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Looking for 286 CPU upgrade "kit"

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First post, by Flash

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Looking for 286 CPU upgrade "kit". Someone got an 286 - 386 or even a 286 -486 converter/adapter/kit/upgrade?
I know they exist.

Reply 1 of 28, by mwdmeyer

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Do you mean something like this? 800px-Kingston_SX_Now.jpg

Many of them are designed for specific machines/motherboards, so getting one that fits can be difficult.

Vogons Wiki - http://vogonswiki.com

Reply 2 of 28, by dr.ido

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I've got one buried somewhere. Hypertec made a lot of them. Theirs were intended for IBM PS/2 model 50/60 and have a 386SX-25 on them. They also made made 386 -> 486 upgrade boards for PS/2 model 70/80. I used to see them a lot in ex government surplus systems - under policies of the time fitting an Australian made upgrade to existing systems looked better than simply replacing them with new. The same policy also saw 5160 XTs fitted with 386SX-16 motherboards and poorly fitted 3.5" floppy drives by another local company.

The Hypertec ones were fitted by removing the 286 CPU and plugging the board into empty socket. There were no other connections made to the motherboard. I guess there's no reason not to try in something else as long the physical layout fits. That said I can't remember seeing anything other than a PS/2 50/60 or a 5170 AT that used a PGA 286.

What system do you want to upgrade?

Reply 3 of 28, by keropi

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I have used one of these 386sx upgrades on my generic 286 system - with a little solderwork, a socket replacement and some cutting I was able to fit it , sure it took some time but the result is just great 😀

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Reply 4 of 28, by Flash

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Great job with that "286", thanks for sharing. Exactly something like that I'm looking for, upgrade to insert in the CPU socket for general system.
I've got the Commodore A2286 bridgeboard in my Amiga 4000, its an emulator originally made for the earlier Amiga 2000 (1986/87). Its an emulator in the sense that it makes the Amiga act like an PC concurrently with running Amiga OS, essentially its a complete 286 PC more or less on an expansion board.

Reply 5 of 28, by keropi

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oh I am very familiar with the amiga bridgeboards - at one point in the past I had a GoldenGate 486slc2 in my A4000D ... enjoy some old 640x480 pics 🤣

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🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 7 of 28, by dr.ido

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It looks like the A2286 has a daughter board containing the BIOS and RAM that sits over top of the CPU socket. I doubt there be enough clearance between the boards to install anything without modification. I guess you could raise the daughter board with stacked socket pins. Crazy idea that might actually work - desolder the original CPU socket, solder PGA type upgrade to the back of the board 😀

Reply 8 of 28, by Jo22

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Flash wrote:

I've got the Commodore A2286 bridgeboard in my Amiga 4000, its an emulator originally made for the earlier Amiga 2000 (1986/87).

Oh yes, good ol' A2286.. I wonder whether or not a CPU upgrade alone would make that bridgboard any more useful or not.

Don't get me wrong, I like such kind of technology. But the A2286 CGA emulation is so abysmal (performance wise) that it is almost shameful
to any real 286 PC to be compared with that board ("look that's how slow 286es where! *lol* *rofl* Amiga were sooo much better!" 😉 ).
Here's a sample video of the CGA emulation (the user didn't say such things,btw): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAaNuIfXH0

Again, don't get me wrong. That card may be fine with an external EGA/VGA/Hercules card (if it supports that).
But the internal CGA emulation seems like a parody. 😁

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 9 of 28, by Flash

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My Amiga 4000 got an 68060@66MHz CPU, so CGA emulation is not that slow as on the original Amiga 2000 with 68000 CPU, if I wanted to use that option.
I've got an VGA ISA-16 card installed, so I don't emulate the graphics with software, I also a Sound Blaster 2 card installed.
The bottleneck now is that I emulate the harddrive using hdd image file on the Amiga harddrive, and harddrive this way is very slow this way (120 KB/sec raw read).

Reply 10 of 28, by Flash

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In the YouTube video I think the Win 3.11 slowness is mostly due to slow harddrive emulation, probably very slow access time, then Windows behave like this. This user can maybe improve this a little by adding more buffers for the Amiga harddrive on the Amiga side where an image file is used to emulate PC harddrive, buffers set to like 1500 instead of default 30, this on expense off Amiga Fast RAM. The best is to use a real ISA harddrive controller.

Reply 11 of 28, by Jo22

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Flash wrote:

My Amiga 4000 got an 68060@66MHz CPU, so CGA emulation is not that slow as on the original Amiga 2000 with 68000 CPU,
if I wanted to use that option. I've got an VGA ISA-16 card installed, so I don't emulate the graphics with software, I also a Sound Blaster 2 card installed.
The bottleneck now is that I emulate the harddrive using hdd image file on the Amiga harddrive, and harddrive this way is very slow this way (120 KB/sec raw read).

I didn't mean to bad mouth that card in any way, I'm sorry if it sounds like that. 😅
Just read on a few sources about the slow CGA emulation (and mentioned it, since that's the default mode).

The first one was in a Google book page thing (a magazine review from the late 80s).
Another one is this museum page that says :
"In both programs, you can adjust the colors of the presentation to his own taste,
also you can reduce the color number, as the full 16 colors are often displayed with CGA a bit slow.
"

Since it is a pro-Amiga site, "a bit slow" could also mean "very slow". 😉
That site also confirms a slow HDD emulation, as you wrote..

Flash wrote:
In the YouTube video I think the Win 3.11 slowness is mostly due to slow harddrive emulation, probably very slow access time, th […]
Show full quote

In the YouTube video I think the Win 3.11 slowness is mostly due to slow harddrive emulation,
probably very slow access time, then Windows behave like this. This user can maybe improve this a little by adding more buffers for
the Amiga harddrive on the Amiga side where an image file is used to emulate PC harddrive, buffers set to like 1500 instead of default
30, this on expense off Amiga Fast RAM. The best is to use a real ISA harddrive controller.

I see. So it must be noticable slower than a mechanical 360K floppy drive. 😐
Personally, I've never seen 16-Bit Windows to crawl like that. 😳
Even Windows 3.0 on a real MFM/RLL drive or Windows 2.0 on a floppy disk (720KB, 286 PC) wasnt that laggy.
(When I did a video of Windows 1.x on a PC/XT with CGA it wasn't that laggy, either.)

In fact, even PC-Ditto (Soft-Emulation) for the AtariST seems to have been more responsive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoHVFB0ROlI

In respect to MFM/RLL drives (ST506/ST412 interface) and old PCs,
that's the best I found for comparison with real hardware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeNQbV4pEsM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnudvJbAgI0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg3rNXoVH7c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2pNeUh67x4

Perhaps both the emulation performed by the Janus software and the I/O that came from the bridgeboard were too
demanding for that Amiga (causing a bottleneck) ? But if so, why was the music playing fine in background ?
-I'd be really cool if we could re-test this scenario sometime (maybe in another thread).

Flash wrote:

The best is to use a real ISA harddrive controller.

I think the same. Maybe something that isn't requiring lots of resources (IRQs, DMA, etc).
Maybe an XTIDE card with a CF card would do.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 12 of 28, by Flash

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I don't know why Windows behaves like this, actually on my high end Amiga, where I use a real VGA card in ISA-16 bit mode, Windows is useless to. My wild guess is that it accesses the harddrive for a large amount of smaller files for almost all the time, and a very slow seek time causes this (even using hdd image file on Amiga partition is actually a little faster than the average IBM PC XT hdd on my system, according to benchmark results, but Windows 3.1 is useless).

For all games I've tested (and everything else), it works just as fast as any real 286 computer. CGA emulation is slow if using a stock A2000@7,14 MHZ 16 bit, but it helps to have an Amiga with a 32 CPU that is 90x faster than the stock Amiga 2000 for example, on my system I didn't notices any slowness with CGA emulation.

When I use a software only emulator (PCTask), I get speed like an 33 MHz 386 according to Norton SysInfo and this is also what I experiences with games.
Still I think the hardware PC emulator is cool, it almost doesn't steal any resources from the Amiga side and uses real ISA cards (even how pointless this is, specially when software emulator is faster).

Last edited by Flash on 2018-04-20, 07:03. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 14 of 28, by dr.ido

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I used to run the 1060 XT bridgeboard on my Amiga 1000 back in the day. The emulated CGA does makes me wonder now if anyone ever thought of upgrading the software to do Tandy 16 color graphics. It never occurred to me at the time - Why would I want to play PC games when Amiga games were cleary superior 😀 I used it more as a hard disk for the Amiga and a means to transfer files between Amiga and PC than for actually running PC software.

Reply 15 of 28, by Flash

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The A1060 was actually kind off the first official harddrive for the A1000. The reasons Commodore Germany developed the A1060 was that they felt the platform was missing some "industri standard" productivity software. Such software at the time didn't used any graphics, only ANSI characters in text mode. Such as Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3 etc. You need only monochrome MDA (character only) for using this software.

if you wanted to play games, the A1060 got internal ISA expansion slots where you can add graphic card and sound card (sound card was not available before much later, like around 1989 I think)

Reply 16 of 28, by TimWolf

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mwdmeyer wrote:
Do you mean something like this? http://www.vogonswiki.com/images/thumb/6/6a/Kingston_SX_Now.jpg/800px-Kingston_SX_Now.jpg […]
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Do you mean something like this? 800px-Kingston_SX_Now.jpg

Many of them are designed for specific machines/motherboards, so getting one that fits can be difficult.

Greetings @mwdmeyer, I just joined up because I am trying to upgrade my 12mhz Hyundai 286 and I think that the SX/25LCM is the only way to do it. Is this something you or anyone here has available? A little about the board. It is a socket like the attached photo. There are no jumpers. The crystal near the chip is 14.xxxmhz (solder blob obscuring most of that). Kingston made a SX/20LCM, SX/25LCM, and SX/33LCM. Am I correct in assuming these were intended to upgrade a 10mhz, 12mhz, and 16mhz respectively? There is an eBayer selling the SX/20LCM but I'm not sure that would work with my 12mhz unit. Can anyone confirm my hypothesis? Is the SX/25LCM indeed what I am to be searching for?

Thanks in advance everyone.

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Reply 17 of 28, by serguey bubka

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TimWolf wrote:

Greetings @mwdmeyer, I just joined up because I am trying to upgrade my 12mhz Hyundai 286 and I think that the SX/25LCM is the only way to do it. Is this something you or anyone here has available? A little about the board. It is a socket like the attached photo. There are no jumpers. The crystal near the chip is 14.xxxmhz (solder blob obscuring most of that). Kingston made a SX/20LCM, SX/25LCM, and SX/33LCM. Am I correct in assuming these were intended to upgrade a 10mhz, 12mhz, and 16mhz respectively? There is an eBayer selling the SX/20LCM but I'm not sure that would work with my 12mhz unit. Can anyone confirm my hypothesis? Is the SX/25LCM indeed what I am to be searching for?
Thanks in advance everyone.

Hi @TimWolf, what specific version of Hyundai do you have? Is it a 286N or a 286E?

Sorry for the off-topic, I had no other way of reaching you.
Thankx.

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Reply 18 of 28, by Jo22

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Hi you guys, thanks for bringing this thread back to live. 😀
What I'd like to know: How's overall compatibility of these 286 upgrades with things like OS/2 1.x, Windows 3.x or games ?
I'm asking, because the 80286 has the LOADALL instruction in hardware, but the 386/486 have not (LOADALL 386 is different).
On PCs with these later CPUs, that 286 LOADALL instruction is normally emulated silently by the 386/486 BIOSes, so older software works no problem.
Now, going by logic, since 286 PCs have pure 286 BIOSes, they don't emulate that instruction for newer CPUs,
because there's no need to and because they are not 386+ aware.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 19 of 28, by Anonymous Coward

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I have a one of the fastest 286 upgrades available. It upgrades you to a 66MHz IBM 486SLC2 with 16kb internal cache. It runs at 66MHz regardless of the motherboard speed. It's the Evergreen Rev To 486. I have a very specific requirement for trading though. I want a 486SXL2-66 386 upgrade in return.

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V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium