Looks like a fairly standard 386 to me. Tseng ET4000 VGA, Winbond multi i/o, and a 386DX motherboard with CHIPS chipset. The motherboard appears to be better than average. I'd do something about that battery though.

You most certainly plugged FDD cable the wrong way. Red line on the cable is pin 1, it's location is also printed on controller and drive PCB. The end of the cable with swapped contacts goes to the drive. Bingo!

The 32 bit memory card slots were usually positioned as last (by today's slot numbering) or first (near the AT keyboard connector). They are rarely found amidst 16 bit slots. This might give a clue. On a hunch this will / should be found among the "Unidentified 386 boards".

Nice system you have there. Clip off that battery ASAP. The 4-pin header near the second ISA slot is probably for an external battery container.

I have seen those extended ISA slots on some boards, but good luck finding a card that will use it. Assuming that those slots have 32-bit data access, will that slot be accessed at 33MHz?

Nice video card you have there. RacoonRider is almost certainly correct, you reversed the floppy cable.

I think that a 386 motherboard with an AMI BIOS would report the available total RAM on bootup. Have you disabled the RAM test feature?

Most keyboards of that era did not support n-key rollover or anything close to it.

Your computer's multi-I/O card has a joystick port next to the parallel port and two headers for serial ports. These headers are easy enough to find and there are brackets you can use to install them, just make sure they are inserted correctly.

All you need to make that machine an excellent DOS gaming rig is a Sound Blaster.

wow, that didnt take long to get hardware recognized xD thank you <3 cookies for you~

The memory test feature is still on, and it detected memory to be 4 megabytes. what i found interesting however that first 2 megabytes is tested slowly, and second half twice as fast. is there a real reason to this?

As expected, the bios needed to be reconficured again so it can access the hard drive properly, also disc drive was required to be conficured properly as well, however 1.44Mb disk drive still fails to work. There is no markers for what is ide-1 (red line), and albeit i swapped it other way in I/O card, it still does not function. ill give if few more tries to see if if is wrongly plugged in floppy side, or master/slave issue. (it wasn me who plugged it wrong way though, if i recall there was some hazzle with it when my sis' old boyfriend put his fingers in his pentium and our 386 for whatever reason xD)

EDIT: disk drive light shut down after i swapped the ide cable other way around. I managed to find red line on ide cable too, it was very discreetly marked tough, barely visible at all. However, computer still fails to communicate with 1.44 floppy disc drive, regardless i made it perfectly sure that pin-1 connects to pin-1.

I was unable to determine the version of the current bios, It is however, as you suspected, AMI bios, dated for 1990. Further boot up details does trow alot of details i dont know half about. i do not know if this has anything to do with bios, but this did hit my eye: rom-bios date 5.5.1991 It may be however that it is actuar rom driver version than

alas, the old serial port mouse is missing, so using windows is rather slow.

I never mentioned that the old keyboard where n-roll keyboard. All i know that few players could play it at once without too much of a trouble xD

current dos is MS-Dos 5.00

And there is also slot for another processor on my motherboard, I would suspect it would be for numeric processor, Apart from being "expansion for cpu that does numeric calculations for cpu much faster that it could do it itself" and "today cpus' physically already include npu", i know nothing about it, and if there is a real reason for someone to have it on system old as this.

and as for removal of the battery, You mentioned that 4-pin next to the battery could be used for external battery. if true, how one should use it?
and of course, if i do remove battery now, does it affect the computers ability to work properly, apart of putting bios back in order after every shutdown?

Mkananoja wrote:

But real treasure is old mechanical keyboard. Back then there was no limits how many buttons you could press down at once, and still work like charm. I still remember playing with 3 of my friends playing slick and slide racing game on the same keyboard at the same time, and had no problems... expect we had to bundle up quite tightly to fit in next to keyboard xD

What keyboard is that? I haven't seen any mechanical nkro boards before.

Pin one is clearly indicated next to the pin headers on your multi-I/O card. Take a black magic marker and use it to mark that edge of the ribbon. When they decided to key the connectors so the cables only went in one way, things became a whole lot easier.

You could try switching the RAM modules from bank to bank, but since you need four modules to have any RAM at all (the 386 is a 32-bit processor and each SIMMs slot only puts out 8-bits of memory), its unlikely to make a difference.

The unused socket is indeed for a numeric coprocessor. You will need an i387 33MHz chip, but extremely few games used it in this era of computer.

If that or any other pin header is intended for an external battery, you will need something like this : http://www.jameco.com/1/1/28217-bat-holder-r- … -connector.html

I believe that an AMI BIOS will simply spit an error at you when you remove the existing battery, and you can bypass it. Clip the leads that keep the barrel connected to the motherboard.

Battery holders are easy, just unsolder one from some dead board and connect it to the motherboard with a speaker connector/cable. Mind polarity (red wire is usually "+", for the sake of order).

btw, you have to state that you have 1.44 MB 3 1/2 drive in BIOS, as far as I know, the FDD protocol has not changed over years.

thank you for the link, that image pretty much told me what kind of pin connections i need to not to blow it up xD

the keyboard is old BTC-53 series keyboard.

I have specified on bios that it should be indeed 1.44 3½ floppy drive, and i have made it now perfectly sure that I/O pin 1 do connect with floppy pin 1. boot up do give small pause now, as in trying to figure if there is floppy boot disk in drive a. however nothing happens on specific disk drive, or cannot it be accessed once in dos or windows.

However i may know now why the disk drive wont work. tha all knowing google trew that FDD cable has connectors for 3½ and 5.25 B drive and lastly 3½ and 5.25 A drive,
but fdd cable i have doesnt have one for 3½ A drive. It was mistakenly connected to b-drive's 3½ connector so obviously it couldnt have worked. I have no knowledge why this cable is now in 386 as it cannot be the original. Now i do feel little (more) stupid by not realizing this before ^^;

I hate to admit that i have no knowledge what happened inside 386 before -95 or so. I dont even know if disk driver is the original or not xD

anyway, all i need is to order proper FDD cable (as i havnt found other fdd cables lying around in here), and i think it doesnt even need to have B drive connectors. just to have flip of pin 10-17 before a-drive connector. I also order that 4-pin external battery for meantime as i plan removing that original battery and get proper replacement.

Thank you a thousand for your help~

I saw your pics and it dawned on me that I too was a proud owner.

One of the best retro motherboards I ever owned and first PC I built by myself was with this Chips & Technologies board.

I liked it so much when I wanted to upgrade to 486 I tried finding a similar C&T one but couldn't find any. In fact, I never saw another C&T motherboard for any CPU class again, even the 386 class. I was beginning to think they were rare.

I don't know if is still works, I just kept it as a little memento of my childhood.