VOGONS


First post, by awergh

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Apparnetly a whole lot of stuff was being chucked out at uni today mostly books and stuff but I managed to find my self 3 386 boards and a boring socket 7 board as well. 😀

However none of them seem to post 😢

Now the hard part is to work out what each of the boards is. I'll see if I can find pictures later.

Board 1
American Megatrends Inc (c) 1987
Series-4 Rev-A

Has socketed 386-20 and 387-20
Has socked DALLAS real time chip so no battery bombs on this board
No SIMMs so I assume the memory is socketed on the board somewhere?

Symptoms:
3 beeps continuously
post card says 1.0 presumably 10

This is something about the memory and I presume I should need to reseat the memory but I don't have a chip extractor and am not too sure which is the memory.

Board 2
American Megatrends inc
386SX-XT Series-20 Rev-E

This board has a 386SX-20 on the board and 8 SIMM slots
It has a 6v battery holder which is nice to

it is fairly similar to this board although not entirely the same
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AM … 86SX-CACHE.html

Symptoms:
1 very short beep
Post card says 3

This is something to do with the memory which is all sims so i can probably reseat them

Board 3

Socketed 386DX-20 no 387 is installed
4 banks of ram making 16 slots they are all in a line.
Unfortunately has a battery bomb but doesn't seem to be much damage on the board but I might be mistaken I think I need to clean up the mess.

I can find no branding on the mobo that I can see. The board is big has 1 8bit isa 6 isa and 1 8bit isa.

The bios is from 1986 I cannot tell you much more then that.

Symptoms:
No beeps
No post code just the leds light up so there is power
Sometimes the keyboard lights would flicker several times

My guess is battery leak is the problem and that needs to be cleaned up.

Reply 1 of 5, by Anonymous Coward

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I have board #2.

It is interesting in that it is a 386SX yet can do 2-way memory interleaving (4 or 8 matching SIMMs required for operation), and that it also has 32kb cache. 386SX boards rarely ever had cache. The build quality of this board is superb.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 2 of 5, by awergh

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Well i have had success I switched the 8 512kb sticks for 4 1mb sticks I had and it posts now.

I just noticed it actually says 386SX Cache on the bios chip. No case to put the motherboard in but I'm very happy that the board now posts.
It indeed does look like a nice motherboard. How common was it to have battery holders on 386 or anything pre pentium?

Reply 3 of 5, by Anonymous Coward

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It's pretty rare to have a 386 board with a lithium ion battery from the factory as far as I know.

If you decide to get a lot of use out of this AMI board, I recommending removing the 40MHz oscillator and installing a socket with a new 50MHz oscillator so you can run at 25MHz. Yes, it's overclocking, but the board was designed for operation at either 20 or 25MHz. A small heatink on the 386SX chip should do it. I actually ran my board at 33MHz for a time without any problems (with a Cyrix upgrade CPU), but I don't know if it's a good idea long term. The performance was quite good. The cache and DRAM interleave really help.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 4 of 5, by awergh

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So back on board #1 which is very similar to this board http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AM … T-SERIES-6.html
Although I guess I have series-4 instead of series-6 but it sounds like I need one of those external memory cards?
Do they have a specific name so I can find them hopefully on ebay for a nonobscene amount.

Reply 5 of 5, by Anonymous Coward

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Finding the memory card is probably going to be pretty troublesome. A few years back there was a guy on ebay in LA who probably had what you needed...but he closed shop.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium