No sooner had I stated my indifference to pre-pentium retro I turn around and add a 486 rig to the menagerie. $30 for a near pristine AST Advantage Adventure 466 [486dx2/66] was hard to pass up...
It came loaded with W95 1st release which is cool since I never used the original W95. Case has a few scratches on top where the monitor once stood but otherwise is clean as a whistle and very lightly used based on the slim amount of files/apps installed.
The motherboard is an Elite Group UP8810, all isa off the riser card. Audio is an ESS1868 embedded on the riser card - so far no issues, and video an on-board Cirrus Logic chip - not sure how much memory yet. None of the motherboard cache sockets are populated so I'm not sure if it has any L2 at all. The Dallas RTC/battery seems fine for now.
I'm adding a 3.3gb drive to augment the diminutive 540mb it came with, and fiddling around with the boot files since at stock settings it clears only 545k conventional memory. Rem'ing out everything but the mouse I climb to 581 - still very low, so it looks like I need to fuss around with all this. Maybe isa audio and video cards with lighter drivers? It also seems to load a Dos Extender, something I'm not familiar with at all.
After the memory is sorted I think this box will be a good home to all the older dos and cpu-challenged games in the collection.
EDIT: Does anyone have documentation for this model? In particular the Elite Group UP-8810 v10 rel 3.3 motherboard? I've spent hours trying to track something down with no luck - lots of "close but no cigars". Jumper settings will be needed at some point if I elect to install audio/video cards.