Yesterday, the mailman came by and delivered nice christmas cards to me and my family. Among those christmas cards however, were new parts for my 286 PC. Those parts consisted of a NOS Kraft game port joystick card, and an 80287 XL. Upon opening the package for the Kraft card, I found that the box was still covered in plastic wrap! I felt a bit bad tearing off the plastic wrap and taking out my fresh new card, because it had been sealed in there for 29 years, but the card was only $7, and game port cards are common, so I don't think I destroyed too much history. I'm keeping the box though. Inside the box was just the card and the manual. The configuration of the card was simple enough, requiring me to just flick one DIP switch to get it to work with an 8 MHZ system. I then moved to the 80287 XL, which was housed inside of a nice chip case. I didn't realize how good the XL looked until I finally got one myself. Installing the XL was a chore. To install it, I had to remove all of my expansion cards (due to their orientation they are all over the processor and co processor socket, blocking access to the socket.) After the expansion cards were removed, the installation was very easy and I just popped the chip into it's socket. Installing the game port card took a little bit of effort as it wouldn't go into the slot easily due to it's bracket orientation. With a little bit of force I got the card in there though. With everything installed, I powered it on and it posted as normal. I check the BIOS setup for any options on math co-pro's, and I can't find any. To test the co-pro's functionality, I took an original Intel math co processor diagnostic disk and fired up the diagnostic utility. Unsuprisingly, the chip was recognized and it passed all the checkups a number of times. I then went on to testing the game port joystick card. To test it, I fired up Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge with a untested Quickshot joystick and it worked well. The joystick behaved like crap though and the joystick wouldn't stay up so i'll need to look into fixing it. It wasn't the controller card's fault as I used a game pad later and it was absolutely fine. Using the gamepad and game port joystick card, I had a fun time playing Silpheed and The Simpsons arcade game and everything felt responsive and decently calibrated. The brand new AdLib sounded nice in these games also. After my long DOS gaming session, I fire up Landmark Speed Test and TOPBENCH and they both seem to agree my system preforms close to a 12 MHZ 80286 based machine with a 13 MHZ 80287. I thought that was pretty interesting as I must have a fast 8 MHZ 286 based machine. After benchmarking, I fired up some TurboCAD, to see if the math co-pro was doing anything for preformance, but I have no benchmarks for it without the co-pro so I can't really tell, but it was nice and responsive. Tommorow's upgrades will be the final ones I will probably make on this machine. Tommorow, I will install a 80286 20 MHZ CPU by Harris in the PLCC socket and install an oscilliator socket so I can change out the 16 MHZ CPU clock oscilliator to a 20,24, or 32 MHZ oscilliator to run my CPU at 10,12, or 16 MHZ depending on what my board handles. I know the chipset is rated for 16 MHZ operation, but I have no clue if the faster clocks would mess up the ISA or onboard IDE/serial/paralell controllers. I'm gonna need to practice on soldering and buy a desoldering pump to do the procedure.
Wish me luck on the final upgrade guys!
Set up retro boxes:
DOS:286 10 MHZ/ET4000AX1MB/270 MB HDD/4 MB RAM/Adlib/80287 XL
W98:P2 450/Radeon 7000 64 MB/23 GB HDD/SB 16 clone/384 MB RAM
XP:ATHLON X2 6000+/2 GB RAM/Radeon X1900XTX/2x120 GB SSD/1x160 GB and 1x250 GB 7.2k HDD's/ECS A740 GM-M/SB X-Fi