Starting the 486
So I've finally almost got most of the parts together. A fair share of it new such as the motherboard, video card, network card, sound card, and controller card.
Below is the motherboard:
As you can see the battery was fortunately in good physical condition:
Regardless, as a precaution I've snipped the battery off. Need to look at getting an external battery:
Reading the manual, I've set the jumpers to 3.3 volts and the right clock speed. I'm pretty sure I've inserted the CPU in the right orientation:
Today, I received from eBay locally a couple of 16 MB 72 pin sticks, Panasonic brand:
I was then about to place the motherboard into the AT tower case, only to find it has only two mounting screws inside so the motherboard won't sit flatly. Will need to see if I can find any extras lying around.
Below is the motherboard:
As you can see the battery was fortunately in good physical condition:
Regardless, as a precaution I've snipped the battery off. Need to look at getting an external battery:
Reading the manual, I've set the jumpers to 3.3 volts and the right clock speed. I'm pretty sure I've inserted the CPU in the right orientation:
Today, I received from eBay locally a couple of 16 MB 72 pin sticks, Panasonic brand:
I was then about to place the motherboard into the AT tower case, only to find it has only two mounting screws inside so the motherboard won't sit flatly. Will need to see if I can find any extras lying around.
Comments
For network cards, I think I'd recommend any 3com or Tulip based card. Sound, you've picked an AWE AFAIK. Video will be interesting, especially on a 486. I think a Voodoo, while probably the best performing 3D card on a 486 is nice, it'd take two PCI slots, which are sparse on your machine. I liked ATI and S3 cards, because while their 3D is tolerable at best, (and not ideal on a 486 anyways) their 2D acceleration is the best.
As for other stuff: Consider perhaps separate serial, and disk controllers instead of a combo I/O ISA controller? One thing is adding a SATA card, which opens a lot of doors. USB would be handy as well.
If you're planning to add USB I think you'll only be able to get USB 1.0 working on that due to the front side bus. Not sure on SATA. doubt it would be able to cope with it. Still it would be fun to try.
I'd expect some PCI USB boards would "work", but they would be of limited use under DOS, and Windows 95 only recognizes such cards as USB 1.x due to OS limitations.
Since you got the VLB slots, you might just want to go with a VBL video card.
What are you planning on running on it?
I'd imagine there would be bottleneck issues, but might be handy due to easy availability of SATA drives. Might be interesting to give it a go.
For the I/O controller, I sourced the following card. It's from DTC Data Tech (1995) and supports EIDE:
That's precisely what I bought. An 8 MB card. I had spent a bit of time looking for S3 cards, though typically were mainly 1 and 2 MB and therefore not that good for higher resolutions of 800 x 600 considering it would drop to 256 colours. It was also based on the fact that it was a new card, local seller, and paid less than $20 for it. 3D gaming such as Quake, Half-Life etc. I will more inclined to do that on a Pentium MMX machine that I will be putting together at a later stage.
For the network card, I bought this ISA card by Acer. It might not be a 3Com card, however reading the box and manual it sounds pretty standard for the network cards of the time. It has drivers for UNIX, OS/2, DOS through to Win 95 and NT so pretty much covered.
This was the case I received earlier in the week to put it all together:
For sound a new SB AWE 64 Gold ISA card is on its way.
Initially the usual MS-DOS 6.22/WfW 3.11 combination. It's what I used when I was a kid and also good for DOS gaming obviously. Later, I was considering dual booting with NT 3.51 for productivity apps.
Sure there's Windows 95 and 98 that could run, but I have a P III 800 for 98, and the P MMX to build later which I might throw 95 on it.
That sums it up.
Well I've put it together and attempted to turn it on - just enough to see if it would POST. The power supply fan spins up, the LED display lights up, the keyboard's Num Lock light comes on, and that's as far as it goes. There's no video output and no beeps and yes the AT power cables are inserted the right way with earth cables in the middle.
I've tried resitting the RAM, one by one, and together though made no difference.
Here are beep codes.
http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm
I removed all the cards as you suggested TCPMeta though didn't make a difference.
I thought maybe the old PC speaker has died, so I tried the small one out of my Core 2 Duo machine, no difference. I later determined that the old PC speaker actually works, so I ruled out that issue.
I then tried the AT power supply with the new Soyo Super Socket 7 motherboard I bought a while ago. I went to the trouble of inserting a Pentium 200 MMX CPU, with some SD RAM, and using the switches to set the voltage and bus frequencies. I then plug into a spare fan into the 3 pin CPU socket on the board. Frustratingly I wasn't getting a beep from that either, no video, though the fan plugged in was spinning. As it also has ATX power support, I tried that but received the same results.
I then tried with a used Socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium 166 MMX on it. I was able to get beeps out of this one, appear to be RAM related thus no video would come up. From this I take it the power supply is okay considering I don't have a multimeter to test with.
I also tested the PCI video card in my Core 2 Duo machine, and that worked fine.
It would be a shame if this motherboard doesn't work, but then again its odd that that the Soyo board didn't do much either.
Out of curiosity, does that board support the AMD 5x86 CPU?
The manual's English isn't the best. The board mentions Cyrix CPUs, but not AMD. The manual was from July 1994 however, and according to Wikipedia the AMD 5x86 was released in 1995 as I thought. It's definitely a Socket 3 board, and mentions 3.3 volts only to be used for the DX4 100 CPU. In theory in should be able to accept a Pentium Overdrive, or AMD 5x86.
Here's a couple of pages mentioning about the CPU:
Now that I look at it, that is actually the same model of overdrive I have stuffed in an ISA 486-33 motherboard here.
More info: http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1= ... PR100(V1.1)
When I have a jumper (JP45 DRAM BANK0 SELECTOR) in the default position with both sticks of RAM, I get 2 quick beeps, 8 beeps, then a two-tone beep, then a delayed 2 beeps. Having one stick of RAM, it's just 3 low pitch sounding beeps constantly which I believe relates to the 64KB memory failure.
When I changed the jumper to the other option out of curiosity, it does the same as having one stick of RAM.
The manual states for JP45:
I wish Wednesday can hurry up so I can ship you those memory modules.