Of times where case + power supply + drives were still expensive...

I used to have one of these but sold it recently.

It's an interesting toy, but ultimately I didn't like having it installed in my XT. It's not exactly a motherboard on a card. It still relies on most of the components on the XT motherboard. To the best of my knowledge it only works in 4.77MHz XTs.
It actually turns your XT into more of a 286 than a 386, as the 386 CPU that comes with it as marked as "16-bit software only", not to mention that because it lacks 16-bit DMA, you cannot run 32-bit operating systems without a patch. Windows 3.0 is the only OS I am aware of that has said patch.
One of the biggest negatives I can think of is that this card uses proprietary memory expansion (which is expensive if you can find it). Normally this will limit you to the 1mb it comes with.
There are probably better 8088 upgrade products out there. Unless you're a collector, I'd pass on this one.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

It actually turns your XT into more of a 286 than a 386, as the 386 CPU that comes with it as marked as "16-bit software only"

I think early 386s had a bug that made them halt when trying to run 32bit software. But that didn't affect all of them. The bug-free ones were labeled ΣΣ (sigma sigma), and the buggy ones carried a "16bit software only" label, and they could be selled, as most people would need to run 16bit dos software. I have 3-4 early 386s and all of them are the ΣΣ model 😎

well 32bit software only appeared with win95 (possibly os/2) and you wouldnt want to run that o/s on a 386

what about dos4/gw (or other similar extenders) software? don't they have some 32bit parts?

DOS/4GW doesn't sound too useful with 1 Megabyte.

Davros wrote:

well 32bit software only appeared with win95 (possibly os/2) and you wouldnt want to run that o/s on a 386

DOOM is 32-bit... Required 4MB of RAM though. It was the first game that made me sad that I was still on a 286 at the time; I was only able to play it on weekends when I visited my father's office.

Markk wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

It actually turns your XT into more of a 286 than a 386, as the 386 CPU that comes with it as marked as "16-bit software only"

I think early 386s had a bug that made them halt when trying to run 32bit software. But that didn't affect all of them. The bug-free ones were labeled ΣΣ (sigma sigma), and the buggy ones carried a "16bit software only" label, and they could be selled, as most people would need to run 16bit dos software. I have 3-4 early 386s and all of them are the ΣΣ model 😎

Its a bit more complicated.
There is a good description here http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx … 30978&seqNum=27
chapter '386 Bugs'.

My 16 BIT S/W ONLY 386 looks like this
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/forum/386_top.jpg

Though even if your old 386s are double Sigmas, they still have the Errata 21 Bug.

So f.e. if you have a slow older 386 with Waitstates enabled, a 387 coprocessor, run Win 3.x in enhanced mode, play tracked music with a soundblaster that utilizes DMA for transfer, let the player use FPU interpolation and then add a memory intensive program that starts to swap out via paging.... ...then your 386 might lock up.

elianda wrote:

Though even if your old 386s are double Sigmas, they still have the Errata 21 Bug.

So f.e. if you have a slow older 386 with Waitstates enabled, a 387 coprocessor, run Win 3.x in enhanced mode, play tracked music with a soundblaster that utilizes DMA for transfer, let the player use FPU interpolation and then add a memory intensive program that starts to swap out via paging.... ...then your 386 might lock up.

Sounds cool, but I guess I'm lacking the motherboard and the fpu in order to test that... 😜 But I've got some various cpus. I think there are 2 with no logo at all, two with 386 logo, and also one 386dx-25 IV. I think this must be the most recent.. 😀