That luggable looks like a death trap with exposed PSU! Nice motherboard though.

only exposed when the case is open though 🤣

I've no idea if that PSU was actually supposed to be in there, or if i've been messing with it for some other reason and its just got dumped in the box. Oddly i'd snipped and taped various wires on the AT power connectors. Both -5 and -12v have been cut, as well as the orange power-good line, a bunch of the 5v lines and a ground. They'd also been snipped off the PCB itself. I must have been in my early teens when i was messing with that stuff. Who knows what i was upto!

PSU is now in the bin! I need to make up (or buy) an adaptor harness to convert to ATX power and then i can test out the board. I dont actually have an AT PSU.

Crazy thing is I had the same idea a few years back, and collected parts for a luggable 486 for the same purpose. Started placing components in the "case" when it occurred to me that the spongy lining was flammable, as well as the case itself (wood/cardboard underneath the metallic exterior appearance).

That is an awesomme find.
Those LuckyStar 486 boards may not be fastest of all 486 boards. Yet they are extremely nice, and some of the best you can get.
Back in 1995, we had a special server on the dorm. It was an 486 running one of them free BSD Unix systems.
They changed the servers name a couple of times, always reflecting were and in what it was running.
Sometimes it was named "Bulletinwall" (mounted on a kork bulletin wall) and sometimes it was called "The suitcase".
I even think it was briefly called "The toilet" 🤣

I love the idea of making a PC inside a suitcase; very creative! 😀
I do think you really shouldn't expose the power supply like that though; that's way too dangerous!

I hope it's just a shadow but the cpu socket looks a bit browned on bottom right in picture

once again maybye the picture but those caps near the battery look a bit funny

treeman wrote:

I hope it's just a shadow but the cpu socket looks a bit browned on bottom right in picture

once again maybye the picture but those caps near the battery look a bit funny

The brown on the CPU socket was just a shadow cast by the lever i think.

The caps are odd, it looks like the sleeving has sort of peeled up. The actual cans look fine, not obviously bulged or any signs of leakage. Just the outer plastic has gone all funny at the top. Quite a few of the small ones have gone the same way. I guess a recap job isnt the end of the world should it need it!

its a nice board 😀 gotta look after it

Yeh i've ordered an adaptor thingy for an ATX PSU, so once that turns up i can give it a test using the dx2 and ram from my Dell 486.

Not sure what to do with it. I'd given up looking for a decent 486 and got myself an Asus TX97-E with an early Pentium in it to build a dos gaming setup. I fancied an AMD 5x86 chip, so i guess if the board works i could get one of those for it and find a suitable case.

I also have a isa/pci 486 board in one of my systems running a 5x86 amd clocked to 160mhz, the satisfaction of running a 486 comparble to a early pentium

This board is looking mightily fine - Rev. F. was pretty much shrank down to the minimum. From the few boards I could test the LuckyStar ones were the most reliable and friendly to overclocking.

Rev. F. was pretty much shrank down to the minimum

Those are pain in arse to fit into generic tower AT case.

Eventually got the bits to make my AT to ATX adaptor, so did some work at the weekend.

First job was to re-pin my Dell P3 era PSU from my Athlon build back to standard ATX. Pretty easy job, and the changes Dell made are properly superfluous. They added 2x 5v to the ATX plug, by removing 3x 3.3v and moving the 3.3 to a seperate connector... Why on earth wouldnt you just leave the ATX connector alone, and put the extra 5v lines on the separate header... Anyway i took 3 pins out of the ATX extension i bought for the 3.3v lines and everything else i just had to pop out and move to the correct place.

Then i used the other end of the ATX extension, along with the tails from the scrap AT PSU in the first pic to build an ATX PSU to AT board adaptor. Two of the pins on the AT connector were cut right off, but i realised the pins on the now defunct aux connector on the Dell PSU were the same, so i popped two of those out to replace the short ones, and managed to get it all soldered up.

Then, with the CPU and ram from another 486 swapped in, a Matrox graphics card slotted in, and my now modified PSU attached, i fired it up...

And it works 😀

Not done anything else with it, but it posts which is a good start!