First post, by Skyscraper
Hi!
I just discovered this forum and after reading a few threads I got inspired to build my own retro system for dos gaming.
About 10 years ago I found an old trashed compaq computer, I took it home but for some reason I only saved the motherboard with a pentium 133 cpu and the power supply.
It was lucky that I at least kept the PSU since its some sort of custom AT psu with both the normal AT power connectors and some sort of extra power connector.
After using my epic google skills im quite sure the motherboard comes from a Compaq Deskpro 4000 5133...
There are lots of versions of the system board for the deskpro 4000 with p133 cpu. 686G5, 686G6, 586V and 686V, my board seems to be the 686G5.
A pentium 133 is a bit slow for the voodo 2 card I plan to use so I searched my appartment for socket 7 cpus.
Among the cpus I found were 3 p200mmx and a p166mmx, a quick search later and it became clear that the fastest cpu officially supported was a p166 without mmx. Probably no 2.8v core voltage support.
Official support is not something I require, what could go wrong? 😉. I found a page that listed jumper settings for a board that at least looked like my board and sure enough there is a jumper setting for 3x multiplyer.
Since the cpu likely will be fed with 3.3v I picked the single one that was 0.35 µm the rest was of the 0.28 µm version. (edit: speedsys identifies it as 0.28 µm so perhaps it is a 0.28 after all)
I also searched for other parts to use and found 4x16mb and 4x32mb 72pin edo memory, a soundblaster 64 gold , a socket a cooler, a 2.5gb harddrive and a floppy drive.
I put the stuff togheter and pushed the power button, it booted at once and asked if I would like to save the updated configuration.
I restarted to enter the bios setup to assign IRQs and DMAs and the like... f10 f2 del del! F10 F2 F10!... no bios setup, back to google.
Ok so it seems the bios setup utility is stored on the harddrive that I threw away 10 years ago but after some intensive googling I found a compaq softwere package with the setup utility for deskpro 4000 with pentium 2 CPU...
What the hell pentium / pentium 2 whats the diffrence... its only a utility to let me access the bios not the bios it self . I downloaded it, made the disks and installed a new setup partition, it worked!
After that I installed dos 6.22 and everything seems to be working.
Now I'm pondering whether I dare to update the bios.
I downloaded a bios for the deskpro 4000 5133 686g5 from a shady driver site. I also found a compaq year 2k check utility that I think will be able to tell me if the bios package I downloaded is the correct one 😀
I will update this thread as I progress
English is not my native tounge so if this looks like some google translate garbage keep that in mind 😉
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.