386 box supertunning

[dave]

I find it really hard to believe that these old CPU's have no cache (or very little) on them. I remember before I killed my celeron 1300 I turned the L1 and L2 cache off. It was slower than my 486's! It was horrible! I waited 10 minutes, and Windows XP was still loading. I got sick of waiting and turned the cache back on. I am never doing that again! I suppose 8088/86's, 286's and such wouldn't need it because they were handling fewer instructions or something

haha. 96K of buffer on that deskstar. I wonder if the 230MB conner drive in my 486 has any buffer?

Also, is that AIDA thing downloadable? I want to run it on my 286 and my 486's

[electronixguy]

@tom

Congratulations on finally getting your 386 back, I look forward to your experiments

Looks like you've made some neat little mods to the board, should make your experimentation easier now. I think I have a few linux distros that will run on that machine, I'll have to look in my ISO collection on the acer thing next time I run it... If I have anything useful for that, I'll post versions here, and I'll upload to rapidshare or something if you want any.

[Tom Maneiro]

For those interested in AIDA16/32...

shinobiresources.com/downloads.htm

AIDA16 = DOS mode (you can't run it under Windows!)
AIDA32 = Windows 9x...XP

(FYI: AIDA used to be freeware, until they were purchased by Lavalys, and we know it as the pric€y Evere$t)

[dave]

hahaha. AIDA16 crashed my 486 while detecting the chipset! I'ts been at the same screen for 5 minutes Maybe it's EMM386's fault, it causes quite a few problems on this machine, and I can't be bothered to disable it. Ctrl+alt+delete will even freeze it up!

DAMN YOU MB-4D50AV and EMM386!!!!!!! I kill you

Edit: It worked yesterday, and after exiting, control+alt+delete worked too! A rare occasion where it does. I also found out my Conner CFS210A has 32KB of buffer! Yay me! Apparently, the DX4 Overdrive is a "Mobile" DX4...

[idisjunction]

Hi. I've been following this thread for quite a while, but never bothered posting. I'm doing so now to see if anyone wants to try a crude Linux floppy I made a while back. It may be useful to see if your old computer is capable of running a modern kernel. It does very little, but it'll boot to a shell and allow you to run some very basic commands (like top). It boots in 4 MB of RAM on QEMU, and I've made very similar kernels that run on my 486DX-75 with only 4 MB of RAM (oh joy!). I didn't compile in FPU emulation, so it may not work right if you have a 486SX or have no 387. I'm not sure if GCC and glibc even support the 386 anymore, so it may be an interesting test.

www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e364bd0ba6d2de2f7069484bded33bcd1b9f58c421ce430c

When prompted to insert a root floppy, you can just hit enter, unless you have a root floppy from somewhere else you want to try.

[electronixguy]

I know it's not computer technology, but I thought I'd share a new development here anyway

Hopefully the image shows up right, haven't posted pictures here before... Our Daughter, Kira, was born October 21 2009 at 1:11 PM. She weighs 7 pounds 7 ounces and is 51 CM long/tall. As can be expected, most (if not all) of my experiments have been put on hold for the next while.



edit: Sorry the image is kinda big, it seems to have altered the thread display, at least at 1024x768...

[Tom Maneiro]

Congrats, man!

Don't forget, when she is a bit older, to teach her how to use a computer that is not an smartphone

[dave]

electronixguy - Congratulations on your new member to the family! Now have fun with dirty nappies (diapers just incase you were wondering what a nappy was) and feeding! Before you know it, she'll be crawling, and then walking, and then starting school. I wish you, your wife and Kira all the best in the present, and the future!!

[electronixguy]

@tom - Don't worry, I will lol I can't stand "smart" phones anyway...


Thanks for the comments, guys, I'm glad you're not annoyed at the off-topic post

[GiGaBiTe]

I recently got some old computer parts if anyone wants them. You'll have to pay $10 USD + shipping (for the CPUs). The parts I got are:

2 x Am5x86-P75 (133 MHz) (P/N. AMD-X5-133ADZ)
1 x Am486 DX/2 (80 MHz) (P/N. A80486DX2-80NV8T)
1 x i486 DX/2 (66 MHz)

I also have two rare but broken SOYO 486 boards. The one I have for sale has 3 things wrong with it:

1. It has no battery (I desoldered it due to it being dead and leaking)
2. Several pins on the I/O chip were corroded by acid so I had to remove the acid with solder. The pins in question are for the parallel port connector, so the parallel port is dead. Someone skilled with a soldering iron and PLCC chips can probably fix it
3. It has a corrupted BIOS. The board will boot with an ISA video card and display the "Award Boot Block BIOS 1.0" and want a floppy with the BIOS image on it. I've tried to fix it without success. Someone with a ROM burner (32 pin DIP) can probably fix it.

The board is $15 + shipping. The board is probably worth fixing as it has 4 PCI slots.

[Tom Maneiro]

486 with Flash BIOS? Looks unlikely... but since this beast also has PCI (so it's at least late 1994 to early 1995), it's not a wicked idea.

After all, Flash BIOS motherboards were already available in 1995, from the big brands (like IBM). What says the BIOS ROM chip? (peel the label if needed)

[GiGaBiTe]

The BIOS chip socket on the motherboard is for a 32 pin DIP, which according to various images on the internet was widely used up into the PIII era. I tried the old "boot up a board, pull the original EEPROM out and stick this one in and flash it" method, but for some reason the flash doesn't work. I assume it's because I'm using the wrong version of AWDFLASH. The flash says it's successful, but putting the EEPROM back in the old board just results in the "Award Boot Block BIOS v1.0" console.

Both SOYO and iWill (the board I transplanted the EEPROM into) are defunct companies so I had a hard time even finding a version of AWDFLASH that would even work with the boards.

The BIOS chip itself is just a generic 384k EEPROM.

[dave]

@tom - This is probably a stupid question, but have you ever thought of putting Windows NT 3.51 (yeah, the program manager sucks, but it's guts are okay) or NT 4 on your 386? Just a thought for an experiment or something if you have a spare HDD.

GiGaBiTe - I like the sound of those 486's (I should probably PM that, but anyway). I'll have a think over them at school today seeing as it's as boring as digging holes.

[Tom Maneiro]

GiGaBiTe: Give a try to Uniflash! It's way better than AWDFLASH, and much safer.

dave: Yup, i have plenity of spare HDs... so it would be a nice idea. First i need to find some NT3.51 install disks (and in Spanish, if such thing exists).

I've done some more testing with 40MHz 386:

- DooM: After loading CTCMBBS, I got AWEsome audio under pure DOS. For some odd reason, music does not work, only SFX! I've tried playing a bit with Doom setup (changing to General MIDI, Sound Blaster, SB AWE...), but i was unable to get music! And it works under Wintendo, so i don't know what the heck is going wrong here... As for the game: it's a bit slow, but the framerate improves a bit with those extra 7MHz...

- Supaplex: Works nicely, and sounds cool with the AWE64 (Supaplex has support for SB, Adlib, Roland-something... and PC speaker!)

- Web browsing: IE3 actually renders a bit faster! I saw no big improvement under Arachne, however... Arachne takes up to 10 minutes to render complex sites, like Engadget homepage... and even the final result totally sucks, as Arachne has next-to-null CSS support. Obviously RAM is a huge bottleneck, even worse than CPU.

Aside of the obvious RAM shortages, the system is highly stable. Need to do some temperature checking on that 'SX

System global status:

- Marika (386): Stable at 40MHz, but required RAM swap.
- Asumi (P133): OS reload still pending... Candidates: Knoppix! Anyone have another Quantum Bigfoot?
- Saki (P225MMX): Hardware failure One (or both) of the NICs decided to die, making the box to freeze on boot (at least i think that this is the cause, because the kernel logs say that it dies when loading PCNET32 NIC driver)... and i'm far away from the system. I will be back at Friday to diagnose the fault (and hopefully, to not do an autopsy!)

[dave]

hehehe. I have 2 bigfoot CY2160A's . I've got english install disks for Wndows NT 3.51 that are on my computer in image form (I can put them on my website if you wish, but you wanted spanish ones and mine are english). For a browser, (seeing as I hate MSIE after reading toastytech.com) I wold use Netscape navigator 4.0x. It would run aright on your 386 I reckon if you turn java and javascript off (seeing as it crashes way more often and slows your computer to shit when it's enabled). About the music in DOOM, does it ask you for a MIDI I/O port or anything? (I'm just suggesting ideas, I can't remember what's in the setup program. I've never even bothered to configure DOOM's music on any of my computers )

Aside from me, are there any more australians on the boards? Shocking won the melbourne cup (!!!), and I got the TV in class tuned in and had a HB pencil as an antenna! (I bet that won't happen after 2012 when we get our analogue TV switched off )