VOGONS


First post, by Turboman

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Hey guys, I got this 286/16 computer tested it seems to work good, hard drive looks dead. It's nice looking PC looks to be complete even came with the original manual.
I want to upgrade this to the max! It currently has 2mb of ram and it has an AMD 16mhz. The manual seen in the pictures mentions 20mhz can I actually get a 20mhz to upgrade this with?
I also want to get an FPU it say to use a 80287, what kind should I use, 10mhz? The motherboard is a Super 286/16 Ver 1.0, 00-71-80286-10. I don't know anything about other then that.

I'm not very good with finding ram like this. It currently has Hy531000S-80, I checked on ebay and they are $3 a piece which is too much for me. What is the fastest kind of ram this can take and where can I get some that is reasonably priced? and what other upgrades should I get for it? This is a new project that I'm going to finish and test it out see how it performs 😁

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Reply 1 of 8, by carlostex

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You probably need to get a 40MHz crystal oscillator and put it in place of the 32MHz one. Keep in mind that your motherboard seems to get the ISA bus clock from the main OSCI divided by 4, so the BUS will run at 10MHz. This will provide a speed boost, but some 16bit ISA cards might be fussy working at 10MHz. I would recommend you to keep the system at 16MHz, it was the definitive 286 clock speed i believe. I think 12MHz and 16MHz were the most common clock speeds for the 286.

For the hard drive you can try to use a Compact flash IDE adapter and use a 256MB card if that's enough for you, or if you wanna keep the Hard Drive route i'd recommend you to get a Seagate ST3144A or if you need more capacity an ST3144A. These hard drives were the "shit" back in the days. Very reliable.

Reply 2 of 8, by Caluser2000

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Congrats. It looks like a very tidy system.

Definately fit a network card and sound card in it. The nic has an added advantage of having an boot rom socket. You may be able use an eprom with the AT version of of the xt-ida bios extension, to give you huge hard disk drive support, in the boot rom socket. You can add extra ram for the hell of it with ISA ram expansion cards but they're reasonably thin on the ground. A CDRom drive is possible using IDE but looks like external 5.25" bays are limited on your machine. The parallel port can be used to add a number of different devices such as zip drives, LS120 drive(added bonus of a second 3.5" floppy support), backpack parallel port cdroms/floppy drives.

I have an LS120 and backpack cdrom daisy chained off my slimline 286/12 which was lucky enough to have support for 8megs of 30 pin simms.

Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2015-05-20, 12:59. Edited 1 time in total.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 3 of 8, by GXL750

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That dead hard drive is a real relic. The company that made it tried pulling some shennanigans involving stocking their warehouses with boxed bricks marked as hard drives. They didn't make it out of the 1980s.

Reply 4 of 8, by Caluser2000

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Interesting seeing a Miniscribe 8051A set up like that too. Wonder if it had was a hard card with smaller drive initially and the mount was repurposed?

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 5 of 8, by oerk

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Caluser2000 wrote:

Interesting seeing a Miniscribe 8051A set up like that too. Wonder if it had was a hard card with smaller drive initially and the mount was repurposed?

Yeah, seems a bit like trouble waiting to happen.

What's the card holding the hard drive supposed to be, anyway? It certainly isn't the controller card, which would've at least made some sense.

Reply 6 of 8, by Turboman

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oerk wrote:
Caluser2000 wrote:

Interesting seeing a Miniscribe 8051A set up like that too. Wonder if it had was a hard card with smaller drive initially and the mount was repurposed?

Yeah, seems a bit like trouble waiting to happen.

What's the card holding the hard drive supposed to be, anyway? It certainly isn't the controller card, which would've at least made some sense.

It has what I believe is a serial port. It's weird they would mount the hard drive that way since it is bending the card.

Reply 7 of 8, by Caluser2000

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I guess taking up the outer 8-bit ISA slot was that big a deal. There's still plenty of other slots to fill.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 8 of 8, by MCACE

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Hi Turboman

I recently picked up a Super 286/16 board like the one you posted here. It is non functional. The BIOS chip seems to be corrupted. Unreadable in my TL866 programmer. Do you by any chance have a backup ROM/BIN file of your board that you could share.

Any help would greatly appreciated .

Thx