That's some crazy old-school hardware mixed with modern stuff... The only comment I have is that you should probably try to take 8MB of RAM out of the second system and put it in the third so you have 32MB and 16MB instead of 40 and 8. Win95 needs at least 16 I think if you expect it to do anything. The ISA video card should be buried and given a funeral too - I think you can get PCI video cards for $5 now that are much better.

Those systems would be good for Warcraft, Doom, and maybe Quake and Descent LAN games if you network them together.

Perfect for Mechwarrior 2\Mercs. 😀

I wanted especially that 40Mb / 8Mb thing to test stuff in "extreme situation". I would like to see what my Win apps do if the memory runs out or such things happen.

Sadly i have just one monitor (LCD! 😀 ), keyboard and mouse, and not any network stuff, so these old machines (the P133s) are just for testing. I work with the P233, then if i want to test my apps performance, i copy them on these machines, and see what they are doing. All the three machines can run DOS perfectly.

That ISA VGA card is certainly a low end. I had an another ISA VGA card with a 4.86 what had to be put in a long slot having that brown "AGP" ( 😁 ) at it's end, that was four times faster than the one in the P133. But that mobo has not got any slot with "AGP". Although for stress - testing it is perfect! 😀 An another flaw of that crappy card is that it usually starts as BW although it is a color card (Hit CTRL + ALT + DEL a few times to switch in color mode).

That slot you're talking about is probably "VLB" (VESA Local Bus), which was a shot in the arm for ISA that came too late to become widespread before PCI became the new standard.

I had an AMD 486DX4-120 system with a VLB video card (and I think a VLB IDE controller card too). I remember that PCI existed at the time, but wasn't popular enough yet for me to be able to tell whether VLB or PCI was going to be the smarter choice.

I also remember that I couldn't really play any DirectX games in Win95 because my system was too slow (don't know if it was the CPU or the video card or both, though).

"VLB or PCI was going to be the smarter choice" - VBL occupied almost the whole length of the computer case, PCI was a "short" slot. There was no surprise on that PCI became more popular 😀

Probably the old card did not support DirectX. That simple. My card (The 8Mb ATI) not really supports OpenGL while it can (could - i did not play since ages) run games even with more than 400MHz minimal system requirements if they were written to DirectX.

After all when i had seen that crappy ISA VGA card, VLB was much faster. QB games written to 16 color modes typically ask much from the video card where i could experience that my old 25MHz 4.86 (the mobo broke down) with VLB VGA card ran the game at 18FPS whilethe P133 with the plain ISA VGA card ran it at 5FPS. Big difference, and that five times faster CPU helped absolutely nothing :-?

The ISA bus was extremely slow, so VLB and PCI were both huge improvements in the speed that programs could send data to the video card. These improvements were badly needed once CD-ROM drives became popular, as ISA cards struggled to keep up with the demands of full-motion, full-screen video. For example, I remember that sound during the cutscenes in Fade to Black was choppy because my CPU had to take so long to send the video frames to the ISA video card that it didn't have time to process the sound data in real-time.

PCI probably won because it was better. VLB was just an add-on to ISA, which probably made it more limited in capability.

Yes, it was just an add - on making that long slot even longer 😜

What a mess is inside of an old 4.86! The whole case is filled by cables and cards - and the VLB VGA card divides the whole thing in two sections. 🤣 - but it was still a great machine... It is so sad that it is gone - with the BIOS chip burned on my finger :-?

Get a new BIOS chip?....I doubt they've changed that much since 486 days or you could probably find someone with a similar mobo.

The mobo broke, not the BIOS chip. I just had an another old one, but with a BIOS labelled as "3.86 BIOS", and it did not work with the 4.86 (I tried it many times). So finally i decided to put the 4.86's BIOS in the working mobo. I had 50% chance to put it in with the right side as there was no sign on it indicating how it should be inserted, and i failed. Then i forgot how the 3.86's BIOS was inserted, and i think i succesfully toasted that another BIOS too (But i was not so stupid to check it again that way like i did with the 4.86's 🤣 ).

There's usually a notch or half-circle on one end of the BIOS IC. On the motherboard/socket end it's trickier: sometimes there's a dot or a 1 or something near one of the corners.

(Huh, a little of time passed... 😜 )

I remember i looked through literally everything around the slot to find something what would identity how the BIOS chip should have been plugged in, but the only thing i found was the texts printed on the top of them. And as i could remember then the two chips had the text printed on them in the opposite way (So if i plugged in that damned chip in the proper way the text would have been turned around by 180 degrees...).

Does not really matter now, for a reason the old 4.86's broken motherboard, the video card, the SIMM memory sticks, and the CPU were given to somebody, and then were forgot. So i guess if i wish to get a 4.86, i will have to hunt down one from some PC graveyard, or some spring cleaning.

Anyway at least the P233 works nicely and runs my PC squaker 😀