First post, by PecanLoveNubble
I've recently managed to mostly re-assemble my old computer from college, a 486 SLC2/66. I'm having a very odd issue where it appears the video card randomly doesn't get detected properly and is b/w only. Additionally, when this happens, my system will hang when loading EMM386.SYS but boots and runs fine if I bypass loading it, aside from everything in black and white. I have an ISA Tseng Labs ET4000 1mb VGA card. This will generally only happen after the machine was running fine and I mash the reset button or power it off/on. Originally I thought perhaps I am shadowing the video bios to RAM and the ram itself was faulty. So I swapped out the RAM. I currently have 4x4mb 30pin dimms in it. I haven't tried a different video card as the only other ISA card I have is EGA and I have no EGA monitor. When I first re-discovered the motherboard the on-board NiCD battery had burst damaging the traces. I went through, cleaned it up, soldered a couple jumper wires and that seemed to do it; however, I don't have a battery currently connected to the BIOS. It seems to retain settings when I power it off for about 5 minutes. I'm assuming there's some voltage floating in the capacitors for a bit. I'm working on snagging a 4pin connector to attach a battery pack to for the BIOS. I'm assuming it's BIOS related as when the BIOS does loose its settings it's fine again, however, it's not required that it looses its settings to revert back to the correct color VGA display. Does anyone have any suggestions for troubleshooting this?