I have a bunch of 486 chips, several of which I suspect have damage and are glitchy. I'd like it if there were a way to be sure of this - anybody know a tool to test the stability, or whether a chip is "good"?
Look for a DOS CPU burn in tool. I am sure there are some around. It'll thrash the CPU with Math calculations to tax it as much as possible, you should know pretty quickly if the thing is unstable or not.
I have a benchmark called ByteCPU that runs under DOS w/ some Japheth extensions to let it run the win32 console app it is that works with 486 - if it goes through that should that be sufficient? Or is a burn in tool different?