I used to have a jetway 542c, it was a nice stable board. There were quite a few boards from around then that had both at and atx connectors - and also that big keyboard socket.

By disabling caches you can achieve 386 and 486 speeds even with a k6/2 installed. I'd say the advantages of that plus being able to use an atx psu, having onboard floppy/ide ports, and pci slots, makes it a good basis for a decent retro box.

Thanks for the reply.

I also found it to be a stable board, though it was more stable obviously in XP due to the inherent instabilities of Win9x, however, I think Windows XP was just a bit too much for this board, never had satisfactory performance, and that was when I had a 500Mhz K6-2 in there. Did you ever try overclocking on this board? I remember there was a "trick", can't remember if it was this board specific or not, but there was a dip-switch configuration that could overclock to 600Mhz, even though the max the board could do was 550. This was too much for my 500Mhz K6-2, and it used to just fail after POST.

I remember I always wanted to get myself a K6-3 for this board, as some guy on a forum years back said it would perform equivalent to a same-speed Pentium 3, but they were just far too expensive, even then when they had started to become obsolete.

Wish I had an old PCI video card lying around with an old AT keyboard! Want to fire this up 😀

I know I always trust Motherboard brand!

Funny, I once had an IBM PS/1 Consultant SX-25 that I had upgraded with an Overdrive chip to DX2-50 and 8MB of RAM. It came with a 133MB hard drive, but I also bumped that up to 850 whopping MB. 😁

Stull wrote:

I know I always trust Motherboard brand!

Funny, I once had an IBM PS/1 Consultant SX-25 that I had upgraded with an Overdrive chip to DX2-50 and 8MB of RAM. It came with a 133MB hard drive, but I also bumped that up to 850 whopping MB. 😁

That must be the same machine!! You are indeed right, mine was also 133MB hard disk space, I remember being happy if I had about 5MB free, and was forever running down to 0! Then I discovered C:\WINDOWS\TEMP - like I said above, I was young 😉

I reckon mine also had an overdrive in it, I never ran any utilities back then and was still learning, so I don't know if it was an overdrive for sure, but I remember it was definitely 50Mhz. And the 8MB RAMtoo - in its last days I tried to put Windows 95 on it...nightmare!!

I wish I still had that machine, I sold it for £5 if I recall to an old school friend 🙁

A bit off topic but I just obtained a PS/1 2133-114. Not as beefy as the Consultant but still a nice machine in its own right with 4 Megs of RAM and a 170MB hard drive 😁

I have also had one of those IBM 486 SX25, I think it had 8mb ram and a 170 mb hardrive.
Mine diddnt have an overdrive 😁
It was a stop gap between my IBM 55 SX and a olevetti 486 SX33 (that used standard components)
The olivetti had two harddrives 80 + 210 mb and a soundblaster clone of some sort, The olivetti was perhaps half a year old when I bought it and I diddnt have to pay much more then I got from selling the IBM SX25.

Great replies! Keep them coming.

I remember that whenever I booted that PS/1 machine, 9 times out of 10 there'd be a BIOS configuration error, but like I said, because I didn't know much about anything PC wise back then, I used to just bypass it. I wonder what it was, I will try and remember the code! I know it used to beep twice. This is bringing back many memories!

Hard to imagine in this day and age that we were plodding along on 170mb hard drives!

That Olivetti machine I mentioned, the M300-30, man I wish I still had that, but I messed up the motherboard when it became my secondary PC and it had to go I'm the trash 🙁 they were so sturdy, had a very funny design. I remember the power switch was just a big plastic rectangle that when you looked inside, pushed a metal arm which went all the way to the pack of the PC and into the PSU! Even though it was only 25mhz SX, I seem to remember it performing so well with Windows 95 on only 12mb ram too.

Got a question for you all, if I was to get a usb-to-PS2 converter, and then a PS2 to AT converter, would I be able to use my USB keyboard on my AT motherboard?!

Sorry if there are any typos, writing this on my mobile.

Alex

alex_ncfc wrote:

Got a question for you all, if I was to get a usb-to-PS2 converter, and then a PS2 to AT converter, would I be able to use my USB keyboard on my AT motherboard?!

Only if it's designed to be used by both USB and PS/2, which is the case in many USB mice, but not so many keyboards. 😉

GeorgeMan wrote:

alex_ncfc wrote:

Got a question for you all, if I was to get a usb-to-PS2 converter, and then a PS2 to AT converter, would I be able to use my USB keyboard on my AT motherboard?!

Only if it's designed to be used by both USB and PS/2, which is the case in many USB mice, but not so many keyboards. 😉

Just thought to myself, the AT Super Socket 7 board above has USB in the form of a pin-out, so I could use it with a backplate and not need to worry about keyboard adapters etc! Depends if the BIOS will allow the keyboard to work from the off though, as the CMOS settings for sure will be lost since I last used it. If only I could put a 486 into that board! Mind you, I guess I could obtain an old P75 or something and use that instead.

I bid on a 486 board on ebay the other day. Because I have seen boards selling for stupid amount, I didn't think I'd win, but I did, and got it for about £6.50! With a DX2/80 CPU too, but no RAM. Turned up today. Not looked at it properly yet to see what type of board it is, so I know nothing about it really.

As you can tell I'm now getting into the idea of building a retro machine 😜

I recommend that you shouldnt bother about does AT PSU.. The quality in that time was very poor.. Does AT psu mostly where dead i a few years.. They are also dust collectors..
If you go for an AT one, then choose for a Hi-POT one.. But better looking for a better quality ATX psu

Robin4 wrote:

I recommend that you shouldnt bother about does AT PSU.. The quality in that time was very poor.. Does AT psu mostly where dead i a few years.. They are also dust collectors..
If you go for an AT one, then choose for a Hi-POT one.. But better looking for a better quality ATX psu

I think the PSU in the old AT case I discarded a few years bacj was Hi-POT, not that I'm going to pretend to know what that means 🤣.

I had my main PC case open yesterday to attempt to fit a Zalman CPU heatsink/fan I got off eBay - the retention clip snapped but that's another story. So whilst I had it open I thought I'd grab my JetWay board and see if I can hook the ATX connector up to it and power it up, but the cable sadly isn't long enough unless I remove the PSU from my main case, which I can't be bothered doing right now 🤣. Shame because I wanted to see it fired up for old times sake.

Would it be easy to mount an AT board in an ATX case? Rather annoyingly I did have a spare ATX PSU but I had an ebay selling spree in Summer 2012, and that was one of the things that went 🙁

alex_ncfc wrote:

Would it be easy to mount an AT board in an ATX case?

It's a piece of cake if the ATX case has the mounting holes already done. If it doesn't, you can create your own. But its a nightmare aligning & measuring to ensure theyre in the right spot.

I have an AT Super7 board mounted in an ATX case as we speak. Plus I have those fancy IO shields you need for the AT keyboard.

I was going to say about the AT keyboard, I guess you just punched through the supplied ATX backplate and put your own in there?

Would be a nice little project for me maybe, I remember back in the day you could get cases with ATX PSUs supplied for under a tenner on sites like eBuyer, I wonder if this is still the case (no pun intended)

Being that the JetWay board has an ATX connector on too and is a late AT board, I would imagine it has the holes aligned for ATX too maybe.

alex_ncfc wrote:

Being that the JetWay board has an ATX connector on too and is a late AT board, I would imagine it has the holes aligned for ATX too maybe.

In an ATX case, there is about 2-3 holes extra needed to suit an AT board. If they don't have them, I suppose you could use the little plastic risers ala AT case. Otherwise, yes the bottom holes do align with an AT board.

oops wrong thread and can't delete

Forevermore wrote:

alex_ncfc wrote:

Being that the JetWay board has an ATX connector on too and is a late AT board, I would imagine it has the holes aligned for ATX too maybe.

In an ATX case, there is about 2-3 holes extra needed to suit an AT board. If they don't have them, I suppose you could use the little plastic risers ala AT case. Otherwise, yes the bottom holes do align with an AT board.

Thanks for the info 😀

In that case I am best off finding a cheap ATX case, doesn't need to be anything special. Obviously if it was more "old-school" then it'd look better but some of these cheap ATX cases don't look too bad.

What sort of PSU would I need? Surely a 300W would do? I have no idea what PSU I used to use with this machine.

By the way I bid on a 486 board on eBay and won it, I don't know much about the board yet but the fact is I have no SIMMs to use and I am guessing they could be hard to come by, along with a VGA card and controller card (VLB perhaps) so I might have to skip that project and go with the Jetway board. I also have no AT keyboard! Such a shame that all these parts are getting hard to come by 🙁 I didn't expect to win the bid for the 486 board if I am honest, which is why I bid, as I thought they go for so much now, that I'd have no chance of winning it. As I know everybody here loves pics, here's one, maybe someone here can identify it:

Didn't realise boards of this era still had 8-bit ISA slots, was there any point seeing as you could use them in the 16-bit slots?

Does anybody remember a device called a "SIMM Saver", which allowed you to use 30-pin SIMMS in 72-pin SIMM slots? I had a box-full of these back in the old days...

alex_ncfc wrote:

Thanks for the info :) […]
Show full quote

Forevermore wrote:

alex_ncfc wrote:

Being that the JetWay board has an ATX connector on too and is a late AT board, I would imagine it has the holes aligned for ATX too maybe.

In an ATX case, there is about 2-3 holes extra needed to suit an AT board. If they don't have them, I suppose you could use the little plastic risers ala AT case. Otherwise, yes the bottom holes do align with an AT board.

Thanks for the info 😀

In that case I am best off finding a cheap ATX case, doesn't need to be anything special. Obviously if it was more "old-school" then it'd look better but some of these cheap ATX cases don't look too bad.

What sort of PSU would I need? Surely a 300W would do? I have no idea what PSU I used to use with this machine.

By the way I bid on a 486 board on eBay and won it, I don't know much about the board yet but the fact is I have no SIMMs to use and I am guessing they could be hard to come by, along with a VGA card and controller card (VLB perhaps) so I might have to skip that project and go with the Jetway board. I also have no AT keyboard! Such a shame that all these parts are getting hard to come by 🙁 I didn't expect to win the bid for the 486 board if I am honest, which is why I bid, as I thought they go for so much now, that I'd have no chance of winning it. As I know everybody here loves pics, here's one, maybe someone here can identify it:

Didn't realise boards of this era still had 8-bit ISA slots, was there any point seeing as you could use them in the 16-bit slots?

Does anybody remember a device called a "SIMM Saver", which allowed you to use 30-pin SIMMS in 72-pin SIMM slots? I had a box-full of these back in the old days...

I'm not sure that you can populate both the 30 pin and 72 pin slots on these boards at the same time so your SIMM savers may be of limited value here.

Oh no sliderider, I didn't mean I was going to use them, or even had any to use - was just reminiscing about them once I saw that the board had slots for both 30-pin and 72-pin SIMMs.

They were a very handy way of re-using old unused RAM which was left lying around!

What's the going rate for a pair of 72-pin SIMMS? Mind you, I need to find the manual for this board first - proving difficult, as I know *nothing* about the board! So far the only thing I've seen is "PT-430" in the lower corner of the board.

I think this is your board http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/P/PI … 486-PT-430.html or very close to it.
Its interesting that your board has a molex peripheral connector on it, I've never seen that on an AT board before.

Of some concern though is that it appears that the Keyboard IC is missing which you need to use the keyboard, there is no cache either but it will still work without cache just a bit slower.