Grzyb wrote:

Can't believe it... SB16 came in 1992, other 16-bit sound cards even later. […]
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Unknown_K wrote:

I had a reveal 16 bit soundcard in my 286-12 Packard bell around 1990

Can't believe it...
SB16 came in 1992, other 16-bit sound cards even later.

I reckon there was some PC-based Digital Audio Workstation stuff already in the 80s, but I don't think that Reveal card had anything to do with it.

Well it was a 16 bit ISA card I should say.

there's something that just feels right about running win 3.x in "standard" mode

I didn't think my post was so successful. Honestly, I found myself with this 286 as a gift and I really enjoyed disassembling it and cleaning it after 30 years of dust. I also had a lot of fun studying the motherboard, very small with a maximum of ten integrated circuits. Personally for me, when the DX2 come out I was 11 years old I have much better memories than the games of that period. As some have said, it is at this time that PC games have begun to assert themselves, so it is not just a personal question, but it is precisely with DX2 that the PC has literally taken flight. After several tests I discovered that an unlocked PII 266Mhz can best use the games I used from around 1993 to 1999 without any kind of frame rate drop or anything. I think it's the best PC for that period.

Returning to the 286, I could unsolder the CPU at 16Mhz and put a Harris at 25Mhz ... but would it be worth it ??? I also have a Sound Blaster 2.0 that probably would couple well with that system, in the second ISA slot I could put a VGA more powerful than the one integrated in the mainboard, what do you think ??? Just for fun.... if it is cheaper...

AlessandroB wrote:

Returning to the 286, I could unsolder the CPU at 16Mhz and put a Harris at 25Mhz ...

You probably can't.
Generic motherboards didn't arrive until later. 286 boards often are hardwired to a single clockspeed. You can't just jumper them to a different clockspeed. And replacing the crystal is probably not going to work. The chipset and memory probably wouldn't be able to run at 25 MHz either.

Just changing the CPU won't do anything, clock sources must also be changed and it is unlikely the board will run stably past 20MHz. You will also need faster memories too.

maxtherabbit wrote:

Yep. A fast 286 with VGA can do anything a low end 386 can do. (Other than 32-bit protected mode obviously) […]
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Scali wrote:

Faster 286 systems with VGA (16-25 MHz) were pretty cool...
It was the era of Monkey Island I and II, Test Drive 3, Stunts, Wolfenstein 3D, various flightsims such as F29 Retaliator, LHX Attack Chopper.
They all run fine on a decent 286 with VGA.

Yep. A fast 286 with VGA can do anything a low end 386 can do. (Other than 32-bit protected mode obviously)

386SX wrote:

Errius wrote:

I remember that Elite, released for the PC in 1987, describes the 6 MHz 286 as a 'powerful' machine.

Also the Motorola 68000 @ 7.6 MHz of the Mega Drive console was considered a powerful cpu. 😁
Would be interesting to compare it to that 286. 😀

The 68k is the GOAT. Sega MD, NEO-GEO, Macs, Amiga, X68k, Atari ST. Pretty much everything that was worth a shit in the 90s that wasn't IBM-compatible or a SNES.

I remember when I had the 386SX-20, once I tried (I never even knew about its existance) a friend's Amiga 600 and their games were awesome. My 386 felt so slow compared to that. Had to admit mine was really a low-end no-brand computer with that Oak vga and a slow old 50MB disk drive. An awful low-end config I'd like to find nowdays but just for the nostalgic reasons.
The Mega Drive surprised me lately having bought many games and new controllers. Was really a powerful machine and there's also a demo of Wolfeinstein 3D running on that console impressively well similar to the 386SX experience I remember (less resolution/colors but same window size and framerate).

386SX wrote:

I remember when I had the 386SX-20, once I tried (I never even knew about its existance) a friend's Amiga 600 and their games were awesome. My 386 felt so slow compared to that.

Yea, that was the thing... Home computers and consoles ran a lot of games at full framerate (50 or 60 Hz), with smooth scrolling, smoothly animated sprites and all that.
PCs were simply too slow to do any of that, because it required bruteforce pixel pushing, and the CPUs and video cards simply couldn't update the pixels that fast.
It wasn't until the 486 with VLB arrived, that you could get smooth scrolling arcade games in full VGA (Keen was one of very few games that could do smooth scrolling, but only in EGA, which was less colourful than games on Amiga. And Keen wasn't a very fast game, not quite Mario or Sonic).
That always gave PCs a sluggish feel. You'd also often see tearing when games were redrawing, which also didn't add to the overall experience.

PCs mainly excelled in 3d games in those early years. Framerates were low on 3d games on any platform, and PCs were relatively good at doing the 3d calculations, so they would perform relatively well in flight sims etc.

Scali wrote:

Yea, that was the thing... Home computers and consoles ran a lot of games at full framerate (50 or 60 Hz), with smooth scrolling […]
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386SX wrote:

I remember when I had the 386SX-20, once I tried (I never even knew about its existance) a friend's Amiga 600 and their games were awesome. My 386 felt so slow compared to that.

Yea, that was the thing... Home computers and consoles ran a lot of games at full framerate (50 or 60 Hz), with smooth scrolling, smoothly animated sprites and all that.
PCs were simply too slow to do any of that, because it required bruteforce pixel pushing, and the CPUs and video cards simply couldn't update the pixels that fast.
It wasn't until the 486 with VLB arrived, that you could get smooth scrolling arcade games in full VGA (Keen was one of very few games that could do smooth scrolling, but only in EGA, which was less colourful than games on Amiga. And Keen wasn't a very fast game, not quite Mario or Sonic).
That always gave PCs a sluggish feel. You'd also often see tearing when games were redrawing, which also didn't add to the overall experience.

PCs mainly excelled in 3d games in those early years. Framerates were low on 3d games on any platform, and PCs were relatively good at doing the 3d calculations, so they would perform relatively well in flight sims etc.

I agree. I remember really few games being smooth and the only reasons I left consoles for pc gaming (and productivity apps, word, excel etc..) buying that 386, were cause another friend had bought for an absurdly high price (for those times) a great brand new Compaq 486SX (33Mhz I suppose) all-in-one computer. And the games that make me forgot everything seen before in any consoles were the 3D ones, and the first was the well known Stunts. I was without words to describe the sense of reality of that game. But that was an high end pc, had a S3 805 VLB soldered on board vga and 4MB of ram. That and Wolf3D games basically bought my interest for computers, more or less until 2005 when I began to 'feel' where industry were going to.

The games I played on my 286:

Dune and Dune 2
Civilization
SimCity
Prehistorik & Prehistorik 2
Commander Keen series
Lost Vikings
Goblins
CD-man (a Pac-Man clone)
Grand-Prix Circuit
F-19 and F-117
Alley Cat
Lemmings
Wolfenstein 3D

I also used it to write programs in Turbo Pascal and assembler, do school homework etc.

So it’s not useless at all!

Our first computer was an XT 8 MHz and we then jumped straight to a 386DX-40 after that.
The XT was always frustrating because, by the time we bought it, games were already demanding faster CPU performance (which in this case would have been a 286).
I therefore had no desire after that to touch an XT but, I have built up about 2 XT PC's for myself already 🤣
As a matter of fact, I was fortunate enough to acquire the exact XT PC that we owned and I passed that onto my father so that he could play his old games (that he enjoyed) again on it.

Since I've started collecting old computers, I never actually had a desire to acquire a 286, since we never owned one and therefore, there was no nostalgia about that particular architecture.
However, as sometimes happens in this hobby, I got hold of a couple of 286 motherboards and therefore decided to hold onto them.

As already stated, if you grew up with a 286, then I think it would make sense to build up one. A friend of mine bought a 286 PC back in 1990 with VGA graphics and, fortunate enough, he held onto the motherboard. I recently helped him to revive that PC again.

For me it's more the fun factor behind it to build up a 286 PC (since I never owned one) and to play around by configuring the PC and installing software on it.
I had a similar experience recently by building up a complete 386SX-25 PC. My plan is to still build up a complete 286 for myself as well.

Also, in my case I featured the 286 in one of my demos: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62165
The reason for that is that a fast 286 is pretty capable for 3D stuff, but the demoscene on PC didn't really take off until 386 and 486 were common. So most classic demos are 32-bit.
I wanted to do something entirely in 16-bit... So effectively I saw the 286 as an extremely fast 8088/8086, where I still had to work inside the limitations of 16-bit arithmetic and the dreaded segmented memory model (I actually stuck to 8086-only instructions, so it runs on any PC with EGA/VGA).
It makes the 286 much more interesting to code for than a 386. And the results can get quite close to 386 demos.

Tiido wrote:

Just changing the CPU won't do anything, clock sources must also be changed and it is unlikely the board will run stably past 20MHz. You will also need faster memories too.

My board have 3 different oscillator, 24 32 and 14,3 Mhz. Can the 32Mhz be for cpu only? 32/2=16Mhz. if i change that with a 50Mhz version i control the harris without changing other operative frequency. Or not??

In theory that is all it takes but chances are that 32MHz also controls ISA speed (32 /4 = 8MHz). On my 286 board (Headland HT12 based which had also 24+32+14MHz clock sources) I had to leave the 32MHz oscillator alone and change the 24MHz one instead and the board only ran stably up to 20MHz CPU speed (40MHz oscillator), at higher speed it just started to crash all the time and I already had fastest possible memory and other cards.

AlessandroB wrote:

Tiido wrote:

Just changing the CPU won't do anything, clock sources must also be changed and it is unlikely the board will run stably past 20MHz. You will also need faster memories too.

My board have 3 different oscillator, 24 32 and 14,3 Mhz. Can the 32Mhz be for cpu only? 32/2=16Mhz. if i change that with a 50Mhz version i control the harris without changing other operative frequency. Or not??

Your board is 2 OSC board
32MHz is for CPU
24MHz is for NPU
14,318MHz is just a reference resonator for the clock generator (used by the chipset for memory timings and such) - I guess this particular value was choosen because it's one of the NTSC standard frequencies and frequencies like 33MHz, 48MHz, 100MHz can be easly derived from it (but I may be wrong here).

You need 3 OSC board (CPU, NPU and AT Bus) otherwise you may go into trouble. AT Bus clock in your board is derived from the CPU OSC (32/4=8MHz) and if you rise AT bus speed to 12,5MHz you may (and likely will) go into any sort of trouble from crashes to even board not POSTing.
Some 286 motherboards have provisions for installing third oscillator (it's just not planted on them and it usually requires couple of jumpers as well for it to work) - attachment or this one: download/file.php?id=65076&mode=view.

Scali wrote:

Also, in my case I featured the 286 in one of my demos: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62165 The reason for that is that a […]
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Also, in my case I featured the 286 in one of my demos: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62165
The reason for that is that a fast 286 is pretty capable for 3D stuff, but the demoscene on PC didn't really take off until 386 and 486 were common. So most classic demos are 32-bit.
I wanted to do something entirely in 16-bit... So effectively I saw the 286 as an extremely fast 8088/8086, where I still had to work inside the limitations of 16-bit arithmetic and the dreaded segmented memory model (I actually stuck to 8086-only instructions, so it runs on any PC with EGA/VGA).
It makes the 286 much more interesting to code for than a 386. And the results can get quite close to 386 demos.

That demo seen running on a 286 back in its past would have been awesome! But nothing can beat some 3D demos seen on the Commodore 64 😁 😉
That computer in the decades has been pushed to such limits that it's kind of incredible like "Andropolis" or "Desert Dream" demos...

Personally I find a slow 286, 8Mhz and a Pentium 90 cover everything I want to play. I can tweak the P90 to slow it down if needed and the 286 covers everything else, with the exception of things designed to run on an 8086 which is not of my interest. So where everyone else seems to like 386 and 486 machines I dont understand the desire for those machines since the P90 will run all the early psuedo 3d games much better as well as most of the 2d games as well (and can be slowed down by disabling cache for speed sensetive games).

I lived through these times and it wasn't until we hit the Pentium that I really saw a machine capable of running modern software to the degree required. I have no interest in maintaining or building a 386 or 486 even though I owned those at the time.

Shagittarius wrote:

Personally I find a slow 286, 8Mhz and a Pentium 90 cover everything I want to play. I can tweak the P90 to slow it down if needed and the 286 covers everything else, with the exception of things designed to run on an 8086 which is not of my interest. So where everyone else seems to like 386 and 486 machines I dont understand the desire for those machines since the P90 will run all the early psuedo 3d games much better as well as most of the 2d games as well (and can be slowed down by disabling cache for speed sensetive games).

I lived through these times and it wasn't until we hit the Pentium that I really saw a machine capable of running modern software to the degree required. I have no interest in maintaining or building a 386 or 486 even though I owned those at the time.

the point is just this, I created this post to judge if objectively the 286 was useless, not if it was personally useful for past experiences or particular preferences.

AlessandroB wrote:

the point is just this, I created this post to judge if objectively the 286 was useless, not if it was personally useful for past experiences or particular preferences.

Short answer - it purely depends on what your needs are and what software/games you wish to run on it.

You can ask the same question to someone else about a 386 or 486. If their target games are first person shooters from the mid 90's (like Quake, Heretic, Rise of the Triad & Duke Nukem 3D, then those type of machines are pretty "useless" from that point of view and for that particular person's needs.

AlessandroB wrote:

Shagittarius wrote:

Personally I find a slow 286, 8Mhz and a Pentium 90 cover everything I want to play. I can tweak the P90 to slow it down if needed and the 286 covers everything else, with the exception of things designed to run on an 8086 which is not of my interest. So where everyone else seems to like 386 and 486 machines I dont understand the desire for those machines since the P90 will run all the early psuedo 3d games much better as well as most of the 2d games as well (and can be slowed down by disabling cache for speed sensetive games).

I lived through these times and it wasn't until we hit the Pentium that I really saw a machine capable of running modern software to the degree required. I have no interest in maintaining or building a 386 or 486 even though I owned those at the time.

the point is just this, I created this post to judge if objectively the 286 was useless, not if it was personally useful for past experiences or particular preferences.

Yes, that was my point, in my opinion the 386 and 486 are useless, the 286 has merit.

jesolo wrote:

AlessandroB wrote:

the point is just this, I created this post to judge if objectively the 286 was useless, not if it was personally useful for past experiences or particular preferences.

Short answer - it purely depends on what your needs are and what software/games you wish to run on it.

You can ask the same question to someone else about a 386 or 486. If their target games are first person shooters from the mid 90's (like Quake, Heretic, Rise of the Triad & Duke Nukem 3D, then those type of machines are pretty "useless" from that point of view and for that particular person's needs.

not teally in my opinion. What you said is correct only if you give a target. In your case, 3D games are the target, but what if you don't have a target? Let me explain: IF the 386 does 95% of the things the 286 does, but more can do other things, it means that the 286 is useless as a processor (386) is more efficient. There is only one system that can do more things in exactly the same way. A pentiumMMX is not useless because compared to a PentiumII / III, it can do many things done by them but also things that I cannot do pentiumII / III because it can work more slowly. From what I have read, what the 386 cannot do but which can do the 286 are very specific things, but which are of interest to a close circle of enthusiasts. This is what I understood.