Pimped top cover. Everything looks better with carbon imitation. 😎

I have a 486 UMC board that apparently comes from a similar POS computer type device. Mine is severely crippled with regards to memory access, making it impossible to use with any sound card I have for anything but Ad-Lib music and MIDI - DMA access and digital sound completely hardlocks it. Fingers crossed for you, hope your board isn't as cut down as mine.

Following this for sure.

You could consider some black screws/washers for that top to streamline the look a bit. I suppose you could also sand and paint or create a sticker friendly plastic or acrylic shell for it.

I never really do much in terms of case customization, but it does have quite the industrial look to it at the moment. I also realize I am shooting the breeze by sharing potential ideas for step 100 when you are probably on step 3. Ha!

Man... the more I look at it, the cooler it is. And that is just the outside.

Well, I'm not planning to hide the industrial look too much. I'm going to make a custom face plate for the front and also add some rubber feet, but that's it most likely. It will have a rough, but awesome look then (hope so at least).

Here's the EPSON SBC, front and back. Cleaned it from dust, re-attached the heatsink to the CPU, and replaced the all-black jumpers with color-coded ones. Looks like new.

And here's the manual, just in case someone ever needs it.

Very cool project. Interested on how it turns out.

Started to re-assemble everything. There was a small damage by battery leakage on the lower side of the PSU board, but no other surprises. Also greased and re-sealed the fan (almost inaudible now). Only the floppy drive is still left for cleaning.

No HDD and sound card installed yet, but did a quick test to see how the case looks now when assembled. Not too bad. Have to cut the hole for the top I/O module still, but I don't think I'll re-attach this.

Any concerns about the surface mount caps?

Not really, since it was made in 1999/2000.

I have two similar ones.
Cache is, as far as I know, only available as a supplementary card(brown slot) - so the performance is not too great with games like Doom. It's cool for programming though.

No, the brown slot is VLB and for a PCMCIA controller only. Well, it could be used for other cards, but the connector is custom due to the size of the whole thing and EPSON only made a PCMCIA controller card for it.

There's no L2 cache, but that only costs about 10% of performance. It's something like having 39 fps in DOOM instead of 43 fps (real values), which I don't care about at all. One cool thing is that you can not only disable L1 cache in the BIOS, but also half the clock. This will get you near XT/AT speed for very early games.

Done mostly with putting all parts back together. Added an ESS 1869F sound card with a Dreamblaster S2. On the secondary IDE port of the sound card, I'm going to connect a slot bracket with external CF card access (already ordered). Hard disk is still a problem, since the BIOS has E-CHS only, no LBA, so I'm limited to 8 GB. That rules out the 32 GB SSD and the 40 GB IDE hard disk that I had in mind. Have an Apple-branded drive too, but that's only 500 MB...

Since the HDD caddy is very tight and made of metal, the IDE->CF adapters I have don't work either (causing shorts on the solder joints since it's touching the frame). So the last and final solution is using an IDE->mSATA adapter, which I bought some time ago for no reason. 😉 Fits nicely. Now I just have to wait for the 2 GB mSATA card to arrive.

Did I already mention that the fan is almost silent after re-greasing it? 😀 😀

Quick question on the VLB / Cache COAST stuff: Is there really a big difference between the two? I have seen COAST modules for 486 systems that has the exact same dimensions as the VLB connector, in fact I have a mobo in my collection that has this COAST slot right next to its VLB slot, it looks like the traces on the motherboard connects many of the corresponding pins. I do not have the COAST stick though. Does anyone have some information on this? Would it be theoretically possible to add cache memory in a VLB slot?

No, you can not add a COAST module to a VLB slot. They are not compatible in any way, neither physical, nor electrical.

OK, thanks for clearing that out. Wishful dreaming from my side, there 😀

I'd also like to add that this project looks cool! Have you thought of building some sort of a case for it? Like cutting out thin MDF wood plates or something?

I'm going to make a face plate for the front, but no full case.

Some screens from Dr. Hardware. BIOS is odd; it's from 1997 but has no PnP and no LBA support. Not that I care much...

Performance is great, just what one would expect from an AMD DX4/100. (ignore the 120 MHz it shows, speed is correctly shown on the CPU info page)

Graphics is fine as well. It's using local bus and has VESA 1.2 and VBE 1.1.