kithylin wrote:

BLockOUT wrote:

someone ofered me this board for 5 dollars
and i dont know if i will buy it
there seems to be no brand at all

The vast majority of 486 motherboards produced during this era were either made by chinese clone companies or random taiwanese companies no one's ever heard of before and there is no "branded" models for any of em and you probably won't find documentation for most of em. That's just the nature of computers during this time. It looks completely clean with no issues. If you want a 486-era system, $5 for a board seems like a great deal. Most of em go for $60+ today.

this board is so clone of clone
i did a research and the model is AV-8540
it has jumpers for 3.3v 3.45v and 5v

but on the manual of the site you sent me says
"for using 3.3v cpu a 3.3v voltage regulator LT1085 should be used on U24"

i have no clue of what U24 is, why they included jumpers for 3.3v and then they note that you need a regulator>?

BLockOUT wrote:

this board is so clone of clone

As kithylin said, this was a very common thing in that era. Most of us probably used these nameless clones at some point.

BLockOUT wrote:

i have no clue of what U24 is, why they included jumpers for 3.3v and then they note that you need a regulator>?

U24 is the component right above the electrolytic capacitor near the top right corner CPU socket. In the picture you posted you can see clearly that there is a voltage regulator there. The manual probably specifies that you need one because there may be cheaper/older revisions of the board that did not have that component. This kind of thing also was common when the lower voltage 486 processors were introduced.

sketchus wrote:

I dug out my Amiga from the attic recently (Amiga's are close enough right?) and after having the PSU repaired got stuck into some old games. Sad thing was a ton of my old floppies were completely broken, so I had to order a lot of blank floppies. This is were my dear Win98 PC came into use as it's serial ports are perfect for transferring content to the Amiga, and you can even write to blank floppies in the Amiga drive via your PC. A nice bit of retro goodness.

I need to do this. I picked up 2x A500s recently and BOTH had a memory expansion card with corroded batteries on them. Also 80% of the games that were bundled would not load. Is it a common issue then?

If you want to revisit your A500 do yourself a favor, buy a Gotek Floppy Emulator and flash it with the HxC Firmware (€10).

brassicGamer wrote:

sketchus wrote:

I dug out my Amiga from the attic recently (Amiga's are close enough right?) and after having the PSU repaired got stuck into some old games. Sad thing was a ton of my old floppies were completely broken, so I had to order a lot of blank floppies. This is were my dear Win98 PC came into use as it's serial ports are perfect for transferring content to the Amiga, and you can even write to blank floppies in the Amiga drive via your PC. A nice bit of retro goodness.

I need to do this. I picked up 2x A500s recently and BOTH had a memory expansion card with corroded batteries on them. Also 80% of the games that were bundled would not load. Is it a common issue then?

Yes very common. Although I'd recommend cleaning your drive heads it you have a cleaning disk, if not open it up and do it
If you haven't already remove the clock battery ASAP. It can destroy the Amiga, and you don't need to replace it.

Cracked open a couple dozen NES and SNES/SFC cartridges to desolder the batteries and solder in sockets. They all used CR2032 batteries. Incidentally, so did the N64 memory pak we checked.

I tried finishing my 2003 project but I ran into another obstacle:

@Arctic, that cap doesn't look too happy...

Well, I guess I can build another system as I continue work on diagnosing my childhood 486 after cleaning up the corrosion.

Now then, this Soyo board can ...aaaaw maaan...

(Spoiler alert: Soap and water took care of most of it, fortunately)

Wow, that was bad. Glad to hear it cleaned up.

I'm thrilled to say as well, after a long period spent bending pins back, that my motherboard works! Can't wait to turn it into an XP machine, it should eat games like FarCry alive.

Enjoying the soundtrack (CD quality) that was meant for Rareware's project Dream (N64 version).

Over the past week or so I've bought a few PC games (not sure there is dedicated thread for this?)

• Personally I am quite interested to play Battlecruiser Millenium as I have never heard of it and the back of the box looks interesting!
• NfSIII, need I say more?
• I am also pleased with picking up Mafia for 99p from a charity (thift) shop, one of my all time favourite games that I have on Steam.
• Airfix Dogfighter is great fun, but that might be mostly nostalgia talking.
• Finally, having never played a Civ game before, I thought I'd pick up Civ III; if I get half an hour of fun from it i'll be happy (I work at a 1 hour of fun for £1 is getting my moneys worth!)

I'm messing with my Socket 423 Asus P4T i850 setup.

I was hoping to find a Willamette P4 1.7 capable of beeing clocked to 17*133 = 2266 MHz as I feel that would probably be optimal whithout overclocking the AGP or PCI bus. I had high hopes for a CPU with E0 stepping but it would not even post at 2266 MHz with 1.85V. I have tried a few P4 1.7 with D0 stepping but so far no luck, they all seem to top out at 2000 - 2100 MHz.

Finding a Willamette 2 GHz CPU that can do 2200+ MHz isn't hard but that is with overclocked AGP and PCI bus. The upside is that the memory runs at 880+ MHz with the 4x multiplier at 110 MHz FSB versus 800 MHz with the 3x multiplier at 133 MHZ FSB. Running 133 MHz FSB with 4x memory multiplier is sadly not possible even if I found a capable P4 1.7 CPU because my Asus P4T uses crappy Cypress W134SH DRCGs* and not the better overclockable ICS ones. I still feel 17x133 would be the optimal setting to keep "everything" in spec but sometimes we get what we get and not what we want.

*Direct Rambus Clock Generators 😁

In any case my old Socket 478 Willamette 2 GHz CPU hat I got through work with a FSC Scaleo 800 computer shortly efter it's release is a good overclocker and shoehorned (or rather the opposite) into the Socket 423 socket it's still capable of running at 2.2 GHz with stock voltage. I actually tried to get a real Socket 423 2GHz CPU but the German selling it thinks 15 euro is a reasonable shipping cost for a CPU... I don't. I will probably end up using my old Socket 478 2 GHz CPU in this build, I ran some benchmarks with it yesterday.

This is a stable setting and I upgraded the memory to 1GB today before I started testing other CPUs. After I installed the new memory I let the 7-Zip benchmark run for an hour and then I played World of Warcraft for 2 hours so I guess it's still stable.

I will test more fun stuff before I case this build and put in in storage... 😜 Northwood Celerons are really really horrible CPUs performance wise, even the 2.6 GHz one gets beaten by the slowest Athlon XP CPUs (see link). I wonder how a Northwood Celeron would compare to the Willamette P4 2.0. I know some people I knew back then upgraded from Willamettes (s478) to Northwood Celerons and claimed that with overlocking the Celerons were really speedy, I need to test this for my self.

Link showing just how slow the Northwood Celeron could be.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1201/16

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Over the past week or so I've bought a few PC games (not sure there is dedicated thread for this?) […]
Show full quote

Over the past week or so I've bought a few PC games (not sure there is dedicated thread for this?)

• Personally I am quite interested to play Battlecruiser Millenium as I have never heard of it and the back of the box looks interesting!
• NfSIII, need I say more?
• I am also pleased with picking up Mafia for 99p from a charity (thift) shop, one of my all time favourite games that I have on Steam.
• Airfix Dogfighter is great fun, but that might be mostly nostalgia talking.
• Finally, having never played a Civ game before, I thought I'd pick up Civ III; if I get half an hour of fun from it i'll be happy (I work at a 1 hour of fun for £1 is getting my moneys worth!)

A lot of great games there!

All I'll say is, Civ III will seem archaic I think, even compared to games of the day. Definitely give it a go, but I'd still recommend trying at least Civ IV at some point. I picked up Mafia too recently. I have it on Steam, but with the issues around it on digital distribution, I'm glad to have a hard copy.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Over the past week or so I've bought a few PC games (not sure there is dedicated thread for this?) […]
Show full quote

Over the past week or so I've bought a few PC games (not sure there is dedicated thread for this?)

• Personally I am quite interested to play Battlecruiser Millenium as I have never heard of it and the back of the box looks interesting!
• NfSIII, need I say more?
• I am also pleased with picking up Mafia for 99p from a charity (thift) shop, one of my all time favourite games that I have on Steam.
• Airfix Dogfighter is great fun, but that might be mostly nostalgia talking.
• Finally, having never played a Civ game before, I thought I'd pick up Civ III; if I get half an hour of fun from it i'll be happy (I work at a 1 hour of fun for £1 is getting my moneys worth!)

Just a heads up, turns out yes there is a dedicated thread for this sort of thing. Bought these games today

the board looks like new, it doesnt even have dust in it

paid 15 dollars for all this. PC CHIPS M919

and i know where to buy the original manual for $5 bucks, but the guy does not ship and i have to travel a lot.

Pabloz wrote:

http://i64.tinypic.com/20f4ui1.jpg […]
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the board looks like new, it doesnt even have dust in it

paid 15 dollars for all this. PC CHIPS M919

and i know where to buy the original manual for $5 bucks, but the guy does not ship and i have to travel a lot.

Wow. $15 for a 486 motherboard with on-board I/O is a good price. I had a PCChips M912 v1.7 (real L2 cache) from 1994 up until mid 2012 when its BIOS chip failed, and the BIOS had a major bug (Y2K wasn't supported). Wish I had that board again, but a K6-2 board is even better, and my Packard Bell is amazing, but sadly, no L2 cache, but I might purchase the chips on eBay, as well as the VRAM chips, too (I never installed L2 cache or CRAM upgrade on a board before, and I know the side where the half circle is goes on the right since Pin 1 is on the right and upper ends of the sockets itself (if my memory is right).

testing and sorting hardware 😀

I also installed my ESI Juli@ PCI into my main system. Great card!
Next time I will post some pictures!

Arctic wrote:

testing and sorting hardware 😀

I also installed my ESI Juli@ PCI into my main system. Great card!
Next time I will post some pictures!

the guy that had it had NO clue of what he was selling, he told me nobody buys this stuff only you
i asked if he had other coast modules and he did not

how do we avoid bios chips from failing? is there a way to make a backup? and new bios chips can be bought flashed and installed?

Pabloz wrote:

how do we avoid bios chips from failing? is there a way to make a backup? and new bios chips can be bought flashed and installed?

You can read/write using a chip burner. Backup the old one and write the same one to a fresh chip if you want to do so. It is also advantageous if someone modifies the BIOS for your board and you want to upgrade your BIOS with those features (larger disk support, etc).