An old buddy of mine told me he had a stack of old computer games and an old machine running DOS 5.0 lying around, and asked if I would take it off his hands. Of course, I said yes, so we met up for a couple drinks and then he handed over the lot. I've posted in that bought these games thread for the software, but this is for the hardware.

The machine I ended up with is an AST Bravo LS II 4/66d. This is my first 486. I was giddy as a kid on christmas all the way home. I took a couple pics as I ripped it apart to see what kind of guts it had. However, after I put it all back together, all the joy vanished as I realized that the power supply was dead. I could just replace it, but since, as you'll see in the pictures below, it's probably not worth trying to resurrect this thing.

Front of the case. Yeah, it's beat to hell, but I figured some retrobright and a few new drives and I'd be set.

Back of the case. It's got a built-in video (more on that below), an ethernet card, and what I originally assumed to be the header for a parallel port.

Close-up of the system identifier.

Popping the top, it looks like the drive/psu cage is a single removable unit so that I can get to the motherboard below, good.

Hard drive veritcally mounted on the side...hey, is that SCSI...

...why yes...yes it is. My first SCSI host card.

Damn decent ISA ethernet card. I think these were factory installed based on what I could find of the specific model number of the computer.

And finally, the motherboard itself. Proprietary AST board, nothing wrong there. ISA only, still ok. It's got built-in video and fully populated video ram from what I can tell. I couldn't identify the RAM so no clue how much, I would guess maybe 8mb total? Looks like it's got full cache too. Too bad the damn thing doesn't work.

The entire thing has a burnt smell to it, and there were dust bunnies the size of eyeballs inside when I first opened it. At this point I'm going to consider it a parts donor machine. It's got a few nice touches. The SCSI card is my first, though that chip in the top left corner has the little UV bit exposed, so not sure if that's dead? The ethernet card is a nice touch. The onboard video was CL-GD5428 with I'm assuming the full 1mb populated, so that would have sufficed for my needs.

It was a major killjoy to discover the psu dead, but since the overall case and the rest are in such bad shape, I'll have to call this one a dud. It had been stored in a smoker's home so it's godawful to smell. I smoked for 8 years but never inside, so even to me, this was disgusting.

If anyone can tell me anything about the SCSI card and whether I should be able to reuse the drive and card, I'd appreciate it. It's got the legendary Intel 486/66DX2, and from what I can tell I should be able to reuse that as well if I can get it out of the board. RAM seems to be good, even if I can't identify it.

So, even though I can't use this machine, it's still my first 486, technically. I know this was a long boring rant, but thanks for listening. I needed to share.