First post, by einr
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Now that this system is finally running kind of like I want it to, it's time to present my first real 486 build (I have a Presario all-in-one 486 too, and as a kid I had an Aptiva, but those are not really builds...)
This is a system I found early this summer at a junk store in a large garage (only the tower itself). It was lying all sad-like in a corner, back of unit down towards the ground, so the back of the unit with the ports, PSU, etc. were all pretty rusty due to years of contact with the moist concrete floor. It was a very ugly unit as found; unfortunately I don't have any good pics of the state it was in. Owner of the place said it'd been hanging around there for 10 years or more. Excited to find any kind of 486, but with no high hopes as to its function, I offered him €10 and he accepted.
It has a cool "Brick" badge on it, and on the back of the tower it has a sticker that calls it the BRICK PC 486DX. I vaguely remember Brick being a low-end PC mailorder dealer in Sweden in the early to mid nineties. I have reason to believe this was probably something like a Cyrix 486DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM when it was first sold somewhere around 1994.
Anyway: when I got it home, I powered it on with some hesitation (sure! Let's run 240V into a RUSTY PSU YOU JUST FOUND ON THE FLOOR, what could possibly go wrong? #yolo) and quickly realized that while the PSU worked fine (I could make fans and hard drives spin up), the motherboard (a nice-looking QDI-made VLB unit, pretty standard stuff) was completely dead. I ordered a new motherboard off eBay -- pretty much the cheapest one I could find that had VLB slots and was not made by PC Chips -- and amassed some other parts from here and there. Turns out the new motherboard's layout didn't agree with the case so I had to replace the 72-pin RAM I had with 30-pin ones because of the position of the 72-pin slots vs. the case's 5,25" drive cage.
So when I test-drove the new motherboard, I found out that the computer was a DX4-100 system. Sweet! Exactly the CPU I had in my first computer! CPU worked fine, as did all the other parts of the system, but the ISA VGA card (CL-GD5424) was dog slow.
The system was in awful shape when I got it. It was technically complete, but really haphazardly put together, with as few screws (of like ten different types) as possible, bent metal, flexing boards etc... It was like it had been cannibalized for parts and relegated to "kid's computer" or something when the previous owners upgraded. It had last been used in 1999 but who knows when the last time was anyone actually cared about it...
It had no CD-ROM when I got it, but there were signs that one had been installed before (MTMAICD.SYS in C:\DOS). The hard drive is probably not original because it's an HP OEM part. The CPU was quite possibly upgraded at some point from a Cyrix DX40 because the current Intel DX4 has a green Cyrix DX40 heatsink on it (and a fan). Both 5,25" filler bezels were not original to the case and had been SUPERGLUED and TAPED from the inside in order to stay in place because the plastic tabs didn't fit.
So after spending a couple of months messing with this on and off, it's now fully functional with the following specs:
- Real dinky li'l AT babytower with Seventeam 200W PSU
- Motherboard: M Technology R407E/V with AMIBIOS (replaced)
- 256 KB real L2 cache (lucky! Some of these motherboards come with fake cache or only 64K installed)
- Intel 486DX4/100 WT (original)
- 16 MB 30-pin 80ns FPM RAM (replaced. Supposedly, according to the seller, this has been tested as 70ns capable)
- 1.44 MB Sony FDD (original)
- IDE master: HP-branded Seagate 203 MB HDD (original)
- IDE slave: CF-IDE converter with 1GB SanDisk card (installed. Yep, the motherboard supports LBA)
- IDE on sound card: 6x TEAC CD-ROM (installed)
- Generic-Whatever ISA Multi I/O card (original)
- SVGA card: S3 805 VLB, 2 MB RAM (replaced, upgraded from 1 MB by cannibalizing chips from the Cirrus ISA card that came with the machine)
- Sound card: ESS AudioDrive ES1868F ISA (installed)
- 3Com Etherlink III 3c509B ISA (installed)
- Keytronic AT-style keyboard, 105-key (installed)
- Microsoft serial mouse (installed)
- Them cool-ass speakers (installed)
- Neato Saitek gamepad, Gravis compatible (installed)
- MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (original)
Things I've done:
- Basic cleanup
- Restoration of the "Brick" case sticker (new adhesive... It had half come off when I bought it)
- Installed and replaced all the stuff above
- Removed an extra serial card with a 16550 UART because I don't need it (probably they used this for a modem back in the day, the multi I/O has slower UARTs)
- New screws so it looks a little bit more cohesive
- A whole heap of little things
- Installed Terminal Velocity
To do:
- Replace dead barrel battery. Fortunately it's lithium so it's not going to leak and ruin everything, but it is dead. Fortunately again, the motherboard has a header for an external battery.
- Find, buy and install 1.2 MB 5,25" floppy drive
- Replace 80ns RAM with 60ns (bought, should be arriving any day now...)
- Install new IDE-CF reader with metal bracket so I can easily insert and remove cards from the back
- Install PC DOS 7.0/2000 instead of MS-DOS (PC DOS was my first operating system so therefore: nostalgia)
- Clean it up more/better
- Restore the "Intel Inside" sticker by straightening it out and putting on new adhesive
- Mount the hard drive better; it's a nightmare of bent metal and way too few screws right now
- Cable management. The insides of this is a frightening thing right now.
- Install many old games and then play them
- More standoffs, the motherboard has no support on one side right now because of stupid case/stupid motherboard
- MAYBE BUY A FREAKIN DESK TO PUT IT ON, JEEZ
Hope ya enjoy looking at this li'l system! I will be updating the thread as I do more stuff to it 😀
