VOGONS


First post, by derSammler

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Finished my Alcatel ALC 8551. 😀 This is a nice little PC in a plastic housing, reminding me of the Schneider Tower AT series of PCs.

It seems this was was originally released in 1991 or 1992. My unit is the 1993 version with the 486 upgrade and was sold in 1994 with an updated PSU.

The basic specs of the unit are:

* Custom-made Acer mainboard with on-board 386SX-25 (base config)
* Intel 486 DX/2-50 on socket 1 (upgrade option)
* 8 MB RAM (2 MB on-board, 6 MB as additional SIMMs)
* ATi VGA Wonder XL on-board, upgraded to 1 MB
* All important I/O stuff on-board

I've added some goodies:

* DOM-style IDE->CF adapter with a 1 GB card set up as 504 MB
* ESS 1688F-based soundcard with Hizon DB333 wavetable; also interfaces the CD-ROM drive
* Mitsumi FX-400 CD-ROM drive, early one from 1995 with round eject button
* 5.25" disk drive
* internal 3 watt speaker connected to the corresponding header on the sound card - turns itself off when connecting external speakers
* 2 the max "MPEG Wonder" decoder card

When I got the Alcatel, it had an AMI IDE extension ROM added to the option ROM socket on the mainboard that adds LBA addressing. Decided to pull that, as it did not belong there. While I'm now limited to 504 MB, this is plenty for such a system.

It's running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and feels very responsive, despite lacking L2 cache.

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Last edited by derSammler on 2018-08-19, 13:38. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 2 of 6, by Anonymous Coward

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That's pretty badass. This is the first time I've seen a 386SX motherboard with a 486 CPU socket. I wonder if it uses a 16-bit or 32-bit board.
I have seen systems like ALR which can take anything from 286 to 486, but those use CPU cards.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 3 of 6, by derSammler

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

I wonder if it uses a 16-bit or 32-bit board.

That's a good question. Memory speed is much better than what I got on a 386sx-33 I once had. It's lower than what one would expect from a 486dx, however, but this could be due to the missing L2 cache.

Reply 4 of 6, by derSammler

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Did some testing yesterday to find out how to play back music on the unit. Original plan was to play MP2 files using the hardware MPEG decoder. Sadly, the card doesn't really like audio-only files. While it kind of works, there are pops and clicks because some frames are apparently always treated as video, even if they are audio. Using non-VCD compilant streams even crashes the player software.

So after testing more, I found that QuickView Pro for DOS plays MP2 files with 96 kbps on a DX2/50 just fine. Not bad for such a CPU. 😀

Anyone knows if there are MP3 decoder cards for ISA with DOS support?

Reply 6 of 6, by Technomancer21

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Hey are you still looking for the feet for this case? I have the same case and had the same problem, I had someone with a 3D printer manufacture some replacements for me. I don't have the project file he made of them sadly but it might be an idea for you?