VOGONS


First post, by mat919

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I acquired the following two boards.

unknown.jpg
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unknown ALI
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P60-2087A.jpg
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unknown ALI w/P60-2087A
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They are almost identical except processor speed and few minute differences. I was able to find this:
https://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/m/E-H/32104.htm
which makes me believe I have FORCOM TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION 80386SX/486SLC motherboards. Maybe someone recognizes them? One of them has "P60-2087A" printed on it. I could not find any reference online.
What is the minimum hardware in order to see if they work, as I do not have at the moment any ISA IDE I/O card?
I tried to power them w/o memory, floppy, hard drive (or modern equivalent) and so far I got nothing on the screen, but my old AT keyboard LEDs blinked once.
How would I go about troubleshooting such boards? Maybe it is wrong jumper or something simple I'm not aware of?

Reply 1 of 3, by PC@LIVE

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So they are both 386SX, to test them you need a pair of 30 pin RAM, if instead of two you find four is better, then you need an ISA video card and an ISA controller, as a drive if you don't have an HD or an IDE adapter -Memory card, you can use old floppy disks and a reader (you can easily find the 3.5 "one).
With this you can start them and check if they are fine or possibly if they have any problems.
Obviously if you can identify them you could see if the jumpers are set correctly.
An important thing is the connection to a speaker, from here to the start you can understand from the beeps if it signals any problem.

AMD 286-16 287-10 4MB HD 45MB VGA 256KB
AMD 386DX-40 Intel 387 8MB HD 81MB VGA 256KB
Cyrix 486DLC-40 IIT387-40 8MB VGA 512KB
AMD 5X86-133 16MB VGA VLB CL5428 2MB and many others
AMD K62+ 550 SOYO 5EMA+ and many others
AST Pentium Pro 200 MHz L2 256KB

Reply 2 of 3, by mat919

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PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-07-06, 21:01:

... you need (...) an ISA controller, as a drive if you don't have an HD or an IDE adapter -Memory card, you can use old floppy disks and a reader (you can easily find the 3.5 "one).

Can I use IDE port from a sound card? But then again I think not, because it would have to be activated during boot from the config.sys file and BIOS would have to support booting from it, right?

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-07-06, 21:01:

An important thing is the connection to a speaker, from here to the start you can understand from the beeps if it signals any problem.

Right, I forgot about that. Thanks.

Reply 3 of 3, by PC@LIVE

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Usually the IDE port on sound cards is for CD players. And I think it can be recognized through the dos startup files, but if I'm not mistaken, the driver is needed.
At the moment I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me that there is a line in the files that loads the IDE port for it to work, after that we need to load the CD-ROM driver.
So if you want to keep it simple, I would advise you to try with the floppy drive only (as a drive), afterwards if all goes well you will have to decide what to use, if an HD or an adapter-IDE.

AMD 286-16 287-10 4MB HD 45MB VGA 256KB
AMD 386DX-40 Intel 387 8MB HD 81MB VGA 256KB
Cyrix 486DLC-40 IIT387-40 8MB VGA 512KB
AMD 5X86-133 16MB VGA VLB CL5428 2MB and many others
AMD K62+ 550 SOYO 5EMA+ and many others
AST Pentium Pro 200 MHz L2 256KB