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Building a 486DX2 soon!

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First post, by ahendricks18

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hi all,
I started ordering off of ebay a few days ago. I snagged a copy of Daggerfall with the back art for $12 (including shipping). I also got an "as-is" socket 3 ISA mobo (SIS 85c471 chipset) and a Cirrus logic VESA VGA card. The VGA card isn't too fancy but It's better than my old WDC ISA VGA card, which predates the mobo. I have one of those small AT cases with the MHZ LED on the front, not sure how to set that up though. The one thing I noticed after buying the mobo is one of the 72 pin memory slot has a tab broken off! Is there a quick fix for this? I could just use a single 16mb module that I have, but IDK. I have a plethora of socket 3 CPU's, AMD and Intel. So I chose a 486DX2-66. I have the rest of the parts already.
-A Hayes internal 1200 baud modem pulled from a rusty old Toshiba portable
-SMC 10 Mbps ISA NIC
-No-name IDE/serial/parallel controller card
- less than 1gb HDD. I'll probably use a 800~ mb one.

I also would like to hear some opinions on sound cards. I have an old Analogue devices 16bit card and a SB16 (vibra PnP). So I would need a tool to configure the PnP sound card under dos, right? I'm going to use FreeDOS. IDK, maybe they already have a built in utility. Thanks all, I'll take some pics when it arrives (I'll see if I can use my older Digital camera, instead of my phone, hopefully pics will have better quality). I'm pretty pumped as this is my first 486DX2. I've had the SX ones, but they suck for games (and probably for simple dos networking too). I'm going to run mTCP on my new 486.
Thanks!

Main: AMD FX 6300 six core 3.5ghz (OC 4ghz)
16gb DDR3, Nvidia Geforce GT740 4gb Gfx card, running Win7 Ultimate x64
Linux: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1.5GB DDR, Nvidia Quadro FX1700 running Debian Jessie 8.4.0

Reply 1 of 2, by oerk

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For the frequency dispiay, post a pic from the back and we'll figure it out somehow. It's usually a lot of jumpers to set the different digits for turbo and non-turbo mode, you can probably figure it out yourself.

The drivers for the SB16 should include CTCM to set the ressources. That's all you need. Works automatically most of the time.

As for the video card, try it out yourself and see which one is faster. You don't need any drivers so it's really only an issue of swapping one card for another.

Keep in mind that you'll probably need drive overlay software for hard drives larger than 500MB, even if the BIOS shows the size correctly.

No experience with mTCP, Win 3.11 + mounting SMB shares works pretty well for me.

Reply 2 of 2, by chinny22

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Cheap fix for the Ram connector is to just wedge it in with something. as long as the ram contacts are connecting then its only if you move the PC does it become a problem. Depending on which Ram slot it is you may not even need it anyway.

Vibra16 is a good card to start with. Common cards though are
GUS has a following but is expensive.
AWE32 is my favourite because its what I always wanted growing up., plus has a true Yamaha OPL, which the AWE64 does not.
AWE64 does have cleaner sound and no hanging note bugs if using external midi.
Yamaha ymf 7xx cards are also popular.

Creative drivers include the tool CTCM as mentioned above for any creative PNP card.

if the motherboard doesn't have onboard IDE then you an always get a later controller. Most controllers max out at 8GB round this era. on a Dx2-66 I think you would struggle to fill all 8GB on a standard games PC.

Using SD-Cards is also popular for Dos PC's and you can get ones that are mounted in a bracket so you can easily swap them out if you do find yourself running out of space.

Definite recommend setting up on the network! it takes a bit of time but makes life so much easier down the track

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