Now that I have the Am386DX-40, I was rather impatient and wanted to test the 386 board I had, to see if there's any life in it. Now, back in March, I ordered some round connector strips from China, which haven't arrived and I'm guessing are lost in postage, and I intended to use some of that to make the Dallas socket. I said screw it, took a few small round connector sockets, and just cut off the pins I needed. Won't be pretty, but when the Dallas is in, you can't see it. Put them on the Dallas, then stuck it in the board and soldered it in. As for why I didn't solder the Dallas straight on, I was afraid the pins of the vertical battery socket would touch something underneath on the board if it wasn't somewhat raised up from the board, which a socket achieves.
I had no idea if the board would do anything without cache installed, so I just set it all up in a rather makeshift testbench setup (I have a legit PC testbench, I sometimes even wonder why I even bought it given I tend to be too lazy to set it up and just do makeshift stuff like this), powered it on, and... nothing. After looking at the jumper settings, I decided to put in the one for the SRAM Wait State setting. Even without cache, I figure that might be necessary. Power on again, and hey, 10 beeps this time, it's alive, at least somewhat! CMOS error, so had a look at the Dallas. First, I tried a fresh battery instead of the used but still good one in there. Nope, didn't help. Took out the Dallas again, and noticed a bent pin. Corrected it, carefully reseated the chip to avoid more pin bending, and now we got 1 long and 8 short beeps. Display/Retrace error, let's try seating the VGA card in a different ISA slot. Trying it again, three beeps, that's a RAM error, makes sense with the damaged top slot missing the right latch.
So, in a last ditch effort to see it boot to the BIOS, I just held the RAM SIMM into place while powering it up, and the CRT came on! First the video BIOS, then very briefly the motherboard BIOS before getting into a bootloop. With this rather janky way of doing it, it probably wasn't making the greatest contact in the SIMM slot, so it seems to conks out right when it wants to do a memory check. Well, if I had some spare desoldering station filters, I'd get on it right away to replace the top SIMM slot with an angled one from a battery bombed Mac Classic board, but I don't, so this is another repair for another day. But, I'm pleased as punch that the board does have a good amount of life in it! Can't wait to do the repairs, find a nice case, and get to work on this 386DX40 build 😀