Nice case too.

Nice find! 😁 Now you just need to pimp it out with a bigger hard drive (or a CF card), a Soundblaster Pro or 16, an Et4000, and a CD drive.

I guess, it used to have a different motherboard at 1992, with 386-16, 8 with turbo off. It was probably changed for a 386DX-40 board once they became cheap - the board surely does not look like it was made in 1992.

P.S. Nice find, very clean, handsome case. Have fun!

RacoonRider wrote:

I guess, it used to have a different motherboard at 1992, with 386-16, 8 with turbo off. It was probably changed for a 386DX-40 board once they became cheap - the board surely does not look like it was made in 1992.

P.S. Nice find, very clean, handsome case. Have fun!

8-16 could also be a 286.. there were even 20 and 25 MHz models.

I remember now, the hard drive has 1992 stamped on the label. I have no idea how old is the machine itself. I'll take another look at the motherboard tomorrow.

love the case, all of my school's 386's were in a case identical to that one. "back in the day" as for what CPU is in it, the chip in the exact middle of your first picture looks like the CPU, but I cant read anything on it. With a 30mb hard disk, it could very well be a 286. and you might have to remove that white sticker.

luckybob wrote:

love the case, all of my school's 386's were in a case identical to that one. "back in the day" as for what CPU is in it, the chip in the exact middle of your first picture looks like the CPU, but I cant read anything on it. With a 30mb hard disk, it could very well be a 286. and you might have to remove that white sticker.

It was never a question of which CPU this computer is using. We were just speculating why the LED display was displaying 8/16 instead of the proper frequency.

By the way, wikipedia claims that am386DX-40 was released in 1992 so that puts this build in 1992-93 time period.

I have a M396F board with an Am386SX-40, manufacturing date June 1995 according to a sticker on it. 😀

OK there are some good news and some bad:
The bad news is that the computer often locks up and I have to reset it. CTRL-ALT-DELETE usually works. It even happens when I try editing CONFIG.SYS or when loading the CDROM driver. On the other hand, I was able to play a couple of games of Dyna Blaster no problem at all.

Tried removing four sticks of RAM to no avail.

The good news is that the disk is infact 100MB and checks out fine with SCANDISK.

UPDATE: If I boot the system without loading CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, I'm able to open EDIT and load CONFIG.SYS no problem.

I've created a very basic CONFIG (only himem) and AUTOEXEC (only path) for further testing...

I just attempted to install Day of the Tentacle and got stuck half way through disk #2...

What is wrong with this machine??

🙁 always like to see a machine rescued from the dump, its ashame the PC isn't grateful
Can you swap the RAM with another PC? That's the 1st thing I blame for seemingly random lockup/crashes

I'd like to do a RAM test but I can't get the PC to recognise the NEC DVD-ROM...

maybe you should use memtest86 4.0

there is a bootable floppy out there.

use winimage or rawrite to write the image.

Can't run memtest 4.0 from this computer... it gives me a dump of the registers, if I try booting from the floppy..

AX...
BX...
Cx...
DX...

EDIT: actually I can't boot the floppy from a Pentium either. I used install.bat that came with memtest.

EDIT#2: just downloaded version 4.3.2, wrote a bootable floppy with rawrite3 and managed to boot from the floppy. However, right after starting memtest, the PC reboots itself. yay!

I successfully installed MS-DOS 6.22 on a 128MB compact flash card and added a CD-ROM.

The CD-ROM is connected to the sound card's IDE interface and it's horribly slow. Is this normal?

I also get a lot of "Not ready reading drive D" errors on CDs that are perfectly fine.

EDIT: if I connect the drive directly to the IDE controller, I can't get DOS to recognise the drive. I'm using the same bloody OAKCDROM.SYS that worked with the sound card's IDE interface but it doesn't work! It says "No drives found..."

Most soundcards back then didn't actually use IDE interfaces. What some of them used instead was a proprietary interface that had a similar looking cable, but worked entirely differently. Speaking as the owner of such a setup, I do agree, they are quite slow and unreliable. 😜 Your best option would be to get a known-good IDE optical drive (even if it's not retro 🤣), and connect it to the IDE on the motherboard. The Oak drivers should work with it. If not, try some of the drivers from a FreeDOS distro.

The sound card is an OPTI930 and I believe it uses a standard IDE interface. I installed the drivers that came with the card and they included the standard OAKCDROM.SYS and a bunch of other drivers from SONY, MATSUSHITA and the rest. If I pick OAKCDROM, the CDROMs are detected and I can see what's on the CD but whenever I try to actually install a program they're really slow and give me errors. Again I spent 8 hours arsing around and have almost nothing to show for it...

This PC is starting to get on my nerves.

XCDROM.SYS doesn't see the drive either.

I ended up using a different motherboard - an MG 38606 w/ AMD 386DX-40 and 128k cache. When I look at it, it's actually an upgrade! The only downside is that the BIOS on this board doesn't have Auto detect capabilities.

The DVD-ROM is a Pioneer 106S and it works fine with the sound card's IDE controller.

Here's how this is currently setup. I've ordered a MIDI cable for MT-32 and I'll be replacing the OPTi card with a proper Sound Blaster 16 with IDE. Then I can finally try some Roland stuff myself 😀

That keyboard looks badass! 😎