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Unknown (giant!) 386DX motherboard

S

southbird

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 11, 2009
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316
Anyone have any idea about this one? It's got wonderfully unlabeled connectors. I'm at least looking for the speaker connector. I originally bought it just for the TI 486, but ended up finding a better one, so I figured I'd just power this up for kicks. Also, any guesses as to what the extended ISA slot on the far left is for? There's also a 6 pin (3x2) header on the far right (JP4) which I have no idea about... LEDs / buttons perhaps?

I'm guessing the J21 near the battery at the top is the external battery connector and the 4 pin header way down at the bottom is probably the speaker. There's also a two row jumper block down there of purpose uncertain.

100_2273.jpg
 
Nice board with the 486 upgrade and a Cyrix FPU. Without the memory expansion you are stuck with very little memory unfortunatly.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Not giant--just standard AT footprint. I believe it's a Gigabyte 386L The slot is for a 32-bit memory expansion card.
Click to expand...

Ha, well "giant" I guess because during the 386 reign I mostly only saw low profile machines. But fair enough, AT sized. That board spec you linked is very close (thanks, Chuck!) but it is not exactly right. See the layout of the headers:

100_2279.jpg

I can guess that the top 4 pins are the speaker, the 5 are the power LED / key lock, and then by trial and error I found the left two pins of the bottom row are a reset. The next two sets I'm not sure, especially the jumpered one. Neither seem to make a difference. I'm looking for a turbo button because by the memory count it looks like it's operating in non-turbo mode. Although I don't currently have a keyboard or controller to test this board any further at this time anyway.

100_2281.jpg

And I still have no idea what this is for.


Unknown_K said:
Nice board with the 486 upgrade and a Cyrix FPU. Without the memory expansion you are stuck with very little memory unfortunatly.
Click to expand...

Well, I guess there must exist one of these 32-bit memory upgrade cards. Was this any particular standard? A Gigabyte proprietary part? Would I have any hope of finding one...
 
There were far more varieties than that; DTK certainly had their own and the Micron motherboard I have has its own, which curiously, can also take a daughterboard. When DIPs are involved, it gets difficult to pack a lot of memory on an expansion card. SIMMs were a great idea.
 
I would think those boards are proprietary for each system. I have a 386 with one of those 32 bit slots and a riser board that fits it perfectly (takes SIMMs) but the unit will not turn on with the RAM board installed.
 
southbird said:
Neat. But yeah, around what everyone else is saying here ... no chance anyone has any anecdotes from some kind of short lived "standard" eh?
Click to expand...

Not to the best of my knowledge. Heck, even the type and position of the edge connectors weren't standard. And the expansion boards themselves for other than the "name brand" boards were uncommon.
 
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