I love this machine, so much so that I picked up a Fujiikama 386 Turbo on kijiji pretty much for the monitor.

I am retrobriting it now, as it is very yellowed:

In any case, it came with a lot of battery corrosion (video soon) but also a printer and an NEC Multisync 2A. This was one of my best early on monitors as a teenager, I just had to get it. Here it is hooked up to my 386 SX:

I had it at 800x600 on my Ambra, so I know it works. It's actually pretty sharp for a 0.31 dot pitch monitor.

The Fujikama came with a TVGA 8900, which I upgraded to 1Mb (came with 512k). It had 70 NS chips in 512k mode, but all I had were 44256 80ns chips, so I replaced them all with 80ns units.

I did some benching vs the installed All-in-wonder ATI I have. The results:

3D bench 2 - ATI - 12.2, TVGA 9.8

Checkit ATI - 3110 chars/sec (BIOS), 33966 (direct)
Checkit TVGA - 3110 chars/sec (BIOS), 32681 (direct)

PCConfig ATI - VRAM throughput - 698 kb/sec, 9390 BIOS char/sec, DOS 3060 char/sec
PCConfig TVGA - VRAM throughput - 482 kb/sec, 8700 BIOS char/sec, DOS 3060 char/sec

I immediately decided to keep the ATI card, despite it having half the RAM capacity. I run a round of the PC game Stunts every now and again with my son on my lap, so I am familiar with the performance of the card when playing that game. I ran it with the TVGA card, and it is objectively noticeably slower.

No dice TVGA.

I was also able to test the BUS mouse card that the Fujikama system came with, and it works.

I was going to install it alongside the TVGA, as the ATI has a built in BUS mouse controller. For an instant, I was happy to have each ISA expansion filled up, until I realized what kind of performance penalty I was going to pay in the name of higher Windows resolution. However, fortunately, the Fujikama system came with a 2400 BPS modem, a perfect fit for the remaining vacant 8 bit slot.

Now all my slots are filled up, just as God herself intended:

From left to right:

-2x game controller (8 bit)
-ATI All-in-wonder (16 bit)
-Texelec RAdlib (8 bit)
-Soviet built 2xCOM 1x LPT controller (from Bulgaria, late 80s - I think 8 bit. Either way, in typical Soviet fashion, longest card, most chips, 8 bit performance. Just like say, an Illyushin 62 vs a 767)
-BNC/Ethernet NIC (16 bit)
-IDE/FDC controller (16 bit)
-The aforementioned 2400 BPS modem (8 bit slot)
-ATI Mono Hercules 64k card (Graphics wonder? I can't check now, son is sleeping in that room)

Also, upon running those video card benchmarks, I noticed that *most* of the 41464 chips installed on the card were 100ns except for an 80ns and 150(!)ns chip. So that was rectified.

In my stock of RAM chips I was able to find these:

I know that the base board's system RAM is rated at 120 ns (fuckin' awful) but at least now the 150ns chip has been replaced with some McNEC chips:

And then I decided to run some benchmarks again. The results:

3dBench2 - same (12.2)

150ns / 120ns

PCconfig VRAM throughput
698 kb/sec vs 689 kb/sec

PCconfig BIOS char/sec
9390 / 9390

PCconfig DOS char/sec
3060 / 3090

CheckIT char/sec BIOS
3110 / 3110

Checkit char/sec DIRECT
32681 / 33966

So a slight improvement. I think overall the improvement is the satisfaction that I have all 100ns chips on the card.

No measurable gain in attention span to Sid Vicious beating me in Stunts was reported by my 14 month old.