I found another ISA VGA Card, a Trident with a full meg of video RAM. http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … nt-tvga8900cl-c. Since it had more memory I'll assume it's the best one of the bunch and so I installed it. Windows 3.11 crashes during startup however, probably needs another driver 😒 .
CD-Rom drive is working fine.
I was thinking of using a CF card as hard drive for this PC. All the CF-IDE adapters I've seen so far are designed to be plugged in directly at the motherboard without use of a cable however, and this wouldn't be very practical with the ISA controller card. Does anyone know if there are 'IDE extension cables' for this purpose? (with a male connector on one end for the CF adapter and a female one on the other end to connect to the controller card)

CF adapter and a female one on the other end to connect to the controller card)

You can get ones that have the IDE pinout on the adapter. I have one of these myself. I prefer the ones that mount on the rear expansion bay brackets - so you can just swap-out cards whenever you want as opposed to opening up the case every single time.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Compact-Flash-CF-3 … =item2eb385a136

^^ Just an example only. Seeing as IDE cables can stretch fairly long - I'd say you'll be ok.

As for the FDC not working or the FDD - I'd say the ISA card should work ok providing it is jumpered up correctly (Ie nobody has tried to use a "Spare" jumper for something else which is hard to find sometimes) and the FDD Cable is good. If you can test a single drive cable direct to the floppy - that will help isolate the problem whether it be the controller or the card / cable. Also some FDD's have Jumper settings - (D0, D1 etc) - make sure it's set correctly.

Usually these shouldn't be an issue but I'm just mentioning a few things to help out in any case as I've found with a lot of older systems - a lot of things just aren't set up right.

Also - make sure it's configured in BIOS correctly (ie, drives not swapped around from a bios reset / low voltage on CMOS)

Thanks, those are cheap enough too 😀 . I've already bought an "IDE coupler" from ebay though. Unfortunately the PC won't accept the CF card or adapter. With the CF card installed (no matter in what configuration, with/without CD drive or floppy drive, with the IDE coupler or inserted straight in the ISA controller card, I also tried the secondary IDE channel available from my soundcard 😀 ) the PC refuses to POST. The fans spin and the leds are on but I get no signal on my monitor and there are no beeps. Once the CF adapter is removed the pc works again. I'll try a different CF card when I get hold of one, maybe that will help? (I read some other threads about CF adapters and it doesn't seem like the adapter itself could be the issue? The symptoms aren't very abnormal, I got those if I misconnected the IDE cable to the HD or CDrom for example, but I tried every possible combination on the CF adapter and it just won't work.
I also have a question about my new gfx card, the trident. It sometimes (though rarely) starts up in grayscale instead of color mode until I reset and it also has some kind of interlace effect going on, see the attached picture. Is it damaged?

Oooh stunts, one of my favorites!

I have a ISA trident and Tseng ET4000AX that does that grayscale thing. I looked into it a while back, and from memory it has something to do with the BIOS on these older cards. Sometimes they detect newer monitors as monochrome - there's an extra pin in the VGA cable maybe?

Anyway, there's a small util listed somewhere on these forums that forces the card back into colour mode, or as you've found, you can just reboot the PC.

The only permanent fix is to get another card, one with a newer bios. Given you're getting that getting that nasty interlace effect, you might need to do that anyway.

Im also using a trident card that does the grayscale thing most of the time. Using reset does not fix it.

Actually if you look at my signature, it is a direct reference to this and to what I said out loud the first time it happened. 🤣

In my case the only way i found to avoid it is with the help of my KVM switch. What i need to do is start the PC while the KVM switch is set to another computer. After a few second I switch it back and I do not get the Monochrome screen.

On my Acer 486 I get grayscale sometimes when I use this VGA to S-Video adapter. I didn't know there was a tool to set this. Learnt something new 😀

It's been some time but I have another question: I have managed to get the CF card to work by using another adapter (one that plugs to the end of an IDE cable instead of one that plugs directly to the board), so now I'm reinstalling DOS 6.22+windows 3.11 on the PC. I've replaced the trident with the cirrus logic card and want to use the ES1868F Audiodrive card for sound. I downloaded the driver package for the ESS audiodrive cards for windows 3.x from the vogons driver archive here, but the setup utility refuses to install because it can't detect an audiodrive card in my system. I put the card in a windows 98SE system where it is detected fine as a P&P Audiodrive 1868F. I don't see any jumper settings on the card to configure it (and I guess that's normal as it's P&P?), so how can I get this card to work? In my PC are installed: one I/O card, one VGA card, the ES1868F and a Roland SCC-1.
Thanks for any help!

Get a non PnP card? Maybe this is the issue?

Sure, but I only have these two other ISA soundcards and I'm having problems finding drivers for them:

a FSSC-CS2.1 3D sound with a crystal CX4237B-XQ3 chip
a media magic card with an Analog Devices AD1846JP soundport chip

if you would happen to know a place where I can download win3.x/DOS drivers for these that would be really helpful!

Sorry can't help 🙁

My approach is picking the right parts to avoid issues up-front. A Sound Blaster Pro 2 would be ideal for your machine!

OK, I found working drivers for my crystal soundcard and after a few IRQ conflict issues between my Roland SCC-1 and the crystal soundcard it is finally running smoothly! 😁 I love this PC, but I do need some more RAM because it looks like 4MB isn't enough to be comfortable, and I can't run Ultimate Doom because of it. No luck in finding 30pin RAM anywhere near home though.
Now that I finally have everything setup and running well I'd like to create a backup image of the CF Card I'm using as HDD, so that I could just write that image to the CF card afterwards to restore everything back to normal - if the need arises 😀 . What programs could I use to do this? I remember reading about it here somewhere but I can't find anything about it anymore.
Thanks again!

486DLC? Isn't this an "upgrade chip" for 386?

I don't think Doom will run that well on your machine.

For imaging I stick my Time-Machine drives into another desktop and use Acronis True Image.

Oh, that's too bad... It looks like my general midi SCC isn't that well suited for a 386 pc then? Most games supporting it requiring a better CPU. Guess it's still useful in MT-32 compatibility mode though, but it's a bit of a shame 😀 . Thanks for the program, I'll check it out!

What score for 3DBench do you get (please use version 1.0 for your machine)?

You can download it here: 3DBENCH CPU Benchmark Database)

There are heaps of results to compare it with.

Isn't a DLC-40 supposed to be about equal to a 486SX-33? If that's the case, Doom should run okay. Now if you had a 486SLC, that would be another story...

Double post, sorry

I got a score of 18.8. I got the top 386 score! 😀 it's well behind most 486 pc's though. I noticed Markk put up a benchmark of a 386 in your list. I noticed he has the exact same MB as I do in this thread: 386DX40 build

Hello. Actually I used to have 5 different 386/40 boards. The one I ran 3dbench on and got that result isn't the same as the one that is like yours. Now I don't have it anymore(sold it), while the one that is like your's died sometime ago. 🙁