S_crumb wrote:

Hey guys. I've been a lurker here for a long time but never registered. Glad to finally be a part of the community.

Welcome!

I bought a Gateway 2000 (slim) 486 DX/66 last year on Ebay. I only just started working on it, as I was looking for a CRT. Now that I found a free CRT I got started on it. My goal for this is to be a DOS gaming machine, primarily Sierra games.

Awesome. Share some photos with us if you could! Vogons can host them (and using the built-in attachment function on the forum helps size the photos appropriately).

I am a huge Sierra fan - grew up on lots of their titles.

The BIOS does not detect the HDD.

Several things here -
1: Independent of anything else on a just-acquired retro system, that power supply is going to be a bit old and can cause "unexplained oddities" if the capacitors are having trouble in their old age. It is a variable you can sometimes ignore and get away without problems, but sometimes it will bite you big time.
2: Never under estimate the importance of a fresh/fully-charged BIOS battery.

The BIOS only allows a boot order of A: and C:, no booting from the CD-ROM.

Quite normal for the era.

I was thinking removing the CD-ROM from the mix and running the HDD alone on the IDE channel.

Fair enough, if you want. Note -
1: Configuring jumpers on the hard drive and CD-ROM is important. One should be Master and the other Slave if they are on the same cable and configured correctly.
2: If you do decide to disconnect the CD-ROM, check the jumpers on your hard drive. In addition to Master/Slave settings, drives in and around that era also had a separate setting for "Single" if the drive was the only one on the cable. Sometimes Master/Single are on the same jumper, but you won't know unless you check.

I was a little disappointed that I didn't do more research on this computer, but the given the price of 486 stuff over the last couple of years, it was a good deal.

No regrets! I think it is great that you have a Gateway 486DX2-66 regardless of featureset. I have a clone 486DX2 that I am currently building to add to the retro armada, but I wouldn't mind a name brand system of the time like the one you picked up.

The motherboard is lacking alot of options, it's an ISA only board.

No VLB available is rather limiting - although if your Sierra gaming is of the 256 color VGA 320x200 variety and prior, it won't matter.

It is a 612194-004 motherboard.

Photos (again)! You could also cheat and check the chipset on the board and go from there if you can't find anything based on the specific board itself.

Though I'm not sure if I would need more than 8 megs of ram.

If you are playing DOS games of the era and prior, no. If you had 16MB back then, you were rich. On the other hand, stuff is SO cheap today - you can now pretend to live in luxury in 1993. The DX2-66 I am currently building has about 24MB

Thank you for the tips. You're right 16 megs of ram was considerable back then. I remember scraping my allowance to buy 4 Meg's of ram at $100 per 1 meg stick.

I disassembled the computer and found a couple of interesting things. Beyond the fact that there was every type of screw head known to man. The previous owner 3d printed a hdd tray for the little 2.5" drive. The drive has no jumpers....so cable select was possible back then? Also the adapter board thingy has a cracked connector housing exposing one of the pin connectors. That may definitely cause a problem. I'm not sure what the orientation of the board should be.

Any ideas what kind of ram that might be? 72 pin but other than that I'm not sure.

That looks like a former laptop hard drive, with a 44-pin to 40-pin IDE converter board used. I have a similar converter I use to wipe and test laptop hard drives I acquire using a desktop PC.

The question is, why did the owner use a laptop HDD in his desktop? Cost cutting, maybe? It's very strange indeed.

The 4 pins to the side of that Toshiba drive configure Master/Slave/Cable select. No jumpers = Master, and that is the default setting. I think you are good there - at least for settings.

However, the concern for the adapter board does make sense. It has a bit of a homemade feel to it for sure, and it is possible that board has a fracture or a cold solder joint or something.

Please note! As it has to adapt to a laptop IDE drive, the adapter takes the 40 pin from your cable and tags in the power from the molex in order to connect to the laptop drive. If you do not plug that back in with proper cable orientation, you'll push power to the wrong pins and most likely smell smoke from a now-dead hard drive. You can tell that the 44-pin adapter is not keyed and could easily be flipped 180 degrees.

Do you happen to have any other 3.5" IDE (i.e. "normal") desktop hard drives? Well...either way, it sounds like you headed the direction of CF.

EDIT: There is a possibility that you won't like the sound of that Vibra-based SB. But that is a little ways down the road from now. 😀

I'm sure that the PO just used whatever drive he had laying around and it happened to be a laptop drive. I mean he also threw in a 48x CD-ROM, I feel like that would be too fast for the board. Unfortunately, I threw most of my old parts away when I moved here. I mean who needs all that old stuff anyway, right? 🤣.

I'll be going to a CF drive anyway, but I am going to give this one more shot. I did a little more digging, that's actually a 543 MB drive. It really confuses me that if there was a CD in the drive, the BIOS detected a 543MB HDD. But even after detecting that, DOS couldn't see the drive. That's really bizarre to me. It would be worth removing the CD-ROM from the equation.

I hope after all this the motherboard isn't bad. The only references to this board I can find online talk about it being unreliable. Capacitor issues etc.

S_crumb wrote:

The only references to this board I can find online talk about it being unreliable. Capacitor issues etc.

That's... not... cool. Well! How are your soldering skills?

How is the CD-ROM configured, btw?

cj_reha wrote:

That looks like a former laptop hard drive, with a PATA to IDE converter board used. I have a similar converter I use to wipe and test laptop hard drives I acquire using a desktop PC.

The question is, why did the owner use a laptop HDD in his desktop? Cost cutting, maybe? It's very strange indeed.

PATA to IDE?

That's like saying AC to NEMA 1-15. PATA is the communications standard, IDE is the connection standard.

Ampera wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

That looks like a former laptop hard drive, with a PATA to IDE converter board used. I have a similar converter I use to wipe and test laptop hard drives I acquire using a desktop PC.

The question is, why did the owner use a laptop HDD in his desktop? Cost cutting, maybe? It's very strange indeed.

PATA to IDE?

That's like saying AC to NEMA 1-15. PATA is the communications standard, IDE is the connection standard.

Oops. 🤣

She is alive again! It must've been the HDD or the converter board. I installed a Gotek and a CF card reader. Loaded up a drive overlay from Phil's....thanks Phil!!! Loaded DOS and away we go.

However.....I had forgotten about EDO vs FP SIMMS and ordered EDO RAM. That does not work....I should've thought that an early 486 board like this that is ISA only probably wouldn't support EDO.

Before I order more RAM that I might not need. Should I assume my original NON-EDO RAM is parity or non-parity? The datasheet for the old RAM doesn't specify. Another site says if the number of chips on the SIMM is an even number that the RAM is NON-Parity. Does that sound right to you guys?

S_crumb wrote on 2017-06-09, 21:28:

She is alive again! It must've been the HDD or the converter board. I installed a Gotek and a CF card reader. Loaded up a drive overlay from Phil's....thanks Phil!!! Loaded DOS and away we go.

However.....I had forgotten about EDO vs FP SIMMS and ordered EDO RAM. That does not work....I should've thought that an early 486 board like this that is ISA only probably wouldn't support EDO.

Before I order more RAM that I might not need. Should I assume my original NON-EDO RAM is parity or non-parity? The datasheet for the old RAM doesn't specify. Another site says if the number of chips on the SIMM is an even number that the RAM is NON-Parity. Does that sound right to you guys?

I apologize for reviving this very old thread but can you give some more details on how you got this working? I have the same machine and have struggled for weeks to get it to read and kind of flash memory (sd, cf, dom, etc).

You can read the whole saga here:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/gat … e-woes.1237358/

Specifically can you mention what kind of cf adapter and card you used successfully? Thank you!

I’m also curious how this system is holding up after another five years have passed.

Probably way too late to be helpful but I installed this..... a Startech 3.5" IDE to CF Adapter Card Reader. https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/35baycf2ide
and a Sandisk Ultra 8GB CF card.

It's running like a champ. But I recently purchased a Wimodem232 and I can't get any life out of the serial port. I'm thinking I may need to install a serial card. I can't find a manual for this motherboard to confirm the jumper settings. My BIOS is configured properly but the modem is not detected.

S_crumb wrote on 2023-08-27, 21:43:

It's running like a champ. But I recently purchased a Wimodem232 and I can't get any life out of the serial port. I'm thinking I may need to install a serial card. I can't find a manual for this motherboard to confirm the jumper settings. My BIOS is configured properly but the modem is not detected.

What UART does that board have? This probably doesn't help with it not being detected, but at this time period, at least some of the lower-end big name systems used 8250 UARTs for their serial ports and those can't support >9600bps (which requires a 16550). Really, in my opinion, external models were never really a thing in DOS/Windows PC land - they were big in Macland, but the overwhelming majority of PC desktops had internal modems.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what the purpose of this Wimodem232 is, either...

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 22:22:

What UART does that board have? This probably doesn't help with it not being detected, but at this time period, at least some of the lower-end big name systems used 8250 UARTs for their serial ports and those can't support >9600bps (which requires a 16550). Really, in my opinion, external models were never really a thing in DOS/Windows PC land - they were big in Macland, but the overwhelming majority of PC desktops had internal modems.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what the purpose of this Wimodem232 is, either...

Wimodem232 is a WIFI modem for devices with a serial port. Specifically I'm going to use it with The Old Net proxy.

S_crumb wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:02:

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 22:22:

What UART does that board have? This probably doesn't help with it not being detected, but at this time period, at least some of the lower-end big name systems used 8250 UARTs for their serial ports and those can't support >9600bps (which requires a 16550). Really, in my opinion, external models were never really a thing in DOS/Windows PC land - they were big in Macland, but the overwhelming majority of PC desktops had internal modems.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what the purpose of this Wimodem232 is, either...

Wimodem232 is a WIFI modem for devices with a serial port. Specifically I'm going to use it with The Old Net proxy.

Okay - maybe I'm missing something, but why if this is for a 486, wouldn't you just get an ISA 10BaseT card? I don't know how plentiful they are today, but they certainly were around back in the day (I remember buying one in... 2000 or 2001... for a 486 and never using it) and you can certainly run a TCP/IP stack and non-modern-web Internet applications on a 486.

Just seems mysterious to me that you'd want to use a max-115 kbps interface when you can get a 10BaseT NIC (and if you don't want to run Ethernet to your 486, you can always just get a modern wifi router and set it up in whatever-they-call-the-mode where it bridges the wired ports to a wifi upstream) in that machine quite easily, at least unless 10BaseT ISA NICs have gone the way of Voodoo 2 cards.

Loads of 10BaseT cards still around - the 3C509B which usually 'just works' everywhere are still cheap to find. Unless there's a need to emulate an old BBS or purely other nostalgia, then I'd be consigning serial networking to the bin when much faster methods are (a) still around and (b) integrate easily into current-day networking.

Those are great suggestions that I hadn't considered.

I think what I will do is leave the wimodem for the 486 for BBS'ing. Which I got working. The DB25 port was inactive, so I used a DB9 converter and it's working flawlessly.

Then I will use your router suggestions for my Windows 95 machine. I think that era is a better match to web browsing with The Old Net proxy.

S_crumb wrote on 2023-09-08, 22:41:

I think what I will do is leave the wimodem for the 486 for BBS'ing. Which I got working. The DB25 port was inactive, so I used a DB9 converter and it's working flawlessly.

Wait a second here... DB25 port on... what? The 486?

On most 486es, wouldn't the serial ports be DB9 and the parallel ports DB25?