ULSI 387sx FPU arrived and installed. BIOS detect it is there just fine too.

Added the file COMPTEST 2.57(a nice old diag tool) as referenced by the author of the facinating document that elianda linked to above. Couple of others too, MIPS from Chips & technology from 1986 & good old landmark.

now to find something useful for the co-pro to accually do! 🤣

Best,
Chris

Here are my results with the FPU and vintage Conner HD.

OK, this is pretty weird, this seems a VERY high score for 3D Bench and this system, It's repeatable, have done it over a dozen times in the last few days always within a few points, this is as quick as many faster 486 and even Pentium 60/66 systems! Anyone know what is going on here? I have also run all the champ games, asterocks, galagon etc and they work full speed too despite being supposed to need a 486/33. My buddy played Asterocks on it last night and could tell no difference than on his UMC 486S 40MHz with a VLB S3 805 system.

Have added my scores here to the database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … wpNU/edit#gid=0 it's right at the bottom of the sheet right now. All the other scores, DOOM, QUAKE etc seem comparable to the other low clocked 386 machines on there. I mean this score is only 10 points less than my entry with a Winchip 200 & WD Paradise ISA card! What on earth is going on here???

Hi Chris,

What you are having over there is the board for an IBM PS/1 2133 or 2155 (depends on the riser) from the Fall 1992 series. It came in 3 versions with 2mb-RAM+256kb- VRAM, 2mb-RAM+512kb-VRAM and 4mb-RAM+512kb-VRAM. I have such a system that I'm doing my best to restore.

There are a few notes:

1) No hard-drives larger than 1024 sectors with that particular BIOS release unless you run a 32-bit OS, which brings me to:

2) No Linux/Windows NT/Solaris booting unless you boot the kernel from a diskette after running UNIXBOOT.COM. It has the fixed drive parameter table at a different location than the original AT computers and most OSs don't understand that. UNIXBOOT fixes it.

3) No 32-bit disk access in Windows 3.1 unless you use a special driver that you can find in the IBM PCBBS archives (never bothered to try it though)

4) No ATi Mach64 cards on it because they need I/O Port 0x10? which is used by the Programable Option Select hardware on the Motherboard. The EXM281 (Graphics Pro Turbo) card that I'm having boots wonderfully on other systems but not on this one.

5) If you use a sound-blaster card or a 3Com card make sure that they are in PnP mode and that you have a DOS PnP Manager (like the Intel one). Even optical drives work if you do that.

I also have the original software included on it and the original service manual is "63g2028.PDF" which you can locate on Google. I am working to source a newer BIOS version that does not have the odd IDE FDPT problem and can solve points 1 through 3 for you.

I am currently having the following configuration for it:
CPU: 386sx@25MHz
FPU: Intel 80387@25
RAM: 16MB
VGA: Currently Trident 9000 but with a Nitro ISA 64/2MB in transit
Sound Card: Sound Blaster 32 PnP
NIC: 3Com 3C905B-TP
HDD: Original 129MB Maxtor replaced with a 2GB Transcend Industrial SSD
ODD: Sony CD-RW/DVD-ROM replacing the 5¼-inch floppy
FDD: Sony 2.88MB floppy replacing the original 1.44MB (still seen as 1.44MB by the BIOS)
PSU: Swapped the original 110V PSU with an IBM PS/1 220V PSU from an Italian PS/1. It's NLX in size/form factor but with AT connectors.

I am keeping all the original hardware parts.

Software: Level 1 US Software (MS-DOS, Win 3.1, MSWorks for Windows, etc.)
Upgraded to MS-DOS 6.22
Upgraded to MS-Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with all the usual patches (TCP/IP, Y2K, Win32s, etc.)

And on separate partitions: Red Hat Linux 6.2 with all the updates and a custom 2.4 kernel (for faster booting).

Bug me on PM for more details,
Răzvan

HighTreason wrote:

Here are the innards of my ValuePoint 325T/S with the floppy and bone removed;

Guess your board is a different revision, but for the most part it looks near identical and is the same spec. My CPU gets hotter than hell so you might want to glue on a little heatsink just to be safe.

Chris has a PS/1 board, but your board is quite interesting:

• You have two extra jumpers at the video card (J16 and J17 according to Statson, for IRQ9 and VGA Enable according to s61g1423.pdf).
• CL-GD5422 instead of CL-GD5410. A welcome upgrade!
• 1MB RAM for the VGA Card instead of 256kb or 512kb like in the PS/1
• A 1993 revision BIOS (instead of our 1992 which uses the crappy FDPT offset).

Could we get some detailed photos of your board? Maybe also a BIOS Dump? I'd love to try that BIOS on my board to see if Linux/Windows boot unmodified.

Also, from information scavenging I understand there is an upgrade card that plugs into the FPU socket called 486SLC3 which would give you a 75MHz rated 386sx CPU (3x multiplier) and 16kb of cache which should boost the performance even more. If I find one, I'll let you know the results of the testing. Can anyone confirm?

Cheers,
Răzvan

Thanks very much for the useful information Răzvan! Amazing the info this community manages to dig up from the past. I have a 3 slot riser with this board.
Best regards,
Chris

Speedsys for the board with the ULSI 387 fitted.

Installed my Microsoft Windows Sound system ISA card along with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Afterdark & Microsoft Arcade yesterday.

Been playing Microsoft Arcade's, Missile Command and Asteroids loads, they run spot on but Centipede is rather slow.
Also played some INDY 500, LOTUS III & PC*BERT DOS games, all running great.
Been having a lot of fun with this machine, just really need to find a case of some sort. Am i right in thinking this is LPX?
Might try out these two ISA VGA cards later, a Pine Western Digital Paradise WD90C30LR 512K & a Pine Realtek RTG3105iEH 256K. I know when I tested both on my socket 7 machine that the Paradise did pretty well but the REALTEK was incredibly slow.
Will be a bit of fun playing with them anyway 😀

Weird I didn't saw this thread before... These are the pictures of the original case of this board - PS/1 Type: 2133, model: 111 as seen on the last picture:

The case is long gone by now. I disposed of it sometime in 2013 or 2014. It was in real bad condition inside and I needed space. In that time I also got rid of 5 other cases 😒

Anyhow... it is great to see you're having fun with it and I hope the pictures make it easier for you to find a proper case for it.

HighTreason wrote:

I wonder what they did to it, because it doesn't really feel any faster than a normal 386SX, though I cannot enable the 8KB cache in the BIOS and that may be a factor, ugh, IBM.

You definitely want to get the cache enabled - reviews of 386SLC systems of the time put them at speeds comparable to fast 386DX systems at the same clock speeds.

Might be worth trying SLCCARD.SYS and SLCCARD.EXE from here: http://greyghost.mooo.com/mcastuff/486slc2/contents/