So, finally I was able to construct close to what I had as a 12 year old - my favourite computer (my 2nd one, I built it myself from parts from school - it's a long story but you can be assured the parts were legally acquired) - an NCR 3386 made in West Germany. Full size desktop case, the thing was HEAVY. In the mid 90s I was unable to build a complete system, as I needed an I/O controller. I tested the machine with another I/O controller at the time, but I had to return it to a working machine as per my agreement with the Principal.

Recently I was able to source a very similar (same?) case with a GIANT MFM drive, a full sized motherboard, and what I think was 2 or 4 Mb RAM. Unfortunately, someone had tampered (rather invasively) with an on board IC and the machine did not POST. I pulled out the drive and the damaged motherboard (too bad, an SX-25 would have been comparable to a DX-20) which inside was very different from what I had. Still, it was original NCR stuff. The case is a bit bent up, I had to do some bodywork to the rear of the case as a result.

My original 386 had a planar board, three full length ISA cards that had an extra 8 bit bus riser interconnecting each other (one was the processor board, the other two were 2Mb RAM each for a total of 4 Mb RAM). There was a Trident video card (I think it was a 9000, may have even been 512k - I added that, it had a crap Oak card, that I recall) and a Quickshot two-joystick 8 bit plastic cladded ISA card, and one last 8 bit COM/LPT combo. I eventually bought an FDC/IDE drive controller, and it worked with the 42 Mb hard drive I was allowed to take from the school.

Here's a picture of it in 1996:

I actually very recently cut that table apart (that are now shelves in my garage), my dad still has the collapsible legs on a new, bigger table we built together. It would have been cool to have put it up like that, I even have a similar dot matrix with the stands.

So the specs of my original computer in 1995 were:
-Intel 386 DX 16 (maybe a 20? I could swear it was 16 though - can't find any documentation)
-4 Mb RAM
-Trident 9000 VGA (256/512?)
-42 Mb hard disk, later a 212 Mb
-1.44 and 1.2 Mb FDDs
-Joystick controller card
-Com/LPT ISA card
-16 bit FDC/IDE card

Currently I was able to obtain a simple no frills 386 motherboard that I downgraded from an AMD DX 25 to an Intel DX 20. Most of the wires that connected to the LED and speaker were too short - actually, I replaced the tinny speaker for a much bassier (Lol) unit that I soldered into the volume adjuster (knob stolen from some cheapo 90s speakers for now) - yeah it rotates the wrong direction to increase/decrease the volume, and it doesn't mute it entirely, but it's plenty quiet at min. Very nice volume sweep, as in a stereo system. A small challenge was the dual anode Red/Green LED - When you power on the system, it is green. It can also become orange if you activated turbo (I am not sure if that is the desired operation, my original didn't do that, it ran at full speed though), but unlike the 386 SX 16 board I had in it briefly, this board had a negative trigger for the turbo LED, so I had to build a little inverter circuit for it to translate the signal. I also added a physical reset and turbo button under the unfoldable flap. I had tons of problems with reliable RAM and had to shuffle cards around, (I had to lose a 2400 BPS modem as the current board has only 7 ISA slots) but I got it working very stably now.

Non Turbo operation:

Turbo operation:

Under the flap:

The inverter IC I had to rig in to make the Turbo LED work correctly:

and the beefy speaker:

The IC is in a foam transport piece, I soldered the legs from the top directly to the wires and pushed them into the foam, with double sided tape. I didn't have a single PCB lying around, honestly I may leave it like this 😉

The specs in 2024 are:
-Intel 386 DX 20 Mhz on a VLSI based Biostar Microtech MB-1325VT
-4 Mb RAM (via more standard SIMMS)
-Trident 1 Mb 8900D NVRAM (25% faster than my TSENG ET4000AT, and a few decimal places faster than my 8900D DRAM in benchmarks)
-212 Mb hard disk (same one! Caviar 2120! Love that startup sound!)
-1.44 and 1.2 Mb floppies (swapped the 5.25 face and LED from a broken drive so they matched what I had as a kid - Red LED)
-SB 16 with SCSI (CT 1770)
-Multi I/O card (Goldstar of some kind)
-Compaq SCSI 12x CDROM
-USB ISA card
-3COM Etherlink III NIC
-ATI Wonder mono card
-Logitech hand scanner interface board
-CF2IDE connector (empty slot)

I love this build, it's not exactly what I had in the past (in fact, the only original "part" is the Cinquecento sticker) but it is close enough that it inspires nostalgia and definitely sounds the same thanks to the hard disk. The 386 SX 16 board that was in it briefly had a much closer POST test (Phoenix BIOS, line by line of what's being tested, just like my original NCR) but its a fair compromise and completes my quest for my childhood PC. And it is about as slow as I remember it being, after spending the afternoon playing Civ on Windows 3.1.

I actually do have an NEC Multisync 2A that I had for this machine later on, but I'm not that attached to it, plus this 19 inch can do 1024x768 in Windows 3.1 😁 - SOME progress should happen. The motherboard supports up to 33 MHz, and the BIOS has a wide range of turbo declocking, so I could always go that route 😉