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First post, by superfury

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Is there a difference in the chipset of the Compaq Deskpro 486, when compared against the Compaq Deskpro 386? Is there any new hardware added(from a software point of view)? Or is it just some caches added?

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Reply 2 of 5, by superfury

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What I mean is: when comparing the Compaq Deskpro 386 hardware addressable by the CPU through MMIO and IN/OUT commands, what are the differences from the software point of view? (So like the Bochs' ioports.lst information for up to the PS/2) Besides it being faster (because of the 80486 with added caches) and the CPU functional additions(like the new flag). Is there any new or changed(extended functionality) hardware available on the I/O ports or on the memory bus(through MMIO)? Of course comparing without extra hardware boards plugged into either motherboard.

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Reply 3 of 5, by vladstamate

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If we can find somewhere some specs for different DeskPro 386 and 486 system, we'll know better.

But other than that there might not be much a difference from an emulation point of view. DeskPro could have had both EISA and VLB which gives you 32bit soundcards and video cards therefore changing timings in your emulator.

I also expect the chipset to have certain ports where it can configure things like caches and so on. But you might get a system emulated fine without supporting those.

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Reply 4 of 5, by superfury

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Been looking for such specs on the Compaq Deskpro 486, but I can't find any info like in the Bochs' ioports.lst file? The ioports.lst file lists Compaq Deskpro 386 information, but nothing in there about the 486? Since Bochs emulates a Pentium-class CPU, you'd think they would have checked anything that's added on the 80486, since the pentium is directly derived from the 80486, thus would need a chipset that's compatible with that one for software compatibility?

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Reply 5 of 5, by Scali

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I would say that from a software point-of-view, nothing has really happened between 286-386-486, outside of the CPU itself.
The differences, as mentioned, are mainly because of chipset/motherboard-specific features and configuration like caches, plug&play support etc. Things that are transparent to software running on the system, and generally vary from one chipset/motherboard to the next anyway.

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