First post, by MaTi
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all,
First please allow me to briefly introduce myself.
I am 37 years old from The Netherlands and have been looking into 'old stuff' lately, longing back for the good ole days when imho computers were just more fun.
I remember being a kid (lets say from the age of 10 till 18), spending too much time on computers (both building them and using them), but with very limited financial resources to spend back then.
I would like to place some of the old games from back then, so I figured I wanted a retro pc... Actually... In the meanwhile I now have three 😀
(1x p3-450Mhz with dual voodoo2 in SLI, 1x p1-133Mhz) annnd this beauty which arrived today... FREE, as it was just collecting dust in someone's attic.
I believe it has some very nice hardware inside, looking at prices for the cards on ebay.
These are the pic I got before she sent it to me:
..I actually remembered the case from back in the days, but wasn't entirely sure whether it was the 386 or the early 486 era..
Todat I got it and it turns out to have a big sticker at the bottom reading '386DX40'.. Nice! Which is correct..
It's board got an onboard AMD DX40 CPU on it, with 8MB ram and all cache sockets populated.
Then I looked at the ISA cards which came with it. I'll share them with you:
I did some quick googling/ebaying and although the IO cards do not seem to be anything special, I was completely shocked by the prices for the vga and sbprov2 cards.
What makes these so expensive? I used to have tons of such cards 15(?) years ago and threw them all away being old junk 😉
...Am I as lucky as I think I am finding these?
Anyway, my real question:
I am having troubles determining what board is in the system. If possible Id like to get some more info on it and possibly a manual would be even better 😀
I could find two things which I thought could be a model number, but googling that didnt help me.
Between two ISA slots it says 'C3400A P10-04C340000" and elsewhere on the board it has a sticker which reads 'MR921008REV.A02'.
Does that ring any bell to anyone? If it helps I could take a picture of the board ofcourse 😀
Also, would anyone know how to get into the BIOS? it has an AMI bios dated 1990. I tried del, esc, ctrl+esc, but to no avail yet.. I found some others I could try too, but didnt do that yet.
And lastly, I see the board has a socket for a 387 coprocessor. My 386DX33 back in the days (1995?) used to have one too, but I was too young to really know what it was good for. I havent googled that yet, but would it be worth getting one?
This is what it says inside the empty socket:
..When googling for that I found a document which says it can either contain a 25 or 33 Mhz 387, but that it should be equally clocked to the CPU.
...Which is interesting, because it's a 40Mhz 😉 So, long story should: can/should I buy one and if so, which one and where? Any advise?
Sorry for the long post and thanks for all your help in advance!
..I believe I found myself a new (expensive) hobby! 😁
Martin
Still relatively new, but spending too much time on retro already.. 😀
