on the left is the video card (Tseng ET4000 1mb). Notice the slot is longer than shorter slots. Thats is vesa local bus. There are 2 on the system here. The 2nd card is the IDE connectors/controllers allowing the hard drive and floppy to connect and be detected. Sadly there is no soundcard in one of the other slots. The 486DX2 is the chip near the ribbons (its name is upside down here). The pc speaker magnet can be seen botton middle attached to the harddrive case. In the middle you probably can see three sticks of ram (8 there in total), in the middle of those ide grey cables in white long sockets. The empty socket is where a 386 would go.
Finally with the case back on and cleaned (still need the 5.1/4 bay covers). I installed and tested a few items. Doom was always a good dos "application" to stress the cpu and video. Right now the chip is rather hot. 20fps doom - well maybe.. I'll have to benchmark it.
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Thanks for the comments. I didn't expect this so soon but I got a hold of a Vibra 16 ISA card!! It was living in a PentiumII-266Mhz that I still have (it has shared ISA and PCI sockets so that was fantastic).
This soundcard has 3 IDE connectors: Standard IDE, another for Panasonic and a Matumi one according to the print on the pcb.
Next, I booted up and extracted 3 floppies of SB16 drivers (downloaded the night before) into a directory and ran install. The installer picked up the right settings 1st time. The classic 220H, IRQ: 5 and DMA:1. The high DMA for 16bit sound and 330 for music. Lines added the config.sys and autoexec.bat.
With the soundcard working, I plugged in the cdrom. This is a 12x LG from 2000, bent the 10th IDE column pin on the soundcard (counting from the right side from pin1) to get the IDE connector on.
From the screen you can see 3 cards installed - The Vibra16 is the greener one in the middle with the IDE cable plugged into it at the end of the card. You can see two columns of IDE pins for the earlier matsumi and Panasonic cdrom drives.
Rebooted with a windows98 floppy and a couple of ISA/PCI scans later it finds the cdrom. Fantastic.
I decided to test the sound with an old PC Format Cdrom (the 4th cd edition they released). It has a ton of old mod music files, avi Mandelbrot zooms using fractint and some doom levels.
CD MODS
WOWII AFRIKA.MOD
How the case internals now look with the soundcard and cdrom in.
Next it's possible to get an 8 euro ISA ethernet card and maybe connect to the network and try DosLynx web browser. Although with 8Mb it will be a challenge. This pc did run Encarta '94 and the famous Berlin Wall clip without falling over. In windows it did use 800x600 in 32K color thanks to the Tseng ET4000.
Having said all that - there are few issues to sort out. The motherboard where the D plug for the keyboard goes in has a dry joint fault on the board. That is, I notice occasionally on boot up - the keyboard can fail. Sometimes its a HDD controller failure and lastly the Cdrom data connect went after 10minutes AFK (although power-wise it was fine). A bit of soldering under the should fix that. But I'll have to take out the motherboard for that. So for now I'll leave it. But that's pretty much where it was in 1994 - that summer got the 16 bit soundcard and x3 cdrom. The year before it was just the floppy and harddisk. Restoration Job complete!0 -
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When I was googling for drivers I saw this post on Vogons and my breath was taken away - Someone had done the same in 2010. The screenshots are very good, Board, memory (much clearer to see - the white banks of 8 rows).
Thanks for the link. I had a 386DX-40 back in the early 90s, and got all nostalgic a while back and started looking to rebuild one. Original board I had was similar to the one pictured. Mine was hacked together from bits and pieces 'cos I had no money and I remember it benching the same as one of the guys new IBM 486s
D.0 -
Next it's possible to get an 8 euro ISA ethernet card and maybe connect to the network and try DosLynx web browser. Although with 8Mb it will be a challenge.
If you really want to browse the web with this baby, see if you can get your hands on OS/2 Warp 3. IBM's WebExplorer still works with many websites. Netscape/Warpzilla with Java and Flash is probably a bridge too far with only 8 meg.
Warp certainly beats the hell out of Windows 3.x0 -
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I should add that I've got a bunch of ancient software on floppies still if you're interested ...
Netware 3.11, PC-NFS, PC/TCP for DOS, QEMM 386, Desqview/X, Windows 3.1, Several DOS versions, MS Office (4.2 I think), PC Tools for Windows, Norton Utilities, etc.
I don't even know if the floppies are still readable, but you're welcome to them if you want to give them a good home
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I should add that I've got a bunch of ancient software on floppies still if you're interested ...
Netware 3.11, PC-NFS, PC/TCP for DOS, QEMM 386, Desqview/X, Windows 3.1, Several DOS versions, MS Office (4.2 I think), PC Tools for Windows, Norton Utilities, etc.
I don't even know if the floppies are still readable, but you're welcome to them if you want to give them a good home
I would myself if the OP doesn't want em I've got quite a few old pcs
I've recently "resurrected" an old Dell 386 that just turned 20 years old in June :pac:
The battery in it had leaked (it actually went all..furry too) so that had to be all cleaned up, but fortunately didn't cause any major issues.
Here's the battery:
And the damage it did, after a bit of a cleanup:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30279551/20120227_210943.jpg
So if anyone has any really old pcs in storage, it'd be a good idea to remove the battery if you haven't already..
And the machine itself:
There's a Parallel Zip 100 drive to the right of the Xbox 360 that's REALLY handy for transferring files (I have a USB zip drive for my modern pc)
It's got a network card in it but I haven't set that up yet. I have a load of classic point and click adventure games on it at the moment. Doom never did run so well on it
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No problem, if the OP doesn't chime in you can have them!SirLemonhead wrote: »I would myself if the OP doesn't want em I've got quite a few old pcs
I've recently "resurrected" an old Dell 386 that just turned 20 years old in June :pac:
The battery in it had leaked (it actually went all..furry too) so that had to be all cleaned up, but fortunately didn't cause any major issues.
Backup batteries are a real pain in old PC's. They're often soldered in as well, but luckily some have a 2-pin header that you can attach an external battery to, which I've done on an old Compaq server I have that's also probably 20 years old too 0 -
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No problem, if the OP doesn't chime in you can have them!
Backup batteries are a real pain in old PC's. They're often soldered in as well, but luckily some have a 2-pin header that you can attach an external battery to, which I've done on an old Compaq server I have that's also probably 20 years old too
Yeah i'll get around to eventually changing the battery. It should work ok if I link up 3x 1.5volt batteries. I have to manually configure the bios every time I turn it on but it's no big deal.
If you've got several versions of Windows 3.x and Dos, If the OP wanted to take the "best" versions i'd appreciate anything at all I can get my hands on leftover 0 -
My Compaq runs just fine on 2xAA, so only 3V, but the original battery was a 3V coin cell. You can easily buy AA battery holders with 2 places, and I think 4, not sure if you can get one's with just 3.
If you want old versions of DOS, I've got image files (for WinImage) of pretty much everything from DOS 1.0 onwards, and Windows too from 1.0 onwards. I downloaded them from somewhere on the net, I can't remember where now. I've even got some of them working under VMWare for a laugh
I think the only version of Windows I have on diskette is 3.1, i.e. not Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but I'll have to dust off (literally!) the diskette boxes and check.
EDITY: sorry, can't find the ancient DOS versions at the moment, I'll have to go searching 0 -
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SirLemonhead wrote: »I have a few things as disk images but I really love the idea of owning the genuine disks
You'd have to be extremely lucky to find 20 year old floppy disks that are still working, they're way past their sell-by date by now. 0 -
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Oh ye of little faithYou'd have to be extremely lucky to find 20 year old floppy disks that are still working, they're way past their sell-by date by now.
I've just put some the following through WinImage to test them (not every single diskette, just randomly picked ones) and they all passed!
Windows 3.10 - 7 diskettes
MS-DOS 6 Upgrade - 3 diskettes
MS-DOS 6 Plus Enhanced Tools - 3 diskettes
MS-DOS 5 - 3 diskettes
IBM DOS 5.0 - 3 diskettes
MS Office 4.2 - 25 (!) diskettes
Windows NT Workstation 4.0 - 3 diskettes
Windows NT Server 4.0 - 3 diskettes (original disk 1 damaged, replacement disk supplied)
So if anyone wants them plus a bunch of other stuff, let me know. SirLemonHead gets first refusal.0 -
Oh ye of little faith
I've just put some the following through WinImage to test them (not every single diskette, just randomly picked ones) and they all passed!
Windows 3.10 - 7 diskettes
MS-DOS 6 Upgrade - 3 diskettes
MS-DOS 6 Plus Enhanced Tools - 3 diskettes
MS-DOS 5 - 3 diskettes
IBM DOS 5.0 - 3 diskettes
MS Office 4.2 - 25 (!) diskettes
Windows NT Workstation 4.0 - 3 diskettes
Windows NT Server 4.0 - 3 diskettes (original disk 1 damaged, replacement disk supplied)
So if anyone wants them plus a bunch of other stuff, let me know. SirLemonHead gets first refusal.
Excellent! Am definitely interested, would love taht stuff, just give me a shout with what I can take 0 -
You can have the lot!! .. I'm trying to have a bit of a clear out and it's actually getting in the way a bit at the moment. I see you're in Dublin, so you can collect it here in Bray if you have transport, otherwise I can drop them off at yours. PM me and let me know what you want to do.SirLemonhead wrote: »Excellent! Am definitely interested, would love taht stuff, just give me a shout with what I can take0 -
Oh ye of little faith
Not saying that it is entirely impossible, if they're properly stored. I still have a bunch of 5.25" floppies for the old C-64/1541 and many of them still work, at least they did, last time I hooked it up about a year ago.
I just dug around in my "OS Museum" and set up a virtual machine with Windows 3.11 on a "large" drive (1 GB) with FAT32:
It works fine on MS-DOS 7.1 but as you can see, the venerable Norton Commander struggles
to determine free and total disk space. 0 -
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Yeah, I've got some 5.25" floppies of Turbo Pascal lying around here too, no idea if they work as I don't have a 5.25" drive any more. I've even got some 8" floppies up in the attic from an old NEC APC that I had once upon a time. That machine is currently in a computer museum in the Netherlands 0
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Brilliant thread!
I've plenty of gear like this sitting around at my parents' place. I kept a record of what I had back in 2007 so I attached it here. Most if not all of it should still be there. At some point I may give away this stuff rather than dumping it, but it would involve me getting it up to Dublin first.SirLemonhead wrote: »So you're saying they generally came without heatsink and fan? :pac:
I didn't mean ALL I guess, mostly a lot. Mine certainally didn't but I did have a 486 that had a heatsink now that I think about it
I had a 486DX2-66 with a heatsink and a 40mm fan but that was rare enough - most ran with nothing at all. Even most Pentium and Pentium II processors had just a heatsink.0 -
Brilliant thread!
I've plenty of gear like this sitting around at my parents' place. I kept a record of what I had back in 2007 so I attached it here. Most if not all of it should still be there. At some point I may give away this stuff rather than dumping it, but it would involve me getting it up to Dublin first.
I had a 486DX2-66 with a heatsink and a 40mm fan but that was rare enough - most ran with nothing at all. Even most Pentium and Pentium II processors had just a heatsink.
Give me a shout if you do, I'd love that 5-1/4 floppy drive 0 -
Thanks for feedback and tips AND sorry for being late to get back to all.
Dazberry - It was np, its was a joy to see that 386DX in that almost identical SiS board - Vogons is a great site i normally use for DosBox. That whole section on old system there is amazing.
Alun - thanks for the kind offers. I think I should be ok for software. I'll dig out FreeDos 7.1, fdisk and install.
Torqay - Great tip on FreeDos 7.1. Thanks! I'll see if I can access the full 4.3Gb with this (beyond the 500Mb bios limit and the Fat16 2Gb limit). Good to know that 3xstart is a work around if i ever do try re-installing windows 3.1
Gyck - We played doom over a serial cable using the com ports between that 486 and a 120Mhz pentium. Naturally at that stage i was playing from the pentium. Worked great.
Network card wise i'll see what i can do. I'm assuming even if i got a card i'd need a TSR driver setup on bootup.
I might also install Borland C (or Turbo C) just to do a primes.c count up to the 1st 25,000 primes and see how long it takes. This whole project was started off when i got my old P2-266Mhz running against my Raspberry Pi and the Pi beat the P2 on the primes count race. It would be extremely interesting to see how that would go lol. My p120 felt like a 400% increase at the time. The P2-266Mhz felt x2 that again. I would probably see a 10 fold increase in the time it would take to process 25k primes. FreeDos first though...... 0 -
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Procrastastudy wrote: »Firstly its 4am - I relaise I'm here as well.
Have you tried going outside? Obviously not now its dark.
Joking aside - as a geek - kudos for entertaining yourself at 4am with out resorting to a website with a similar name to yours! 0 -
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Want a better graphics card?
A
fastware ag240d (8MB on board) - the manual says it's a 3D PRO 740. possibly 8MB
B
rage pro turbo agp 215r3bja33 - low profile card - has 4 vg3617161dt chips on it, so I'm guessing it has 64MB on it)
C
S3 Trio 3D/2X 4MB AGP VGA Video Card S3 QCE2HC
D
Creative Labs CT7260 - ports; line out, spdif out, tv out, vga out (blue 3*5 vga connection), vga in (round 3/4/2 connection). has four m11b416256a chips on it, so I'm assuming it's 16MB.
A, B, and C were in static bags. D wasn't. Unknown if any of them work.0 -
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