Good day Vogons at large! Long time reader and first time poster here, with a question for ya'll regarding the mysterious MOBO I found in a recent thrift find.

Walked out of the house about 2 weeks ago with the sudden urge to finally bite the bullet and try to start up a DOS gaming rig- but given the state of Goodwill/SA's PC policy these days, I expected to find nothing at all, and quell the urge in a warm blanket of disappointment... till I walked into an old mom&pop thrift near my house and saw a shiny beige box hidden behind some old VCRs. My heart skipped a beat, and I told myself "it won't turn on, of course, and I won't spend any money"... Long story short, it POSTed right there in the store, and 15 dollars later, I was the proud owner of a socket 7 machine with (almost) all working hardware. Windows 95 was found installed and running well.

I pulled her apart and found a generic ATAPI 44x CD-ROM and floppy drive; CPU is a Pentium 166 SY016; sound and modem were generic ISA components, though the Sound card was DOA and Windows will not recognize it as PnP, despite attempts at a manual driver install; 4 gig IDE HD; Diamond Stealth64 S3 video card (huzzah!); and a sad set of 8 MB FPM SIMMS. SIMMS have since been replaced with 64 Meg of EDO, and I'm awaiting 512KB of IBM cache and a Creative AWE32 ISA card.

So this is my question: does anyone know anything about P&Q motherboards, specifically the P&Q L-9630-8 ML-1 94V I found all this stuff plugged into.

My research indicates that it has some passing familial production relationship with the Amptron PM-7900A. The P&Q has the same Intel i430VX chipset, the same SIMM/DIMM combination count, a USB headed (and USB support in BIOS) and general appearance; however, the PINOUT guides I found for the Amptron do not match the few printed jumper guides actually on the board, the PCI/ISA count differs, and the layout of the board itself differs slightly. It also has a dreaded DALLAS CMOS chip (thankfully socketted).

I would appreciate any general or specific advice/manuals/pinouts/data anyone might have for the P&Q line and/or this specific model. Also, what sorts of things can one do with a USB 1.0 headed in a Windows 95/DOS environment? I understand DOS has little to no USB support, but could I use a thumbdrive to transfer data in '95? Since the board has jumpered multipliers, does jacking the CPU up to 3 or 3.5X count as overclocking, and does that overheart the CPU?

I was 11 in 1996 when the board and most of this hardware was manufactured, and I have many fond memories of building and playing with socket 7 machines- but 20 years has erased much of my memory regarding this tech, and even DOS commands. My current struggles include- P&Q info; trying to remember how to setup COM and IRQ settings for an AWE card; and picking a good Multiboot software to shrink the current HDD partition and create a second partition to run a pure DOS 6.22 environment, as the current 95 setup makes playing CD-ROM DOS games like Rise of the Triad really obnoxious.

Any suggestions of a dead-simple Multiboot/partition tool for this sort of setup?

Thanks guys!