Party like it's 1991 - 386SX PC

[almoststew1990]

You may remember the "Windows 98: The Beige Build" thread which eventually came together well and was upgraded over the course of the last year and a half - its still going in AMD Slot A 800MHz form. I played around a bit with DOS mode on it and I've been itching to make a proper DOS PC. So here is my new project, an 80386 based PC!



It's a Baby AT form factor so I was expecting to have to buy an old or "new old" case but surprisingly one of my cases could accommodate it (my least favourite case but never mind).



It's got an AMD AM386SX at 40MHz, 4MB of RAM, lots of 16bit ISA slots and that's about it! It has a barrel battery on it instead of a CR2032 "normal" CMOS battery. Luckily, it is at least a new barrel battery so shouldn't leak (again).

One of the reasons I was hesitant about this build was that it meant, once again, I would have to accumulate a lot of basic kit and peripherals; last time it was IDE cables and PS/2 Keyboards, this time it is controller cards and serial mice...

I have a bit of a shopping list:



I've got my eye on a couple of ISA graphics cards and I'll need to have a think about sound cards. I would like to get Creative Music System support as well as soundblaster /adlib, which limits me to basically the original soundblaster , sb1.5 and sb 2 if I can find a 2 with the optional cms chips installed.

I might also get a maths co-processor for "floating point calculations" but I'm not sure it will add much to the speed of the CPU.

Does anyone know what the small "socket" is at the very right hand side?

I've got the control card on the way but I still won't be able to properly build it until I get a video card. I'll keep this updated!

 

[almoststew1990]

Great Success!

I've finally got a good few parts together; ATX to AT power adapter, graphics card, controller card, so I was able to test it out - it booted first time! Luckily I bought a controller card that came with a manual so I could set the jumpers as needed. I attached a floppy drive, wrote MS DOS 6.2.2 disks using RawWrite, and it booted to A straight away.

Thanks for the help picking the graphics card which is working with no issues.

It fits snugly in my very small ATX case (it's smaller than my modern M-ATX case!)






Now I need to get a CF to IDE adapter...

...and a sound card.

 

[almoststew1990]

I've got it up and running fine with the CF card and adapter which eventually arrived. Getting DOS installed was a bit of an adventure as most of my disks seemed dead, but it turned out the driver only worked 99% of the time! Swapped the drives over and DOS is fine. I've loaded the CF card up with lots of games and it's working great, especially for those speed dependent games like Secret of Monkey Island and Test Drive 3, but I still don't have a sound card. I have a bit to learn before I get one as the price seems to vary between £10 and £250!