^ that ESS sound card is OK for what it is - it even has a clone opl3 : the square dxp chip
I don't think that s3 card is faster than an ET4000 , I have a diamond-branded one and I was not impressed.
If you want a fast isa card that won't have the tseng issues get a WD90C30 or 31 one with 1MB of ram. Never had an issue with one, as fast as tseng with 1mb installed and games like it. The only "drawback" is that most WD cards come with 8bit DACs so it's only 256colors. Personally I don't care for an isa gaming system but your need might be different.

Thanks for the info on the ESS card. So it is not the bottom quality class. 😀

Actually I am looking for an ISA vga that can be software-tuned to different screen refresh rates, for reducing CRT flicker.
Spea cards do that. But they are hard to find. 😠
And it might even turn out that they also do not cooperate with the AHA-1542CF as well 🙁

Speed is quite unimportant in this case, as this builds' purpose is to play DOS games that do not run well on fast systems.
At the resolutions these games use, I guess even an 8bit VGA would do... 😎

Well, my IWILL ZMAXdp just blew a capacitor in the power supply.. ugh, capacitor plague era PSU. Everything looked good on it too -- since I looked inside with a flashlight when it arrived. The pop scared the shit out of me.. almost sounded like a .22 gunshot and the computer just turned off. Time for a recap, and hopefully nothing else got damaged. I was almost through the Windows XP install! haha

Correction.. just tore apart the power supply. One buldging cap on the DC side, but what blew was the fuse in the power supply. It left a little scorch mark on the PSU's board. Both look like easy repairs.. but there may have been another short that caused it to fail. Fuse is rated at 250V/2.5A, the peak load that the power supply claims is 350w, with 300w continuous. Power supply is a Channel Well (CWT) T43B014. So, not the best quality power supply, but it is proprietary.. I think. It is like ATX size in the height and width, but half length with the power routed out the bottom, and two 80mm fans to draw air through the CPU heatsinks and exhaust it through the power supply. Anyone know of any equivalent power supplies? Probably not, 🤣. I'd like to upgrade it to the 400/450w that the IWILL ZMAXd2 came with. Needs 24-pin + 8-pin EPS.

Edit2 for pics:
CONQUER FUSE MET F2.5 250V

One slightly bulging cap..

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed.

Can't get it to display anything and it turns on as soon as it plugs in. The guy said it wasn't working then messaged me two hours later saying he left it plugged in an powered on and left for a minute, came back and it came on. In the photo the green power light was on, and it was displaying a 161 CMOS Battery Dead error. So I know it turns on under some certain set of circumstances unless the ride home in my passengers seat killed it. He showed it to me when i was there and it was still on but he had disconnected the monitor (I mentioned a previous experience with a CTX monitor like that one failing violently) and I shut it down via the power button.

Right now it comes on and about 3 seconds it flashes the HDD access light and gives 2 short beeps (I'm assuming this is normal). The various keyboard lock lights all respond and you can hear it alternating between querying the hard disk and querying the floppy drive about every 30 seconds. Green lights not on, and the front power button does nothing. I've already replaced the CMOS battery which had some light corrosion and tried resetting it via the CMOS jumper. If I remove all RAM it give's a no ram detected code as would be expected if I remove all ram. If I set the jumper to bypass on board video I get a no video error (no auxiliary card installed). I need to find a wrench that fits the bolt head screws for the expansion slots before I can try a different video card but I know the video card works from before.

It's obvious the CPU and motherboard are working to some basic level as things are responding. What's not obvious is why I'm not getting a video signal, and why the power light and button are non functional.

I'm leaving it turned on over night to see if it just turns itself on at some point like the guy said it did.

Do any of you guys have any suggestions? I'm wondering if that TurboChip was installed wrong (I have no other 486 CPUS to test with).

Would this count as retro or modern? Bought a Dell Latitude D630 and a custom Intel DG965BW system that looked like it was a server at one point in time.

@wiretap
well, in my experience, when a PSU leaves a skidmark on the fuse, something failed short and the fuse did its job. Fuhjyyu caps are familiar to me and the company is still around in Taiwan. They don't look like they really failed so much as dried out. Considering the workload and airflow they had...

one of two scenarios is likely here:
75% chance a mosfet decided to give up the ghost and when they fail, they fail short. Scenario #2 might have been a contributing factor.
25% chance the secondary caps are totally cactus and they caused the psu to overwork and thus the popped fuse.

No matter what, you are practically rebuilding that powersupply. All new caps, all new mosfets.

Maybe try a newer SFX PSU and drill a couple holes to adapt it to your case? Something like a 300watt SeaSonic would be perfect.

ODwilly wrote:

...drill a couple holes to adapt it to your case.

Benetton93 wrote:

And now - for something special. Or weird. Probably both fits. QDI MP4-P4U885P3 http://i.imgur.com/LYGsOWbm.jpg Well, for mobo i […]
Show full quote

And now - for something special. Or weird. Probably both fits.
QDI MP4-P4U885P3

Well, for mobo itself - there's nothing weird. Rare? Yes, since there's Socket 3 + PCI. And they now quite expensive nowadays.
Weird thing is - story how i saved this mobo. From quite shocking condition.
Long story short - my gf called me, and said that somebody placed "sort of 90s computer" near her house. I decided to check it out, and... things started to get wacky.
When i opened computer case (which was in very bad shape), i saw this...

It was infested with.. wasps. That's right, you can actually see parts of hive, and there was 6 dead wasps. That is kind of thing i probably will never forget in my life... 🤣
Anyway, i decided to take out mobo to see is it worth to save or not. Later i cleaned hell out of that mobo, and tested it if it's alive or not...
And it definitely is.

Conclusion of this story - never judge by the look.
Thinking about making powerful 486 PC. Any suggestions about graphics card? Don't wanna install Voodoo though, my Voodoo Graphics doing it's job in my MMX PC, and Voodoo 2 will be too much for it. 🤣

I've also got this board and used it for quite some time in my main 486. I think its rock solid and never gave me issues. The BIOS is a bit sparse but everything necessary is there. I always found it weird that they included an onboard IDE controller but no floppy controller so you have to use up an ISA slot for a multi IO card after all. Speedwise it is definitely up there with the best 486 PCI boards in my benchmarking. Good find!

luckybob wrote:

https://pics.me.me/but-thats-heresy-39361653.png […]
Show full quote

ODwilly wrote:

...drill a couple holes to adapt it to your case.

Hahaha, Agreed. Much prefer the original PSU get recapped and refurbished, but a little heresy doesnt hurt now and then right? ;P

ZMAXdp Update: (I'll probably move all this to a new thread so I don't clutter this thread)
Yea I already ordered all the materials to refurb the power supply. It would not really work to stick something else in there, since the area the PSU is mounted acts as a wind tunnel for the CPU coolers. Any normal power supply (even SFX) mounted in that location would have all the cables going straight into the CPU heatsinks, whereas the CWT power supply has the two 80mm fans butted right up to them.

EDIT: bah, I found what caused the power supply fuse to blow.. a shitty molex splitter. I just tried to use the same splitter in another PC, and somehow it is causing a ground (or has a high resistance connection). I plugged it into a different power supply for testing, and it won't allow the power supply to turn on when connected. Then I jiggle the molex splitter and the power supply turns on and off, then trips. Remove the molex splitter and the power supply works fine every time. 😠

Two little parcels this week.

First up - a Music Quest MQX-32m:

Dual intelligent mode MIDI interface. Not 100% MPU-401 compatible, some games don't like it - but they are few & far between, and this remains one of the best ways to hook up something too old for SoftMPU to an MT-32 or similar.

Then this box:

They don't pack them like they used to:

On the right software and documentation:

And on the left (after two more layers of cardboard and under a disposable antistatic wrist strap):

What's this? It's the last revision of the "SunPC Accelerator" SBus card. Or, in non-Sun-speak, an Am5x86 on an SBus module that can share system resources (RAM, disk, video) with the native SuperSparc CPU, allowing an old Sun machine to run DOS and (theoretically) Windows programs in a window with (near) native performance and compatibility.

I'm very much looking forward to sticking this in my SparcStation 20 and seeing what it can do. Only problem is that it need Solaris 2.5 or 2.6 to run, and despite trying multiple OS images including ones directly from Oracle and using CDRom drives that have the quirky block mode required by Sun, I just can't get any installer to boot :'(

Picked up this bundle at the flea market today for 5€:

A QDI P5I430TX Titanium IB motherboard with a P166 MMX CPU, two 16 MB EDO SIMMs and a 3.2 GB Quantum Fireball ST. After a surface scan the hard drive unfortunately has 360 kB of bad sectors, but other than that all components work fine. The board isn't anything special in terms of specifications, but it has one very cool feature - it's completely jumperless, so everything is set up through the BIOS, including multipliers, FSB and voltages. I never had a jumperless board this old before, so this was a nice find for me.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed. […]
Show full quote

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed.

Can't get it to display anything and it turns on as soon as it plugs in. The guy said it wasn't working then messaged me two hours later saying he left it plugged in an powered on and left for a minute, came back and it came on. In the photo the green power light was on, and it was displaying a 161 CMOS Battery Dead error. So I know it turns on under some certain set of circumstances unless the ride home in my passengers seat killed it. He showed it to me when i was there and it was still on but he had disconnected the monitor (I mentioned a previous experience with a CTX monitor like that one failing violently) and I shut it down via the power button.

Right now it comes on and about 3 seconds it flashes the HDD access light and gives 2 short beeps (I'm assuming this is normal). The various keyboard lock lights all respond and you can hear it alternating between querying the hard disk and querying the floppy drive about every 30 seconds. Green lights not on, and the front power button does nothing. I've already replaced the CMOS battery which had some light corrosion and tried resetting it via the CMOS jumper. If I remove all RAM it give's a no ram detected code as would be expected if I remove all ram. If I set the jumper to bypass on board video I get a no video error (no auxiliary card installed). I need to find a wrench that fits the bolt head screws for the expansion slots before I can try a different video card but I know the video card works from before.

It's obvious the CPU and motherboard are working to some basic level as things are responding. What's not obvious is why I'm not getting a video signal, and why the power light and button are non functional.

I'm leaving it turned on over night to see if it just turns itself on at some point like the guy said it did.

Do any of you guys have any suggestions? I'm wondering if that TurboChip was installed wrong (I have no other 486 CPUS to test with).

I have some IBM Value 486sx33 and 486dx2-50 computers. I really like these they are some of my best 486 computers. I really like the IBM hard-drive images available to download. I use the 1994 multimedia image.
https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downl … -for-type-2133/
My IBM 486sx has a upgrade ZIF socket for a mathco processor or an upgrade intel CPU like this one.
It needs to be a 169 pin CPU.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Overdrive-CPU- … hoAAOSwI01cRyTA
Just pop in the CPU. No jumpers to set.

My 486dx-50 will take any 5v. Intel 486 CPU. I think the 486dx-50 is max speed 5v. CPU. Unless you use some sort of overdrive CPU.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I have some IBM Value 486sx33 and 486dx2-50 computers. I really like these they are some of my best 486 computers. I really like […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed. […]
Show full quote

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed.

Can't get it to display anything and it turns on as soon as it plugs in. The guy said it wasn't working then messaged me two hours later saying he left it plugged in an powered on and left for a minute, came back and it came on. In the photo the green power light was on, and it was displaying a 161 CMOS Battery Dead error. So I know it turns on under some certain set of circumstances unless the ride home in my passengers seat killed it. He showed it to me when i was there and it was still on but he had disconnected the monitor (I mentioned a previous experience with a CTX monitor like that one failing violently) and I shut it down via the power button.

Right now it comes on and about 3 seconds it flashes the HDD access light and gives 2 short beeps (I'm assuming this is normal). The various keyboard lock lights all respond and you can hear it alternating between querying the hard disk and querying the floppy drive about every 30 seconds. Green lights not on, and the front power button does nothing. I've already replaced the CMOS battery which had some light corrosion and tried resetting it via the CMOS jumper. If I remove all RAM it give's a no ram detected code as would be expected if I remove all ram. If I set the jumper to bypass on board video I get a no video error (no auxiliary card installed). I need to find a wrench that fits the bolt head screws for the expansion slots before I can try a different video card but I know the video card works from before.

It's obvious the CPU and motherboard are working to some basic level as things are responding. What's not obvious is why I'm not getting a video signal, and why the power light and button are non functional.

I'm leaving it turned on over night to see if it just turns itself on at some point like the guy said it did.

Do any of you guys have any suggestions? I'm wondering if that TurboChip was installed wrong (I have no other 486 CPUS to test with).

I have some IBM Value 486sx33 and 486dx2-50 computers. I really like these they are some of my best 486 computers. I really like the IBM hard-drive images available to download. I use the 1994 multimedia image.
https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downl … -for-type-2133/
My IBM 486sx has a upgrade ZIF socket for a mathco processor or an upgrade intel CPU like this one.
It needs to be a 169 pin CPU.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Overdrive-CPU- … hoAAOSwI01cRyTA
Just pop in the CPU. No jumpers to set.

My 486dx-50 will take any 5v. Intel 486 CPU. I think the 486dx-50 is max speed 5v. CPU. Unless you use some sort of overdrive CPU.

Wait are you telling me these things use a software bios stored on the HDD?

Images of OS and preinstalled software.

Eleanor1967 wrote:

I always found it weird that they included an onboard IDE controller but no floppy controller so you have to use up an ISA slot for a multi IO card after all.

It seems like every board with that UMC ISA/PCI chipset has that "problem". My ATC1415 has 2 ide but no floppy and same for my pcchips M915i which also uses the same chipset.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I have some IBM Value 486sx33 and 486dx2-50 computers. I really like these they are some of my best 486 computers. I really like […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed. […]
Show full quote

Bought an IBM PC 350 433DX with a Kingston TurboChip upgrade installed.

Can't get it to display anything and it turns on as soon as it plugs in. The guy said it wasn't working then messaged me two hours later saying he left it plugged in an powered on and left for a minute, came back and it came on. In the photo the green power light was on, and it was displaying a 161 CMOS Battery Dead error. So I know it turns on under some certain set of circumstances unless the ride home in my passengers seat killed it. He showed it to me when i was there and it was still on but he had disconnected the monitor (I mentioned a previous experience with a CTX monitor like that one failing violently) and I shut it down via the power button.

Right now it comes on and about 3 seconds it flashes the HDD access light and gives 2 short beeps (I'm assuming this is normal). The various keyboard lock lights all respond and you can hear it alternating between querying the hard disk and querying the floppy drive about every 30 seconds. Green lights not on, and the front power button does nothing. I've already replaced the CMOS battery which had some light corrosion and tried resetting it via the CMOS jumper. If I remove all RAM it give's a no ram detected code as would be expected if I remove all ram. If I set the jumper to bypass on board video I get a no video error (no auxiliary card installed). I need to find a wrench that fits the bolt head screws for the expansion slots before I can try a different video card but I know the video card works from before.

It's obvious the CPU and motherboard are working to some basic level as things are responding. What's not obvious is why I'm not getting a video signal, and why the power light and button are non functional.

I'm leaving it turned on over night to see if it just turns itself on at some point like the guy said it did.

Do any of you guys have any suggestions? I'm wondering if that TurboChip was installed wrong (I have no other 486 CPUS to test with).

I have some IBM Value 486sx33 and 486dx2-50 computers. I really like these they are some of my best 486 computers. I really like the IBM hard-drive images available to download. I use the 1994 multimedia image.
https://ps1stuff.wordpress.com/download/downl … -for-type-2133/
My IBM 486sx has a upgrade ZIF socket for a mathco processor or an upgrade intel CPU like this one.
It needs to be a 169 pin CPU.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Overdrive-CPU- … hoAAOSwI01cRyTA
Just pop in the CPU. No jumpers to set.

My 486dx-50 will take any 5v. Intel 486 CPU. I think the 486dx-50 is max speed 5v. CPU. Unless you use some sort of overdrive CPU.

Wait are you telling me these things use a software bios stored on the HDD?

No the bios in on the Chip on the motherboard. The hard-drive images are original install images of how IBM setup the hard-drives for these computers.
You can download the image extract it and burn it to a cdrom. Then boot your IBM pc off a DOS boot disk with cdrom support and then copy the cdrom image to your harddrive with this command

1A:> xcopy d:\*.* c:

I don't know about your motherboard. If it only supports a 5v CPU.

Only photo from seller, this board is on the road to me for 10 Euros 😀 Ram and processor included

respect2759 wrote:

Only photo from seller, this board is on the road to me for 10 Euros 😀 Ram and processor included

Nice board.
Why would you want VLB slot if you have PCI ?
Unless you have a VLB video card you wanted to use.