Looking at the cards and benchmarks available, the ACUMOS AVGA2 looks to be the most sensible purchase, depending on how much the auction ends for. I see on the benchmarks that the ISA bus is essentially saturated in the last few benchmarks.

Does the 512kb of vram instead of being 1mb not matter for a card limited by the ISA bus?

Acumos AVGA2 is an older Cirrus Logic card, CL-GD5402 IIRC. That's a pretty good card too, and having only 512k won't hurt DOS games at all. It won't be enough for more than 800x600 and the chip supports 256 colors at most but it isn't a problem if you don't plan to run a GUI on it (and if so, you may be OK with 800x600x256). Both high resolution action games and high/truecolor demos are out of range for a classic 386/486 build with ISA VGA anyway.

Well a few bits arrived!

Fortunately one of my cases had mounts for BabyAT. It surprised me how small the board is.

An ATX to AT power cable adapter arrived too. Also, a random selection of floppy disks I regret buying. It's got lots of blank floppies though, which is what I was after.

Arriving soon is the I/controller but I still need to get a CF to IDE adapter. Will this work - i see lots of 40 pin and 44 pin versions. I think I'll need a molex to floppy power adapter too, as I only have one floppy power connector... eghh...

Here is a nice easy question for everyone.

My HDDs are IDE and have 39 pins and one blank in the middle where the 40th pin would go. The cables have 39 pins and one filled in bit in the middle where a middle pinhole would go.

My controller card arrived today and the IDE connector has 40 pins - no blank/or filled in bit. Co-indecently I have a cable with 40 pin holes. It is an older 40-line cable whereas the rest (39 pin cables) are 80-line cables.

Is there a way of making this work with a CF to IDE adapter which has 39 pins? I haven't ordered it yet but it would be good to know!

I have similar issues with the floppy connector - it has too many pins compared to my floppy cable which is missing a pin.

I just cut off the offending pins but you have to make sure you line up pin1 and marked wire on the cable when determining what pin to deal with.

...and please remove the barrel battery before it's too late!

Even though it is a new one apparently?

It should be fine, I think the guy you bought this from probably posts here - he refurbishes / fixes up quite a few old PCs 😀

Just make a note to swap it out in 20 years time 😜

re: 40 pin IDE cable - personally I would just bend that pin out of the way, they're easy enough to replace if needed and it shouldn't be used for anything. Same goes for floppy drives
For the hard drive itself, you could just get a CF to IDE adapter, I have so far found they're much easier to work with and easier to get in small enough sizes to work with the limited drive/sector support of old BIOS/IDE cards

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Here is a nice easy question for everyone.

Rather than bend or snip the pin, I normally just add the extra hole to the cable connector either using a fine point scalpel / craft blade, a fine Dremel drill bit or a hot needle.

Great Success!

I've finally got a good few parts together; ATX to AT power adapter, graphics card, controller card, so I was able to test it out - it booted first time! Luckily I bought a controller card that came with a manual so I could set the jumpers as needed. I attached a floppy drive, wrote MS DOS 6.2.2 disks using RawWrite, and it booted to A straight away.

Thanks for the help picking the graphics card which is working with no issues.

It fits snugly in my very small ATX case (it's smaller than my modern M-ATX case!)

Now I need to get a CF to IDE adapter...

...and a sound card.