I love that I can’t hear CRT whine any more, it does make using CRTs far more enjoyable! Drives my kids nuts, though. They ask me if I had to deal with the noise all the time, and I had to reply, well yeah, what else could we do?

Of the three that you have, the 3com is definitely the best. The D-Link is NE2000 based so it will perform the same as the other NE2000 card. With the speed of machine that you have, you may not see much perceived performance difference at 10Mbps, but you’ll probably see less CPU usage with the …

I was thinking it was a pretty square-y sounding sine. Looking at the wave in my (admittedly bottom of the barrel) scope from my snark barker, it’s definitely squareish but not perfectly so. I wonder if that’s down to any filtering or flaws in the design in the analog section of the original Sound …

I was doing some reflowing on the GUS Max 2.1 card since it would lock up at the detection using the DOS setup program or when I enable it in Windows 95C's device manager. I reflowed the following to see if the issue would get fixed: [...] Apparently, the ICS1614 GF1 chip is done for and the card …

I sent in a fix for SBDIAG just yesterday. The SAA chips can produce noise (for "drums") and sine waves. SBDIAG turned on the sine generator, but forgot to turn off the noise generator. Try to download the current SBDIAG.EXE from github, and try again. That did it! The sine waves sound perfectly …

Following up on my own post: Folks who socketed your TEA2025Bs: how are they holding up? I’m thinking about socketing mine because the 2 I’ve used so far in my Snark Barker are both bad: one had distortion in the right channel and the other had no output at all. I went ahead and socketed the new TEA …

Folks who socketed your TEA2025Bs: how are they holding up? I’m thinking about socketing mine because the 2 I’ve used so far in my Snark Barker are both bad: one had distortion in the right channel and the other had no output at all. Also both SAA1099s I got from China were extremely bad - basically …

Good idea to try the original 82C206 in the socket. I just did it and it showed the same original symptoms. So yeah, it was indeed bad.

So, egg on my face: I traced the DREQ1 and DACK1 lines based on my photo above with the chip off. I checked for continuity and found that there was no continuity on DACK1 to where I was expecting it to go on the board. After I popped the 82C206 chip back out and gave things a good look, I finally …

Good spot! I relocated R22 and C77 to the bottom of the board because they interfered with the socket.

I desoldered the 82C206, put in a PLCC socket, and inserted the 82C206 I got on eBay. Good news: the system boots and high DMA still works. Bad news: low DMA still doesn’t work. Next I’m going to start tracing signals that are DMA related around the board and test every logic chip they go through. I …

So I've purchased a 82C206 and hot air rework station, as the chip is not socketed on this motherboard. Wish me luck, I've never done SMT soldering of this scale before! I'm going to watch plenty of tutorials on YouTube first.

I have a 386sx system that I'm building with this motherboard and I seem to be having problems with anything that uses low DMA channels 1-3. This first manifested with the system not being able to boot or access floppy drives. It would hang on booting from floppy, or if booted from a CF card would …

Testing the AT clone case I pulled out of my parents' attic. It held our family's first PC, a 286 with EGA graphics, 40MB hard drive, and 287 FPU (to run AutoCAD). I have a pic of the actual system when it was new! E17p0qVWYAIVius.jpg E9RlO-zVgAMgDuO.jpg Very cool although a little sad that it was …

Good idea, I hadn’t tried it with a battery connected. Unfortunately it still gives the same 3 beeps with one. Thanks to the board manufacturer for clearly labeling the external battery connector as 6V, unlike the labels on the rest of the board…

Testing the AT clone case I pulled out of my parents' attic. It held our family's first PC, a 286 with EGA graphics, 40MB hard drive, and 287 FPU (to run AutoCAD). I have a pic of the actual system when it was new! Filename E17p0qVWYAIVius.jpg File size 445.59 KiB Views 2262 views File license CC- …

I recently got this super clean 286 motherboard with an ACT A27C001 chipset and am having great difficulty getting it to boot. I have a feeling it's due to memory configuration, and I can't find any information about it, let alone documentation for jumper settings. It has 8 30-pin SIMM slots and a …

I recently was digging through some old things and came across my old GUS (revision 3.74) that I've had since the 90s and had a wave of overwhelming nostalgia that caused me to jump into sourcing all the bits for a great mid-90s retro box to put it in. I finally put everything together, and then was …