Great! I have a normal IDE controller, with one IDE channel, but is occupied by both disks. I used to have a CD-ROM, connected to a SB 32. But my soundcard passed away a month ago, and replaced it temporarily with a sb16 pnp. But my cd-rom wouldn't work when it was connected to it. So I got rid of it completely..... I like better the look of the PC with just two floppies, and if I want to run sth new, I remove the CF card which is on a bracket.

I decided to format my 2GB CF device. The one with Win98 on it. I am in the process of installing Windows 95 on it. I wanted to do Win98, but the minimum requirements are probably a 486. When Win95 is installed, I will post back with some comments.

All of this is using the 386 mobo with a Siig IO controller. Here's a page from the manual, and below is a screen shot of the formatted 2GB CF device.

I've got windows 95 installed, but I can't take any screen shots of the resources, etc. I've tried Everest Home and Ultimate, and also SiSoft Sandra 2001 and 2002. Everest throws up errors, while Sandra complains of missing .DLLs. Is there another win95 compatible utility I can use, to do some simple Windows benchmarks, and to show the speed of the system? Thanks a lot for any info.

Quake requires a FPU to run as well.

I was wrong about 386dx. I always used to think that 386dx contains internal FPU. ^^

In the process of testing, I accidentally broke this thing. It's like a jumper. It's used to select what cache size your mobo has. Oops. How can I replace it, I wonder? What is it? Are there any "brains" inside the black part, or is it just simply a piece of metal?

What a pity, but great results require great sacrifice. (;
I have got part you broke. If you want I can send it to you for free. I admire that you explore the power of finding limitations of those old computers.

If I were you, I wouldn't bother much about that. A 386 is a much too old cpu to run windows 95 on. Even if your system has a very strong advantage because of the CF card being very faster compared to a disk, you should have installed at least 16-24mb ram.

Thanks very much udam_u! 😀 I have made a repair to the broken item. Hehe, I used a staple! I haven't tested it yet, because it's in a Contaq 386 mobo without a CPU - I'm waiting for a new CPU to arrive. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't work, because of my repair, I'll kindly ask you to send that replacement part. Thanks very much!

I got Windows 95 installed on to the 2GB CF. The 386 mobo's settings are - 128Kb of cache, 100 MHz osci, 386DX-40 overclocked to 50 MHz, 20 MHz bus speed, 8 MB of SIMM RAM (4 SIMMs are 60ns, the other 4 are 70ns). Windows 95 seems to be stable. Here's what Wintune 97 thinks of this system. BTW, Markk you are right. However, I was very curious to see how well the 386 mobo would cope with Windows 95, on a low amount of RAM.

How much time does it take to boot? I remember being given a 486/33 with 8mb ram and an old 130mb seagate disk, with win95 installed, and it needed ~5mins.....

Hmm are you really sure about the bus speed at 50 Hz?
A divider /2 would be 25 MHz and /3 16.66 Mhz.
(double divider for your osci at 100 Mhz)

Did you had to increase some waitstates? At what Read / Write Waitstates do you run at 50 Mhz?

As for Wing Commander, I use to simply switch off the L2 cache on my 386DX-40 and then speed is fine. It scores in SI7 then at about 26.
It may be a little bit slower, anyhow this will e the case if you don't go for a ET4000.

Another thing is - how many ISA cards did you try until all worked at this high speed?
Most of my cards won't go beyond 10 Mhz. (Some even won't post `at 10 MHz ISA CLK)

Thanks very much udam_u! Happy I have made a repair to the broken item. Hehe, I used a staple! I haven't tested it yet, because it's in a Contaq 386 mobo without a CPU - I'm waiting for a new CPU to arrive. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't work, because of my repair, I'll kindly ask you to send that replacement part. Thanks very much!

He he he funny solution. How to transform part available at your fingertips into something useful. I think that this is a kind of "computer survival school". From my diary I used Finish Line oil (originally intended for bicycle chain) to repair noisy fan. I'm waiting for information about your mobo. (:

Markk wrote:

How much time does it take to boot? I remember being given a 486/33 with 8mb ram and an old 130mb seagate disk, with win95 installed, and it needed ~5mins.....

Ive got W95 on my 386 DX40 with 64meg of ram, it takes just about 53 seconds from power on, thats including the 4 or 5 seconds to test the ram, not touching the keyboard to speed it up, its perfectly useable.

anyone got an old version of hd tach that will run on windows 95?

retro games 100 wrote:

Siig Multi I/O controller card

Got any more info on this card? It sounds interesting! 😉

Gasp! You've just made me rethink something. I looked at the mobo manual again, and it says the following, for my current jumper configuration: CLK2/4. Underneath, it says "CLK2 equals the OSC speed of the mother board". That means 100/4 = 25MHz! The bus speed is running at 25MHz! I thought it was 20MHz, but that's incorrect, because that was for my old bus speed calculation, when I was using the 80 MHz osci.

Regarding wait states: The only way to get the mobo to boot up successfully using the 100 MHz osci with a bus speed set to 25 MHz, is to set a BIOS set up field called "Auto configuration function" to Enabled. When this setting is set to Enabled, it appears to ignore all manually entered BIOS wait states. Also, I think my Cirrus Logic 1MB video card is the only video card I have that will tolerate such a highly overclocked system. I tried about 8 others, and none worked correctly.

For Windows 95 boot up speed, I get this -

Switch on power and wait for the BIOS POST display to say "Starting Windows...". Start stop-watch.
Windows 95 appears, 29 seconds later.
Windows 95 task bar appears and the system is ready to use, 5 seconds later.
Total time to wait is 34 seconds. That's with only 8MB of RAM! That's using the last release of Win95, with the unofficial service pack.

I might increase the amount of RAM, and see if that speeds things up a bit. Also, in another thread, I was using an ATI 8514 Ultra "co-processor" card. I was hoping to test it properly. People suggested I needed to use Windows 3.1, but now I have Windows 95 installed, could I use that instead? I wonder if the Windows 95 CD-ROM has a suitable driver for it?

The Siig multi I/O controller is awesome. It comes with a manual. If there's something you want to know about it, let me know.

retro games 100 wrote:

The Siig multi I/O controller is awesome. It comes with a manual. If there's something you want to know about it, let me know.

You happen to have a pic of it?
It's interesting, think there are any more for sale? I'd need a model number though.

It's just a shame it doesn't (officially) support 2.88 floppy drives though..oh well 😜

Re: Siig controller. I'll take a pic and identify it first thing in the morning. Actually, I got it from the Netherlands! From our good friend Salient. It was in his signature list of goodies for sale.

I removed the 60ns and 70ns SIMMs from the board, and installed 4 lots of 4MB 70ns SIMMs. Win95 boot up time has not decreased. Also, the Wintune scores are more or less the same. Here is a comparison summary, including a 486SX-25.

I've seen plenty of 2.88mb floppy drives. I don't think I've once ever saw a 2.88mb disk though.

Siig controller pics -

dirkmirk had a SIIG controller as well but instead of having IDE/floppy ports on it, it lookes like it simply loaded a BIOS extension that added LBA mode support:

He did say he got a HDD performance hit in speedsys from it though.

Thread here: http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread. … t=906144&page=6

retro games 100 wrote:

For Windows 95 boot up speed, I get this - […]
Show full quote

For Windows 95 boot up speed, I get this -

Switch on power and wait for the BIOS POST display to say "Starting Windows...". Start stop-watch.
Windows 95 appears, 29 seconds later.
Windows 95 task bar appears and the system is ready to use, 5 seconds later.
Total time to wait is 34 seconds. That's with only 8MB of RAM! That's using the last release of Win95, with the unofficial service pack.

Well, I don't consider Windows boot up times very suited to bench a system. From my experience it strongly depends on the hardware and drivers getting loaded aswell as network issues. (f.e. try to boot without network conencted and DHCP on).
Though I did a video recently that shows also my 386 booting up Win95.

retro games 100 wrote:

I might increase the amount of RAM, and see if that speeds things up a bit. Also, in another thread, I was using an ATI 8514 Ultra "co-processor" card. I was hoping to test it properly. People suggested I needed to use Windows 3.1, but now I have Windows 95 installed, could I use that instead? I wonder if the Windows 95 CD-ROM has a suitable driver for it?

My IBM PS/2 is a bit weak for Win95 and I also don't want to mess up it's installation. So I haven't tested it there.
Though I remember that I read somewhere that it was already surprising that there was still support in Win 3.1 for a five year old (quite uncommon) card.

That overclockers website looks interesting! 😀 BTW, I've found out something interesting and important about oscillators. They don't all appear to be the same quality, and consequently, the overclocking ability is affected by this factor. Let me explain. I bought 5 100MHz oscis from a website called Farnell. I had to buy this quantity, because they place a restriction on your minimum order. I couldn't just buy 1, for instance.

Anyway, I've just finished testing all 5 of them. Only 2 work, at the mobo's maxed out speed settings. That is, 25 MHz bus speed, which is the /4 mobo bus speed jumper setting. The other 3 will fail at the point where the IO controller tries to see what HDD is attached to it. The BIOS POST display shows garbage characters for the HDD name and parameters.

For these 3 lower quality oscis, I must alter the mobo bus speed jumper to /6, in order for the system to function correctly. If I pull out a "bad" osci, and replace it with a "magic" one, then I can set the mobo bus speed jumper back to /4, and boot up at full speed.

Alphakilo470 wrote:

I've seen plenty of 2.88mb floppy drives. I don't think I've once ever saw a 2.88mb disk though.

Most will be the (useless) IBM ones, without dedicated power connector.
I had a hell of a time finding the disks though, but years ago I got lucky when I walked into this old dusty little computer shop that still had 2 boxes of the disks on the top shelf (including a layer of dust on the box itself) and bought some there.

Heres a pic of an IBM disk I made for vintage-computing:

and a (not all too revealing) pic of one of my 2.88 drives when I was testing my 6BTM slot 1 board:

For some reason I've always LOVED this format, partly because noone seemed to like them very much and because the 2.88MB floppy format is considered a failed standard.

Btw, when using these disks in windows, they are in fact almost twice as fast as the 1.44MB disks.

And thanks for the siig pics! I never seen an ISA card with 2 IDE connectors before, only in pics I saw on the web.
Never been able to get one myself, but I never thought I'd even consider trying out a board that has no PCI or VLB 😜