Yesterday was another really shitty day outside of retro-computing, but let me put it this way, working on the 486 is Zen....not sure why.
Put it back together last night and decided to wait until all the other parts come in before I crack er' open again and put everything back together one last time. I got my 128MB of RAM in, (60ns 72 pin FP 32MB Modules X4) - with Parity off it's hilarious because it starts counting the Parity Chip as a part of RAM on this thing (LOL), it was stating I had 136MB of RAM (!!!!)....maybe I should pick up some 64MB Modules sometime.....256MB on a 486 would be downright evil (and I've heard of one that could go that high, but they are very very rare).
I'm not without some issues though, but I can live with them, at boot time, with Parity off in the BIOS, the screen is covered in green "U" except where the Memory counter is, 🤣. But it runs fine, it did get a memory error though at that point until I turned Parity on in the BIOS - which is kind of odd because I did not expect to have such a feature as FIC's board listings state it just uses regular non-parity RAM (my mistake), but apparently a good one as my board is weirdo and seems to do so. Now the only issue is after finding the base 640K only the RAM counter is shown - don't really care.....it's retro looking then like an old Deskpro!
Running under the new RAM, I have not been able to really push it much yet as I need to add HIMEM.SYS from a newer version of DOS/Windows or start using QEMM 8 again so I can utilize the full 128MB under 6.22 (QEMM's XMS drivers from version 7.14 up support 128MB, and later versions support more).
I also put my 32Kx8 Tag RAM chip in and pulled all the errant L2 Cache chips out, that way all I have to do is pull one card, change 2 jumpers, and plop the 32 pin DIPs into the 4 sockets and then I'll have my 512K Cache, however, waiting for those things to come from Shenzhen (or however you spell it) is taking awhile, it's been in the "posting" phase for over a week and a half now. Hope they don't get lost in shipping, but then IIRC, I bought a $11 Stratocaster guitar tremolo from China last year and it took awhile to come in too.
The parts coming in still are....
- 5X ISSI 128Kx8 - Still posting
- Another AMD 486 DX4-100SV8B, which I bought yesterday
- Diagnostic Card, this WILL be handy in the future
- 486 Heatsink, the kind with the plastic frame that goes around the bottom of the chip and the heatsink snaps into the top, I don't like the ones with the press-clips on each corner because I've had those come flying off when I move the machine, but I like the plastic frame type. My favorite of all time though were the ones Radio Shack used to sell that had an actual metal clip of some kind that held it down.
I did make a few config changes from before - the DX2-66 is now running at 5v instead of 3.3, I see a bit of a performance increase (tiny) but not much. Having 128MB of RAM in a 486 does cause some pausing during memory operations because it's got so much RAM to work with, but I do notice, despite only supporting 64MB, some slight performance increases but that could be the RAM speed (60ns vs. 70ns which is what I had in there before). Under the DX4 this thing should be wicked fast. I am toying....however, with putting some kind of squirrel cage fan instead of a straight up fan since the CPU is right under the drive cage, and then driving the output to the front vent of the case under the drives....or maybe to the speaker/fan hole in the front with yet another fan to drive the air out like a modern active cooling setup.
Now, you might be wondering, what am I actually doing with a 486 to warrant that much RAM, Processor, and L2 Cache - well, there are a few things.....
- I'm trying out using the 486 as a DAW.....there are some older programs, I got Quartz to work with it and not bad either, but I see ProTools, Cakewalk, and some others can work as well that may have even lower requirements than QuartzAudiomaster does....let's just say a Retro PC themed music project may be on the horizon......
- I'm also planning to experiment with Linux Distros, OS/2 2.1/Warp, and maybe some other O/S (FreeBSD being another one), maybe FreeDOS as well - I have 2 2.1GB HDD laying around that I can try out various O/S on and want to see how far I can push the performance of this machine within a modern context. Under 95 and WFWG, even in the previous incarnation, this was extremely stable and reliable, By now I could probably run 98SE on it or even 2000 Pro (though I'd have to do something about the Serial Mouse issue there - Win2K likes PS/2 mice and does not play happily with serial devices from my experience). Playing with O/Ses is part of the fun of the 486 era for me because it can run the gamut from early versions of DOS all the way to Windows 2000 Professional and some rather recent Command Line only Linux Distros and things like FreeBSD, or QNX...things with a lighter footprint.
