yes I believe the chipset is only rated to 16mhz.
Honestly, with a 286, anything over 1mb ram is really overkill. You can use it as EMS, but not many things used EMS.

Unless your gonna run fractint on a 286, adding a 287 FPU wont bring anything extra to the party.

Treat the 286 as a faster XT. Its the bees knees for raw dos. Throw in a SoundBlaster 2.0 and Play some low end dos games on it. Dig out Ultima III or IV!

I love 286s. You can do quite a lot on them. I agree that more than 1MiB is not strictly necessary. If you only play DOS games. Most games until 1991/1992 are perfectly playable with a 286. Subjectively good examples:

* Monkey Island 1& 2
* Day of the Tentacle (yes, it works, and can also use EMS)
* Indy 3 & 4
* Space Quest 1-4
* King's Quest 1-5
* Wing Commander 1
* Stunts
* Test Drive 3
* Ultima VI
* Pinball Fantasies/Dreams
* Commander Keen

And many, many more... You can also run Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1. But there more than 1 MiB would be advisable, since it eats memory for breakfast. You can even run WinWord 2.0 or something like that.

The FPU is not necessary as said above. Only things like Autosketch, Excel or Lotus 123 will use it. Even Fractint will mostly use the integer unit for its algorithms.

But definitely put in an Adlib or Soundblaster card (or clone) to make the game experience better.

Nothing like running some awesome 286 demoscene demos and letting the programming wizards show you just what that 286 can do. Make sure you have a sound & VGA card installed though.

http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=10952

http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9168&page=1

BloodyCactus wrote:

Unless your gonna run fractint on a 286, adding a 287 FPU wont bring anything extra to the party.

I don't think it would for fractint, either, since the "int" in "fractint" means "integer".

I had an ancient 286 laptop that I would play Infocom text adventure games on, and I'd found some TSR to play .MOD files so I had some music while playing Suspended or Zork or whatever. So even a lowly 286 had some decent capabilities.

Interestingly, I had the same mindset about owning a 286 and what to use it for.
Back in the day, we transitioned from an 8 MHz XT clone to a 386DX-40.

As such, I never had the burning need to acquire a 286 to play games on but, over time, I have actually acquired a couple of 286 motherboards and 2 fully operational 286 PC's.
At this point, I don't see me playing any games on those machines, since I can just as well play most of those games on a 386SX or 386DX based PC (of which I also have a couple).
However, since I'm now into vintage computers, I do like to "tinker" around with these old PC's, build them up and run a couple of benchmarks for fun.
After that, I pack them away and move onto another project but, I will probably hand off some of my 286 PC's to some of my local & fellow vintage computing enthusiasts.

Regarding the puzzles that you mentioned:
I think you can probably run some late 80's games much better on a 286 than on an XT (like some of your Sierra & Lucararts games) and they will definilty perform much better with 4 MB of RAM than with only 640K of RAM.
As I recall some games did take advantage of EMS memory but, whether it will run efficiently on a 286 will probably depend on the game.
A 287 FPU probably won't add any benefit (from a gaming perspective), unless you wish to dust off your old CAD programs and have a burning desire to run Lotus 1-2-3 on your 286 😀 .

286s are so much fun! Much more interesting than 386s which are not really that different than later platforms (basically everything prior to x86-64).
Think about limitations of 286 as something that stimulates creativity.

Actually you can play most games released before 1993 and even some later games (like Darker from 1995) are playable.

If you ask me - for DOS gaming you won't really find more exciting platform than 286.

Everything more than 2MB RAM will be overkill (I owned 286 16Mhz with 2MB back in the 90s until it was replaced with K5 PR133 in 1997 and I did pretty advanced stuff on this machine - some Turbo Pascal programs, fun with fractals, .MOD music, Windows 3.1 ran without hickups too).

BloodyCactus wrote:

Treat the 286 as a faster XT. Its the bees knees for raw dos. Throw in a SoundBlaster 2.0 and Play some low end dos games on it. Dig out Ultima III or IV!

yes the 286 is well faster than xt, i estimate a 286-16 with 0wait to be 5-6 times as fast as xt. however it doesn't have more ram than xt to unleash that speed, accessing over 640kb is a lot of trouble and slows things down a lot.

Not to mention fastest 286s are on par with 386DX with the same clock speed and faster than 386SX with the same clock speed for 16 bit code.

noshutdown wrote:

BloodyCactus wrote:

Treat the 286 as a faster XT. Its the bees knees for raw dos. Throw in a SoundBlaster 2.0 and Play some low end dos games on it. Dig out Ultima III or IV!

yes the 286 is well faster than xt, i estimate a 286-16 with 0wait to be 5-6 times as fast as xt. however it doesn't have more ram than xt to unleash that speed, accessing over 640kb is a lot of trouble and slows things down a lot.

What do you mean it is a lot of trouble? Maybe it depends on a particular chipset... Some Headlands support memory relocation allowing access to the area above 640kB as XMS, some natively support EMS. I never had any problems setting up XMS and always used himem.sys on them without any trouble.

BTW - Some 286s are actually even faster than 386SXs (out of the box).

You might be interested by this software as well : http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26070
This allows you to free some UMBs even on a 286 and use EMS if your chipset supports it (and there are many chipsets supported there)

even in win3.1 there were many programs that demand 386 enhanced mode

I used 3.10 a long time on my 286 no problem. I had 4MB, a CD-ROM drive, handy scanner, laser printer, 16-Bit sound card and played lots of games there.
My father and me even went online with it (CompuServe via WinCIM software). Win32s was about the only thing that I missed. 😀

accessing over 640kb of ram is inconvenient and slow if possible.

It's not that bad, IMHO. That "it has to switch to protected-mode and then do a reset to get back to real-mode" thing is outdated information.
Himem.sys (~MS-DOS 6.x) has two code paths. One that uses LOADALL (286), one for the 386 and later CPUs.

is installing a 287 fpu helpful?

Depends on the software. It's as useless as a 387 or 487 depending on the point of view.
It may accelerate 3.1x a bit, according to some sources. See Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11 FPU Usage
Please note that the original 287 runs at 2/3 clock rate. Third party FPUs and the 287XL run at the same clock speed (3/2 ?).

You could maybe try to have a fun with programming. Use Borland Turbo C (which is completely free to downoad and legal from their website) or try to use Turbo Pascal - fun as well. Write some games.

You could set it up as an X-10 protocol control system, and use it to do some old-school home automation. Of course, this would also require purchasing X-10 adapters and whatnot...but would be an interesting thing to do.

.. or you could use it for raytracing. Or orbital calculations (STS+ supports FPUs). Or as a music player for MODs. Or for amateur radio use (JV-Fax/EZSSTV, Hamcom etc.).
Windows for Workgroups 3.10 also works on a 286, though it has limited funtionality there (can only use existing network resources).
Last but not least, you can also run some 386 software on it by installing EMU386. It's not much, but can load some drivers, like DOS-J Plus.
Or fun little games like Loonies 8192. ^^

Oh come on, Loonies now plays natively on 286! No need for emu386. 😉

Patrick Aalto's LineWars II gone freeware few years ago - and it's one of the more playable space shooters which runs fine on 286s!
http://linewars.patrickaalto.com/

Still I think Darker is the best looking game for 286 - it even has short video scenes. It has very specific atmosphere and cool concepts… They don't make games like this anymore 🙁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmV3QhcRQvg

I think also Frontier: Elite II (which is my favourite game from the series beside Elite: Dangerous) runs on 286 as well. Although I never played it on 286 so it may not be the best experience as the game was very advanced for it's time...

HanJammer wrote:

Patrick Aalto's LineWars II gone freeware few years ago - and it's one of the more playable space shooters which runs fine on 28 […]
Show full quote

Patrick Aalto's LineWars II gone freeware few years ago - and it's one of the more playable space shooters which runs fine on 286s!
http://linewars.patrickaalto.com/

Still I think Darker is the best looking game for 286 - it even has short video scenes. It has very specific atmosphere and cool concepts… They don't make games like this anymore 🙁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmV3QhcRQvg

Wow, never have heard of Darker. Will have to try that out. Reminds me of an early Surface Tension.

liqmat wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

Patrick Aalto's LineWars II gone freeware few years ago - and it's one of the more playable space shooters which runs fine on 28 […]
Show full quote

Patrick Aalto's LineWars II gone freeware few years ago - and it's one of the more playable space shooters which runs fine on 286s!
http://linewars.patrickaalto.com/

Still I think Darker is the best looking game for 286 - it even has short video scenes. It has very specific atmosphere and cool concepts… They don't make games like this anymore 🙁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmV3QhcRQvg

Wow, never have heard of Darker. Will have to try that out. Reminds me of an early Surface Tension.

Do it! You won't regret. Framerate on 286 is similar to what you can see in the video (although it was still playable for me and I spent countless hours playing it). Experience is much better on 386 or 486 though. Game is pretty hard (especially tunnels part) and the craft you pilot has very peculiar physics 😀