creepingnet
Veteran Member
Thanks to a board from Jokester, I got that old crazy AT up and running again 2 days ago, and did some final tweaks this morning, it's running better than ever, might be time to try some modern O/S experiments with it soon.....
CURRENT SPECS
CHASSIS: CAT Computers branded Kingspao Model 35 Desktop Baby AT Chassis
PSU: 350 Watt AT PSU (and I need every last drop since I'm driving five drives and seven cards in this PC)
BOARD: FIC 486-PVT, AWARD BIOS, Socket 3, Support for Intel/Cyrix/AMD cpus including 5x86 133
- Burst, & 486 Streaming Enabled, this thing FLIES for a 20 year old PC
CPU: Intel DX4 (80486 DX4-100 CPU) Silver Thermal Paste, modified fan & heatsink for high heat dissipation
RAM: 64MB on 72 pin Fast Page SIMMS
FLOPPY DRIVES: 1.44MB 3.5" (A
, 5.25" 1.2M (B
HARD DISK: A huge number of them, the main is a 3GB partitioned into 2 1.5GB partitions
- Will be possibly using alternate jumpers with a 20, 40, or 80GB HDD with multiple partitions for a myriad of O/S to run including
-- Windows - 3.11 For Workgroups, 95 OSR2, 98SE, 2000 Pro, maybe an expirment or two with XP Pro and 7 32-bit
-- Linux, BSD, BeOS, and some other oddballs when I get the chance
-- all will require an overlay
OPTICAL DRIVES: 52X Read MSI CD-RW drive (use with CD-ROAST in DOS to burn CD-Rs)
OTHER DRIVES: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATA
GRAPHICS: TSENG ET-4000 Graphics Card, 1MB SVGA (800X600 @32-bit Color, usually)
SOUND: SoundBlaster AWE32 with 4MB of Wavetable RAM
NETWORK: NE2000 Compatible Network Adapter
OTHER I/O: Reveal FM Radio Card, Reveal TV Tuner Card
BROWSERS
-- Arachne 1.93 for DOS
-- IE 5.1 for WIN32S
-- Netscape 4.08
-- Opera
-- Other O/S Include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and a hoard of other browsers to try out
OTHER SOFTWARE: A heaping ton - Old Sierra Games, Lucas Arts Games, Origin Games, other DOS titles, Windows games from 3.x to 98SE, Basically, anything that uses early Direct X at the newest. Also mIRC, LeetIRC, Mozilla plugin IRC, Netscape apps (Composer, Communicator...etc), Windows Media Player, Winplay3, RealPlayer, QEMM 97', Vintage MS Office/Works, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics 3.0, WordPerfect 5.1, WordPerfect 6. Basically, I'm covering a decade gap of killer apps, games, browsers, internet programs, graphics programs, CAD, and just about anything else one can name.
The basis of this box was that when I first got into vintage computing, it was through the intel 80486 based machines, before anybody really wanted them, or thought they were worth working with - back when there were a lot of people, like me, trying to eek a modest computing life out of "worthless" pre-pentium hardware. I've had probably over 25 pass through my hands in the past 10 years, and I've always want to have one around, and this one is a mixture of my old machines.....
Flight 386SX (actually, a ZEOS Panther 386/486 hybrid board in a Kingspao chassis) - Was a good, fairly adequate system, but had a lot of configuration errors on my part as it was my first post 8088 PC. The case allowed a LOT of room for modification and expansion to allow me to make it rather featureful - but not very speedy due to limitations of the system board, 16-bit BUS, 30 pin SIMMS, and obscure ZEOS hardware (584 TurboCache comes to mind).
IBM PC-330 100DX4 (T/C: 6571-W5K) - This was possibly the best off-the-shelf PC I've owned, and it lives on in my current 486 machine as the CPU chip came out of this computer. It holds the record for the fastest/most compatible - it ran Windows 2000 Professional for awhile for pete's sake - and quite fast too under 64MB of RAM. Ran all sorts of Pentium era games on it too, like Diablo, Postal "Special Delivery", and DOOM in Win 95. It was considered one of my main boxes for nearly 7 years when the voltage regulator on the motherboard conked out rendering it a doorstop.
What I now have is the equivalent of the best of both + more. I plan to expand to 128MB of RAM though for those later O/S experiments (I know 2000 Pro is rather comfy under 128, as is 98 SE), and maybe in EDO. I also have BIOS support for 4 IDE devices, and as I have an IDE card with 2 IDE channels, I may expand to using that with my dual controller VLB I/O card...that 350 WATT PSU will be getting it's full power used for sure.
Right now, I'm moving several hundread megabytes of Data over TCP/IP network in WFWG3.11 from my Win 7 64-bit machine, it took about 5 minutes to put every Ultima game before Ascention on it! Either way, back to talking on IRC and copying files...
CURRENT SPECS
CHASSIS: CAT Computers branded Kingspao Model 35 Desktop Baby AT Chassis
PSU: 350 Watt AT PSU (and I need every last drop since I'm driving five drives and seven cards in this PC)
BOARD: FIC 486-PVT, AWARD BIOS, Socket 3, Support for Intel/Cyrix/AMD cpus including 5x86 133
- Burst, & 486 Streaming Enabled, this thing FLIES for a 20 year old PC
CPU: Intel DX4 (80486 DX4-100 CPU) Silver Thermal Paste, modified fan & heatsink for high heat dissipation
RAM: 64MB on 72 pin Fast Page SIMMS
FLOPPY DRIVES: 1.44MB 3.5" (A
, 5.25" 1.2M (BHARD DISK: A huge number of them, the main is a 3GB partitioned into 2 1.5GB partitions
- Will be possibly using alternate jumpers with a 20, 40, or 80GB HDD with multiple partitions for a myriad of O/S to run including
-- Windows - 3.11 For Workgroups, 95 OSR2, 98SE, 2000 Pro, maybe an expirment or two with XP Pro and 7 32-bit
-- Linux, BSD, BeOS, and some other oddballs when I get the chance
-- all will require an overlay
OPTICAL DRIVES: 52X Read MSI CD-RW drive (use with CD-ROAST in DOS to burn CD-Rs)
OTHER DRIVES: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATA
GRAPHICS: TSENG ET-4000 Graphics Card, 1MB SVGA (800X600 @32-bit Color, usually)
SOUND: SoundBlaster AWE32 with 4MB of Wavetable RAM
NETWORK: NE2000 Compatible Network Adapter
OTHER I/O: Reveal FM Radio Card, Reveal TV Tuner Card
BROWSERS
-- Arachne 1.93 for DOS
-- IE 5.1 for WIN32S
-- Netscape 4.08
-- Opera
-- Other O/S Include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and a hoard of other browsers to try out
OTHER SOFTWARE: A heaping ton - Old Sierra Games, Lucas Arts Games, Origin Games, other DOS titles, Windows games from 3.x to 98SE, Basically, anything that uses early Direct X at the newest. Also mIRC, LeetIRC, Mozilla plugin IRC, Netscape apps (Composer, Communicator...etc), Windows Media Player, Winplay3, RealPlayer, QEMM 97', Vintage MS Office/Works, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics 3.0, WordPerfect 5.1, WordPerfect 6. Basically, I'm covering a decade gap of killer apps, games, browsers, internet programs, graphics programs, CAD, and just about anything else one can name.
The basis of this box was that when I first got into vintage computing, it was through the intel 80486 based machines, before anybody really wanted them, or thought they were worth working with - back when there were a lot of people, like me, trying to eek a modest computing life out of "worthless" pre-pentium hardware. I've had probably over 25 pass through my hands in the past 10 years, and I've always want to have one around, and this one is a mixture of my old machines.....
Flight 386SX (actually, a ZEOS Panther 386/486 hybrid board in a Kingspao chassis) - Was a good, fairly adequate system, but had a lot of configuration errors on my part as it was my first post 8088 PC. The case allowed a LOT of room for modification and expansion to allow me to make it rather featureful - but not very speedy due to limitations of the system board, 16-bit BUS, 30 pin SIMMS, and obscure ZEOS hardware (584 TurboCache comes to mind).
IBM PC-330 100DX4 (T/C: 6571-W5K) - This was possibly the best off-the-shelf PC I've owned, and it lives on in my current 486 machine as the CPU chip came out of this computer. It holds the record for the fastest/most compatible - it ran Windows 2000 Professional for awhile for pete's sake - and quite fast too under 64MB of RAM. Ran all sorts of Pentium era games on it too, like Diablo, Postal "Special Delivery", and DOOM in Win 95. It was considered one of my main boxes for nearly 7 years when the voltage regulator on the motherboard conked out rendering it a doorstop.
What I now have is the equivalent of the best of both + more. I plan to expand to 128MB of RAM though for those later O/S experiments (I know 2000 Pro is rather comfy under 128, as is 98 SE), and maybe in EDO. I also have BIOS support for 4 IDE devices, and as I have an IDE card with 2 IDE channels, I may expand to using that with my dual controller VLB I/O card...that 350 WATT PSU will be getting it's full power used for sure.
Right now, I'm moving several hundread megabytes of Data over TCP/IP network in WFWG3.11 from my Win 7 64-bit machine, it took about 5 minutes to put every Ultima game before Ascention on it! Either way, back to talking on IRC and copying files...