486 Project - Gaming Machine

Matzo

Matzo

Matzo

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23 Jul 2017
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The challenge is to create a vintage 486 machine to the highest possible specifcation built using what I have in the loft and what I can get my hands on, trying to keep it as authentic as possible by using parts from around that era.

The feedback on this idea has been mixed, some people are quite nostalgic and others recoil in horror at their memories of endlessly loading drivers after a painful installation and configuration of dos and windows. Either way you can have fun watching the build or laughing at me trying as I've decided to give it a go.

So it begins...
 


There's an Creative Vibra and an Creative AWE64 Gold, by some miracle I found the drivers.

The AWE64 is the better card by far and has the drivers so that's the sound card sorted.
 



3DFX Voodoo 3
ELSA Gladiac
Diamond S3 Virge / Stealth 3D 2000

Convinced that the ELSA is faster than the 3DFX card, given that the ELSA Gladiac 511 PCI is basically an Early GeForce card. But this can be benchmarked later to confirm.
 



I have 256MB of memory, two 72-pin 128MB sets. Think the most memory my 486/pentiums had was 16MB at the time.

After an exhausting search I could not find the 30-pin set, I had a 32MB set but I must have thrown them out.
 
True, it was unheard of to have 128MB of memory, I suppose the late 90s socket 3 boards had better support for larger amounts of memory.

I did have 16MB with my 486 mid 90s however it was on two full length cards.
 


@hornetstinger - I think my first few machines cost less than £300. Had a bit more of a budget for myself when I started selling them on.

@CapitalOne - You might be glad to see that this build features that mighty DX4 100. I do have a DX2 66 too but I turned to ebay to get the DX4.
 
nkata said:
My first home built was an Intel 486DX33 which I shortly upgraded to a 486DX2-80 (AMD or SGS Thompson can't recall). Luckily the motherboard had dipswitches for 25/33/40MHz bus clocks. This replaced my [email protected] so was a real stormer. I had 4 x 30 pin memory making one bank of 4MB.

Expect endless hours of memory allocations, interrupts, autoexec.bat and config.sys commands.

Actually my 486 ran mainly in windows 3.1 / 3.11. The 286 with its 1MB later 2MB was a DOS only machine.

This was all pre-internet so no cheating, I expect it all to be done with paper manuals, magazines, guesswork and Peter Nortons bibles. :p

The DX33 build was over a £1000 in 1993, the 286 was not much cheaper in 1990.
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It was the few who had PCs back in the 1990s, remember at school when they had RM Nimbus 186's everywhere on trolleys. One PC in one classroom at a time.

Yeah, it wasn't a case of slotting everything together and firing it up and letting the software sort everything out on a custom build. Jumper settings, dipswitches, lots of reading the manual before you even think about turning it on. Making sure all the pins on the CPU were aligned on a refit too. Then there's the installation and configuration of the OS and the drivers.

I remember the odd snag used to take days if not weeks to sort out.

Of course you could just buy one in PC world when that came about, but that would cost a fortune. Prices did come down eventually and always kept a look out for computer fairs. I remember when PC world had a sale on, PC's from £999 at a time you could build a better one for less than half that.
 
cee-S-dee said:
Ohh yeah, the mighty DX4 100! Looking forward to seeing how this build pans out. I'm currently putting together a 486 build which is based around a DX2 66 and ECS elite umc um8810 motherboard. I have so many ISA sound cards its so hard to choose what to use in a build.

I personally would look at getting something with a yamaha OPL3 chip onboard. The AWE64 is a great card but i find the creative opl clone (CQM) makes some games sound strange.
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Would be good to see another 486 build going on, post it up!

To be fair I've thrown an astonishing amount of old kit away over the years, it just seems to pile up. It was only the well known branded stuff that I kept.
 
LewisRaz said:
Love this thread. My first ever pc was a 486dx4 100mhz. Also 16mb ram and an s3 virge like the one you have!
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Lucky. The 486 DX4 100 would have been my dream machine back in the day.

No ideal how I've still got that S3 verge card, found it alongside a Techworks Interactive 3DFX graphics accelerator card.
 




So I've got an AT case, which has seen some use - bit of a clean up and it will look new again. eBay came to the rescue with a boxed CPU heatsink and AT to PS/2 converter.
 
So next on the list is the motherboard...




It's an A-Trend ATC-1425A motherboard with a SiS chipset and is in immaculate condition.

It has support for 3v and 5v CPUs so will take the DX4 100 and will take the 128MB (4x 32MB 72-Pin modules) memory.

This is another eBay buy which cost a small fortune and came all the way from canada. Forgot to mention that the CPU was from the US, bizarrely it was cheaper and easier to buy and pay for postage from the US than buying from the UK. The 486 processers are quite sought after here as it turns out.
 
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nkata said:
Jumper heaven!

My board was a little older than that shown as it came just prior to PCI and had 8 bit and 16 bit ISA slots and two vesa local bus slots which were 32bit like PCI but looked like ISA with an extension slot. These two supported a VLbus graphics card and a VLbus I/O card with FDD, HDD, serial and parallel connectors.

When i did get PCI later, I had the S3 Virge (upgraded memory) and a 3DFX Voodoo 2 3D card (for Doom etc.)

I wish I had kept my Computer jumble however it was taking up two wardrobes and so I had a massive clearout.
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@nkata

Yeah, I remember the VESA cards. The stop gap between ISA and PCI. Took up huge amounts of space, they disappeared when Pentiums came about. My first 486 had a few of them, was an AST Premium II and was a beast, weighed a ton.

It's difficult to justify keeping a wardrobe full of old gear, unless you've got a big loft in which case they can disappear up there.

First graphics card I had was an S3 Trio 64 with 2MB of memory, splashed out a computer fair one weekend. Can't say I noticed the difference graphics wise but it made gameplay a little smoother.
 
nkata said:
The VLBus card was 128kB I recall which was quite a lot in the day and ample for VGA. My S3 Virge was either 1MB to 2MB or 2MB to 4MB. I populated the empty memory socket. It was probably the former as 4MB was quite a lot.

Those 32MB 72 pin simms are quite hefty. My 80286 actually used 72 pin memory in 1990. When I upgraded it from 1MB to 2MB it cost me about £70 and I had to go to Stockport, some warehouse to collect it. It was a Philips proprietary system board. 30 pin was by far more common and available. My first desktop so a mistake was made in that.
Click to expand...

Think I had a few transactions like that. Travelling miles and people travelling miles to buy items. Met one guy half way at a train station to sell him a Pentium III, 933 in early 2000.

I did have in mind for a 30pin simm system for this build but it hasn't work out. Having said that I've got a great motherboard and the project is coming together quite well.
 


No surprise I couldn't find a 2x CD-ROM drive however the 32x drive I found is still late 90s.

Had to get a PS/2 to serial converter for the mouse too.

I knew there was going to be a few jumpers to play with and probably the odd buy here and there. The biggest surprise was going back to the big old ribbons for everything, floppy drive, CD and hdd.
 


Quick check before I screw everything in place. It works! Reports 100MHz and 12MB memory.

Some reason the GeForce card didn't work so I've switched to the Voodoo 3, will come back later on that one.
 
Came across this build in the loft the other day and it's a long time since I gave an update on this thread, so here goes...

I switched the Intel 486 DX4 100 with a later '94 edition Intel 486 DX4 100 with writeback cache.
Swapped the Creative Soundblaster AWE64 Gold with an early edition Gravis Ultrasound ISA Card
Swapped the ELSA Gladiac PCI with a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI graphics card
I've added a 3.5" Internal ZIP drive
Installed Windows 95C
Added a 'Intel Inside' case badge

Pictures to follow...

Also, now there is a vintage section on the site and I've dug up the thread - could it be moved there?
 
... Forgot to mention I added a 5.25" floppy drive and the CD-ROM drives I tried weren't up to the job so I replaced it with an early DVD drive.

@LewisRaz Yeah, it'll have more use now it's all put together and out of the loft.
 
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