Hi all,
I'm looking for the jumper and dip-switch settings for an ACT (Advanced Computer Technology LTD) 386 cache board.
It's not the one you can find on Stason.org, but appears to be a revision earlier.
Think so because of the date codes on the board.
Best Regards, JayBee
Pictures of the board and markings below:
I can't find anything yet but can tell from your good pics that the board only supports 33Mhz 386 and has 32k cache. Comparing to the later rev on Stason.org would say with great confidence that SW1 is for cache size and SW2 is for ram size. It appears the cache is set to 32k and ram is set for 4Mb. If it were mine I would make sure the ISA bus speed jumper is set to 8Mhz (is near the battery select jumper), put 4 -1Mb 9chip 60ns simms in bank 0 (using pic at Stasons), connect a speaker, use a good 16bit ISA vide card in slot closest to the power connectors and power it up. If lucky it will post or give BIOS beeps which can help decode any issues. If it gives memory error beeps (3 beeps) then I would try 16 -256k 9 chip simms.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Hi Horun,
Thanks for the advice to take an (educated) guess.
Luckily I did find four equal 1MB memory sticks in my box of old memory.
After the required smoke test I inserted the 4 x 1MB sticks and an old VGA card, and to my happy surprise the board worked at once.
Going to push my luck and try to get 8MB working with a mix of parity and non parity sticks. 😀
If somebody still finds the manual/jumper settings, they are still welcome of course.
Best regards, JayBeeOne
Wow Great of course most old boards will work if the MEM size is set larger than what is actually installed.
Here is my edurcated guess for mem settings:
JP1 : Parity, 1-2 = EN, 2-3 = DIS (is near BIOS chips)
SW2: s1 thru s7 = size
SW2: s8 = DRAM W/S (or speed). off = 70 - 120ns, on = 100 - 150ns
Size: s1 s2 s3 s4 s5 s6 s7
1M off on on on off off off
2M off off on on on off off
4M off on on off off off on
6M on off on off off on off
8M off off on off on off on
10M on on off off on on off
12M off on off off off on on
16M off off off off on on on
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Hi Huron,
Thanks for the clear explanation of the switches.
Last week I managed to buy 14 1MB simms from the local '2nd hand marketplace' website.
They got delivered yesterday, and 13 are okay.
So now together with the simms I already had I have 16MB
Somehow the boards memory test detects 15872KB instead of 16384, so somewhere 512KB disappears.
But that's a minor issue, already happy I got this far!
We have some settings in Ultimate Hardware 19 now:
http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/325
But I see those are for a later revision.
Your board has a relabeled Toshiba chipset. For that, we would really like to have the bios string or any other information that you could get from the board.
The markings 35-7023-00-00 and 710023 indicate this is originally a Vtech/PcPartner board. Alas we do not have that one on file yet.
