NEC V20 XT SUPER TURBO 8088 BUILD: NEC V20 XT SUPER TURBO 8088 BUILD
VTECH LASER 8086 XT/3 TURBO 10MHZ SYSTEM: VTECH LASER 8086 XT/3 TURBO 10MHZ SYSTEM
MY IMPRESSIVE 286 12/16 SYSTEM: My impressive 286 system!
MY ROCKING AMD 386-40MHZ: Rocking AMD 386 DX 40Mhz system build
MY OLDSKOOL PENTIUM 1 SYSTEM: MY OLDSKOOL PENTIUM 1 SYSTEM
MY INTEL PENTIUM III BASED WIN98SE SYSTEM MY INTEL PENTIUM III BASED WIN98SE SYSTEM
ATHLON 64 DUAL BOOT WIN98SE/WINXP SYSTEM: ATHLON 64 DUAL BOOT WIN98SE/WINXP SYSTEM
MY 32-BIT COMPATIBLE OLDER SYSTEM LATER ON

Now its time to move on with my 486 build!!
To day my new case arrived! But it wasnt that new as is was supposted to, because someone had cut in the drive bay iam not very happy with... I think that was done because it was in the way of the motherboard (or something else) i guess.. I will try to fix this soon to cut it straight off and make the edges smooth. And i hope i can find maybe another one for it.. But i guess that would be very difficult.. Before i found this case i allready was being busy to find the parts for it..

I found a nice SIS motherboard with 32MB of 72 pins memory. I guess it would have 512KB or 1MB of cache memory and an AMD 486 DX4 - 100Mhz processor on it. This processor would me replace soon for a 586- 133Mhz.(AMD one)
So i can play the highest demanding 486 games like DOOM and so on.

More soon to talk about!
Because iam going to move to another house i had planned to stick to stuff temporary together in the housing because of getting damaged..

Here are just some pictures i made few seconds ago how the case is standby.

Front case! I saw that nice energy star 3d sticker on the front.. When i put my finger on it got to bend. So i had to remove it an see what behind it. When i had removed that sticker i saw that was a hole for a vintage turbo segment led thing.. So i had to remove the front part of the case..
There was only one mounting hole / point for it.. I thought that the other one was snapped off. But that wasnt so.. The factory never had made a second mounting point for it.. I hope it could welt this so i can mount a vintage display there.. Is it correct that the front plastics are made from ABS??

The other problem is that the powerled is green what is normal.. And the harddisk activity led is green to, what i really dont like.. So i will replace those soon too with a red one as suposted to.

And a picture of the damaged drive bay i will fix this soon. Just make it looking it a more little bit nicer then it was.

And temporary i build some stuff in, to protect it from damaging.

For now its just the motherboard.
CT-3900 AWE 32 with 8MB ram (has dutch prices on the memory(i think that nice gimmick to)
An Diamond Stealth 4MB S3, VLB
And a DTK PTI VLB controller / I/O, maybe change it for a SIIG with enhanced bios one that i also have laying here
There also would be a Gravis ultrasound in and my rocket Midiman MIDI board.
And i guess that i would mount a NEC DB60XG to the AWE32 board..
For the harddisk i need to think about that one, maybe 4GB or smaller i think.

EDIT: 3-4-2014

Iam thinking to start building this system, for now i have three VLB boards ready that can deal with processors till the AMD 5X86 P75 133 mhz processors.
One board of those i had to update the bios, it should do bigger hard drives now (i guess till 8,4GB from the motherboard bios) and solved the Y2K bug on this board.
From the second board, it arrived here with a dead bios (didnt want to start up on the first place) After looking i found a same board from a version later. And tried that version eprom on the older board and it worked..
After that i wrote a new bios chip with my eprom writer and foilah it worked.. These boards also have support till 8.4GB and running just fine.. Which boards iam talking about?

The first one is a Freetech 486F38 VLB SIS 85C471 chipset board with autosensing cpu voltage.
The second is an QDI V4P895 SMT V4.0 OPTI895 CHIPSET VLB
The Third is also an QDI V4P895 SMT V5.0 OPTI895 but SMT 5.0 (seems that V4.0 and V5.0 can handle the same bios) V5.0 only has a slightly PCB design differences (like headers)

I have a lot more 486 VLB boards here, but most i need to solve their problems. All of these board i will do a color jumper mod on it (because of easy handling the settings)
I also have a big box here of 72 SIMM modules. I need to test them out on a Pentium 1 board and see if its EDO or FPM, i really cant see the differents. A couple of them are test already, but i have more of them here laying in a box, waiting for testing.

I was thinking of making an 133 mhz system, for now i think its better to leave it 100Mhz for now.. It needs to be a faster 486 system.. so thats why i didnt choose the 66mhz counterpart and the first place. But iam guessing 133mhz is a little bit to fast from my opinion.

Iam going to use that bigtower case in this post, because it give me a plenty of room to work in, and this case is in new shape when i bought it. It came with a damaged harddisk tray.. But i had found a case with a similar harddisk tray with very much luck, and now i have swapped it to this case.. Why i waiting so long on this build is because i wanted to make the turbo display in place with this case (came without one, but had the option for it) But it seems to very hard to find one to fitt in this case, but that idea i will put it on the shelf for now..
First iam trying to get this system running, after that i will do the fine tuning part. I will start this weekend i guess, when i have the time..
But first i want to try everything out before i will build this whole system thing.

Parts that should get installed:

Iam thinking of one of my Roland SCC-1 cards in this build, and using the MPU-401 to connect the roland CM-32L to it (my two other roland LAPC-i boards will get a place in my 286 build, and the other should get installed in my 386 build.
Graphics card, iam thinking of the Diamond Stealth 64 with 4MB of videoram and S3 vision964 or the Number nine computer corporation #9GXE VL with S3 928 (it can handle up much memory on board)
I know the stealth 64 is faster, but i prefer the number nine one.
Memory would be 20MB, its enough for my goal, dont want to go install win95 and win98 on it.. Just want it plain simple as back in the days with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 WFW

Soundcards iam not out for this moment because i have a lot of options here:

I have four Creative SB 16 CSP CT1740 (dont like it for a faster 486 system, because of the older classic retro sound, its fits nicer in a much older system )
I have two Creative SB 16 CSP CT2230
I have one Creative SB 16 CSP CT2290
I have two Creative SB AWE32 CSP, one is CT3900, and second CT3980
I have two Creative SB PRO 2 CT1600
I have a couple of Creative SB AWE64
I have two SB AWE 64 regular (one older version, and one newer version)

I also have some gravis cards here.. choices became overfull..

Iam doubt between the SB 16 and SB AWE 32 at the first place.. But i choose one of the SB16, it would do the CT2290 or the CT2230. On this card iam planning to stick an NEC XR385 midi daughterboard on it. So i have the compatibility for Sound canvas, Yamaha MIDI, MT32 sound on this system.. And want it to expend it with a gravis ultrasound card.
The harddisk would be a 4GB one ( i need a plenty of storage, best way to do it is to make two partitions on the disk.) for the rest i have to see.

Ok, lets begin!

Three / four days ago i started building this system. ( i didnt know it exactly anymore). Because i wanted serious something see ` arise` from the parts i had lie over a couple of months / weeks in my hobby room.
I was also a bit disappointed that the building part took so long, maybe i wanted to wait a little bit longer to hope to find some more better parts i could use.. Because all of that waiting, i getting a little bored of waiting to whole time.. I also couldnt make the decision, which case i should take, which motherboard i should take, how much memory i wanted in this system, and which processor i wanted to take..

For the motherboards i could choose from three boards.

1. Freetech 486F38 (SIS 85C471) (voltage sensing)
2. QDI V4P895P3 SMT V5.0 (OPTI 895) ( 5v and 3.3volt)
3. QDI V4P895P3 SMT V4.0 (OPTI 895) (5v and 3.3volt)

i already had made these boards in full working state, one board had to have a bios upgrade to solve the y2k bug. The other board was dead on arrival when bought from ebay.. The problem was the old bios was dead so the display from the computer didnt get on.. I bought the SMT V5.0 also from ebay.. When it was here i swapped the rom on the older board.. When fiddling some jumpers the board was working again.. Only what i needed to do was writting a new eprom from SMT V5.0 board and so i had 3 working boards.. All of these boards do support processors till AMD 5X86 P75 / 133. My first goal was to use one of these processors in this system.. But i changed my plans.. I wanted something make it special. not do what other retro builders also did.. I have 2 or 3 DX2 66, some DX2 80er, some DX4 100er, and 120er and 5x86-133er.. My intension was to go build a faster 486 system, dont wanted to make a slow 486 DX system in the first place.. I know a lot people are going for a DX2 66 mhz processor.. But personal i wanted some faster system.. so i thought why not going for the 80mhz?? I wanted to give that a real chance, because otherwise i had collect these processor for nothing.. For the board it was a little bit easier.. Because i had two of the same QDI V4P895P3 SMT boards, i decided to take the older SMT 4.0 one (four is my lucky number).(also the VLB slot on the upper part is better for a big tower. Concerns the memory, i had to check which i had in stock.. But i wanted to choose for 20MB memory.. I know back in the days you needed at least 16MB of memory in de system. Because iam going use MS-DOS 6.22 as operating system i really dont need more memory then that.. And 20MB is a nice round value.. Because i pre-tested this motherboard (for the parts if they would work) it struck me that the board really loves fast memory.. So i decided to look for some nice 20MB 72P simm set with 60ns...

About the case.. I found that one on a second hand website in the netherlands.. The case was brand new when it arrived here.. But there was a little flaw.. When open up the case i saw that the harddisk cage was damaged. (picture look on the upper side) When i was trying to find some other nice AT cases. I had found also a big tower case from germany.. But when it arrived here, the front bezel was damaged.. I decided not to going use it anymore for my build, because i really dont like to use ugly damaged cases for trying make a nice build in.. But i thought it was better to save the metal part as spare part.. When i looked in that case i notice that the harddisk cage looked the same as from my other case, but finally it was a match.. So i swapped the old cage, with the good one...