First post, by ciernioo
- Rank
- Newbie
Inspired by Badmojo`s excellent thread about his 286 machine:
I`ve decided to show you mine too. The idea behind this project was (besides of having yet another retro machine) to recreate the experience of my first PC class computer that I had in the early nineties. It was 286/12Mhz / 1MB RAM/ VGA/ 250MB HDD (initially I didn`t even have any HDD, just booted from 1.2MB floppy ...). My favourite games were flight sims - especially those from Microprose - F15 Strike Eagle II, F19 Stealth Fighter, Knights of the sky. Electronic Art`s LHX was also fantastic! Then I remember discovering Wing Commander. Man, I was blown away. I spent countless hundreds of hours playing this game in every possible way and style.I was using analog joystick for all of the sims (QuickShot - currently being repaired) which was such a thrilling experience after my earlier Atari 65XE controller. Flight simulators and analog joystick is my most vivid memory from that time.
Recently, I`ve acuired nearly complete 286 for a reasonable price. It needed some work, but it was in overall good condition. Here is the photo, with later model of DELL`s 15" CRT SVGA:
Some basic Checkit 3.0 info and benchmarks:
The case still needs some cleaning, and some treatment for the "yellow plastic disease".
Below you can see the overview of the guts inside ,
and some details of the case itself - it has one interesting feature: an optional keyboard connector is on the side, so the regular back one can be rerouted to the side of the computer.
The mainboard. I like it very much. It`s clean, compact, elegant and troublefree. As you can see, this particular model lacks the onboard HDD/FDC controller, but I don`t really care. The board came with 1MB DIP RAM. I was going to leave it this way, as 1MB was the amount of RAM that I used back in the day. However those four SIMM sockets were so inviting, that I`ve fed them with some leftover SIMMs that were lying around. That made a total of 5Megs. I thought, that after upgrade it would only use the SIMM memory, but I was happy to see that all of the memory was detected and used. I`ve cut out the battery for safety. I`ll think of some replacement option in the future.
The cards:
- Regular multi I/O. Nothing special about it.
- 10Mbps 3COm 3C905 NIC. Well known standard. All media options available (BNC, twisted pair, AUI). Works great with packet driver ant MTCP suite.
- 512kb Trident 9000. I hate it. I`ve always hate it. It is there for now, but I plan to switch it for someting better. (I had to switch it for ET4000 for photo session, as the Trident keeps booting in monochrome mode most of the time).
- ESS ES1868F soundcard. Those have the opinion of being cheap and boring, but I personally like this model. I`ve installed many of them in many PCs of that time for my customers. Those cards were always troublefree, no TSRs, simple and intuitive config utility, great DOS and Windows compatibility. I never had any problem with these cards. This is why I`ve picked it for the build.
My Z80 computer project http://ciernioo.wordpress.com/
