Both cards are quite valuable. Play some Ultima 6-7 on it?

Install a nic and do some IRCing

you can play 386 games, what else? 😁

Wing Commander of course 😀

It could be nice for playing ~1990 games that actually can't run well on faster machines — this is why other people have mentioned Ultima 7 and Wing Commander. Both games are notoriously speed-sensitive, so this is one of the main reasons people build 386 systems at all.

Other than that you can try some other RPGs (like Lands of Lore or Eye of the Beholder) and adventure games like Monkey Island series or Space/King/Police quest. There should also be some flight simulators for a 386. Most FPS games (besides Wolfenstein 3D) won't run well on a 386, so probably no Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

AWE64 Gold is a really nice sound card, but it's sort of useless for a 386. It has nice General MIDI music (that only gained prominence around 1995 or so) and not-so-nice AdLib implementation. Also a lot of its features require Windows. All in all, you might want to use this card in a Pentium machine.

vabis wrote:

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Hi

I have a 486SLC (if I understand it right its basicly an 386SX CPU ) at 25 mhz,AWE64Gold for sound and MACH64 ATI for GFX.

Is there any suggestions what I can do with this system. Im a bit new to old PC stuff.

thanks

The 486SLC has the added benefit of having a 1KB L1 cache - make sure it's enabled to maximise the potential of this CPU.
I believe that there has been benchmarks done on this CPU, but I think (speaking under correction) that the 25 MHz model should get you around 33 MHz 386DX speeds.
However, the external 16-bit data bus does limit overall performance.

I do tend to agree with the other comments made that this CPU is meant for playing 386 based games.
The AWE64 was primarily designed to be used in Pentium based systems. A Sound Blaster Pro (or compatible card) is probably a much better fit for this type of PC.

Thanks for all the answers =)

Jesolo is there a tool I need to get to enable the cache ??

I forgot to say I have MS DOS 6.22 and 3.11 installed all ready and maxed out the ram to 16 mb

first look at your BIOS setup, if there is an "Internal Cache" option then you need no tool - chances are the option exists.

vabis wrote:

Thanks for all the answers =)

Jesolo is there a tool I need to get to enable the cache ??

I forgot to say I have MS DOS 6.22 and 3.11 installed all ready and maxed out the ram to 16 mb

Agree with Keropi. Your BIOS should have a setting for enabling or disabling the L1 cache.
Just in case, here's a link to Phil's site where he ran some benchmarks on the DLC counterpart and also have some utilities: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/cyrix-486dlc.html

Looks like my bios did not have that option but tried the link you sent Jesolo and that software says the cache is on, and it seems to benched somewhat close to an Am386DX-40.

This cyrix486slc I have I know cyrix did some upgrade that you plug on top of the CPU. Did they make one for this 486SLC ??

That seems correct for a 486slc - 386DX/40 speeds in benchmarks.
I know of the 386sx->486slc double clocked upgrade but no upgrades for the 486slc itself. The upgrades would be better if they came with some sort of L2 cache but sadly they don't. 1kb is just too little to make a big difference .

keropi wrote:

That seems correct for a 486slc - 386DX/40 speeds in benchmarks.
I know of the 386sx->486slc double clocked upgrade but no upgrades for the 486slc itself. The upgrades would be better if they came with some sort of L2 cache but sadly they don't. 1kb is just too little to make a big difference .

All righty, thanks