First post, by Mkananoja
Greetings!
I managed to hijack our old 386 from my parents i spent most of my childhood with. I wish to put it in good order again, but in order to do that, i need some technical help, and of course, hardware modding help.
First of all, i do not recognize any of the hardware that is my 386 xD, nor do i know any know-how details.
so consider this small competition, who recognize components gets a cookie~
my 386 works just fine, albeit i have to reconfigure bios more or less often after extended periods of shutdown because battery is quite dead. Few years ago I had to swap busted power supply from early pentium and do small modding to make it compatible with old motherboard... and power switch. pentium i stole the powersupply from had pulse switch instead of I/O switch. Mod was successful, yay.
Floppy disk drive however does not work. it gives constant green light, but absolutely does not react to discs put in, nor does the dos 6 or bios find the disk drive. Might be simple as master/slave problem, but i do fear that it may be even because of damaged expansion ide card. I have no idea would today's disk drive work on old 386 (from whatever reason) or should it be very old model. let alone is there other problems instead of faulty floppy drive.
I do not remember how much memory the computer has, my bet would be 4 megabytes, tough it could be even 8. It has original 120mb hard drive as well, with lot of our old games on it <3, and of course windows 3.11 xD
Alas, i didnt detach memory cards or hard drive for closer inspection.
But real treasure is old mechanical keyboard. Back then there was no limits how many buttons you could press down at once, and still work like charm. I still remember playing with 3 of my friends playing slick and slide racing game on the same keyboard at the same time, and had no problems... expect we had to bundle up quite tightly to fit in next to keyboard xD
My computer has also serial port joystick i didnt take pic of though. albeit it has seen its better days, it still works perfectly <3
and now the fun begins
motherboard has still its own original exterior cmos battery that obviously should be replaced as soon as possible. it has started to leak allready, tough it has not damaged toe motehrboard at all yet. problem is, of course, lack of tools. i do have cutters and soldering iron and what not, but they are more suitable for 230V cables than precision work with micro-voltage devices. I suppose i am very lucky that it havnt leaked on motherboard yet, and i hapen to have model that has exterior battery, instead of D-chip aka doomsday realtime chip with interior battery.
soo... xD
Any advice how not to bust my old love? xD
be warned, pictures are unoptimized and because of that around 4mb each (lots of pixel!), i wanted you to be able to read the small prints and see other minor details, like numbers of different resistors... xD