carlostex wrote:

Not only to mention and rant about nostalgia, but the 386 is a landmark in computing history. For a long time Intel was a single source of their 386 CPU's, which led to their market success and huge profit margins, but also led to keep the cost of the machines very high. This is where enters AMD and their pushing of the 386 just a small step above, which being a very reliable system brought IBM PC compatible computing to the masses, contributing for the reduced cost of buying a system. Believe it or not today's CPU are pretty much just very fast 386's!

Actually, the high price of the 386 prevented many people from buying them initially. It wasn't until the simplified 386SX motherboard/CPU combo was released that the masses began buying them and even then a fast 286 was still a reasonable and cheaper alternative. Most software on the market was still 16-bit, which a 286 was still capable of running proficiently. The 32-bit architecture of the 386 wouldn't be fully exploited with 32-bit software displacing 16-bit software for a little while yet. Running 16-bit software, the 386 does not show a tremendous gain over a 286 clock for clock and certainly not enough to justify the difference in price. About the best thing you can really say for the 386 is that with further refinements it became the truly legendary 486. It was like when AMD released the Athlon 64. Yeah, it was nice of AMD to release a reasonably priced 64-bit chip to the masses, unlike Intel's Itanium disaster, but until there was a 64-bit OS, software and drivers available being 64-bit capable didn't mean a whole lot to most people. There was a x64 version of XP released, but not a lot of people adopted it due to lack of driver support. It wouldn't be until Vista x64 was released with better driver support that people started making the move to 64-bit computing. Vista released in January 2007, the Athlon 64 in September 2003. That's 3.5 years that it took for 64-bit computing to catch on.

Edit: After doing some research, I see that it took approx. 3 years from the release of the 386 to the release of Windows/386 2.10, so there was a delay between the release of the CPU and the operating system that took advantage of it just like with Athlon 64.

carlostex wrote:

1. Not sure what you mean, the case accomodates 5 ISA slots on a horizontal shape. That's why the case is a low profile type AT desktop case. This is why an ISA riser card is included.

2. The ISA bus will work fine with a 16-bit ISA riser card on a 16 bit ISA slot. You don't need a special board. You are thinking about typical OEM cases and boards with their propietary pinout riser cards to accomodate ISA slots.

3. You can buy a same type barrel type rechargeable battery and solder it into the board to replace the old one or you can mod it for a CR2032 coin cell type. Keep in mind that CR2032 were not made to be rechargeable so you must use a schottky diode to allow current to only go from battery to motherboard. At the same time it will block curent from going up to the battery. It will work like a one way street.

hi carlos!

Thanks so much for the reply I really appreciate the tips, however my first question was more related to the back side of the case, that seems to not have any ports, see the following image:

did you drill holes in with a dremmel or something?

No, i din't need to drill anything because baby AT motherboards only have the keyboard din connector port. OEM boards usually had controllers on board to provide for ports like COM, LPT, etc... Some even had integrated floppy and hard drive controllers.

If you get a generic baby AT board you should have no problems whatsoever.

Like this for instance:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PC-Chips-M321-Vintage … =item3cd814ea2b

carlos you are the best man, thank you SO much you've been a tremendous help man 😀

once again great job on your build, i'll keep my fingers crossed and hope mine turns out well too!

No problems, hope you can do what you want. I'll have some more news on this build later as now i'm currently too busy getting to grips with C++ to have some time for my retro hobby. Feel free to post your build in a new thread i'll follow it for sure!

carlostex wrote:

I will be using 60ns simms, but the ideal would be 50ns. 50ns are almost impossible to find, i don't even know if there were any […]
Show full quote

I will be using 60ns simms, but the ideal would be 50ns. 50ns are almost impossible to find, i don't even know if there were any available and used for 30pin simms.

I'm hoping that RAM will work OK with 1 wait state at 50MHz. The SRAM at 10ns will run pretty well.

As for pics of the board itself:

I have one of these and I am 100% sure it has a 3.6v battery soldered to the motherboard. Did you do the battery mod yourself? do you have charging issues?