First post, by Ace
I found this 486 board lying a box along with a multitude of 286 and Pentium boards and immediately took it home. I am, however, having a hard time with it. I'm out of 30-pin SIMMs and when I got the motherboard, that was all it could take. I found some 72-pin SIMM slots at a local electronics shop and soldered them in as there are solder points on the motherboard for that type of SIMM slot (the board did not come like this).
First off, I can't find any documentation whatsoever on the motherboard. It's a 486WB4A.B1 which I believe is actually a dual 386DX/486 motherboard as there are two sockets on the board, one of which I think accommodates a 386DX. I want to know if this motherboard actually does support both the 386DX and 486 (up to DX4 preferably - the motherboard currently has an Intel 486DX2, which I believe is the older variant with write-through cache - if it is, I will replace it with a 486DX2 I have lying around with write-back cache). All I found was someone selling the same motherboard on eBay for about $150.
Second, I have been unable to get any 72-pin SIMMs working on the motherboard. All I get are 3 long beeps in sequence and no video out of any graphics card I plug into the motherboard. Might this motherboard not work properly with 72-pin SIMMs, hence why there were two empty solder spots for such slots? Or are my SIMMs too new? I have two single-sided SIMM sticks of unknown size as well as 4 double-sided sticks of 8MB and 16MB respectively, none of which worked. I remember reading about 486 motherboards requiring a specific type of 72-pin SIMM, but I don't remember the details. Someone enlighten me on this.
Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.