First post, by Old Thrashbarg
I've finally got around to setting up a system based around a 486 board I picked up awhile back, figured I'd post up my progress with some observations about it. No pictures right now, since it's currently in a temporary ghetto state, assembled in, on and around a cardboard box... I don't own an AT case of any sort, might oughta resolve that here at some point. Or maybe I'll just say 'screw it' and leave it as it is... dunno yet. 😵
Anyway. Here's how it stands:
G486UVL-Z Socket 3 mainboard
AMD 486 DX4-100, with writeback cache support
64MB parity FPM
Genoa Windows VGA 24, 1MB with Cirrus GD5426 chipset
Adaptec AVA-2825 combo Fast SCSI/Floppy/PIO4 EIDE card
Avance ALS120 ISA SB clone
3Com Etherlink III
WD Caviar 2850 853MB for boot/system, and WD 32500 2.5GB for storage
Dos 6.22/ WfW 3.11
No serial/parallel IO card yet, so I'm working without a mouse for the time being. I used to have a bunch of those cards, but I dunno where they all went.
The mainboard is quite interesting. It's an ISA/VLB board, but it was made in 1996, well into the PCI era. I don't know a whole lot about the board, best I can find it was made by a company called Joindata, and it's basically just a semi-generic Taiwanese clone baby-AT board based around the UMC 8498F chipset, with 3 VLB slots, 256KB cache, writeback cache support, and 3 72-pin SIMM slots. I haven't fully explored its capabilities yet since I don't have any documentation on its jumper settings, but as of now it's working with the settings that were made by the previous owner.
The only major trouble I had with the system, was that Adaptec combo card. My final verdict on the thing is that it I do recommend it for a VLB disk controller, since it's featureful, fairly readily available on eBay, and generally cheap. Mine cost me $8 shipped, with the original manuals. But... I'm not gonna lie, that thing was a royal pain in the ass before I figured out the trick to it. After a great number of headaches with failed bootups, data corruption, and the inability to run two drives simultaneously, I finally determined that the best course of action with this card is to ignore all the documentation, and don't even dare use the official software for it. I'm now just letting the motherboard's BIOS control it (luckily the motherboard has LBA support and all that good stuff), and using the WD WDCDRV.386 FastDisk driver in Windows, and it's working perfectly.
The last real hurdle I have is the sound. I'm not yet sure what I think of this card... it shows promise, with SB Pro and SB16 compatibility, and an integrated OPL3 clone, but it's not entirely working correctly. It seems to work OK in Windows, and sound effects are fine in DOS, but the music volume is extremely low, even with the volume turned all the way up in the mixer. If anyone else has used one of those Avance cards, do you have any tips to offer?