First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
I've had this very tidy 386DX-40 for a while now but for the most part it's been sitting idle, and it's time to change that. When I found it a couple of years ago, abandoned on the scrap heap at the local tip, it was already in very good shape. All I did at the time was replace the case’s feet (one of which was broken), replaced the 3.5” floppy drive (read errors), and gave it a bit of a clean-up. Its specs were:
386DX-40
ASUS ISA386C motherboard, 64kb cache, SIS chipset
Winbond serial and game port card
UMC IDE controller
Trident TVGA8900C VGA, 1MB
8MB RAM
90MB HDD
3.5” Floppy drive
5.25” Floppy drive
Decent quality components in a very sturdy – think WWII tank - desktop case; an excellent example of an early 90’s clone. It didn’t have anything much in the way of ‘productivity’ software on it, just DOS 6 / Windows 3.1 and a decent collection of DOS games, which I take that to mean that it was a home PC that someone spent the family savings on, only to see it turned into a games machine for the kids. A common story at the time I suppose.
I of course am also interested in this machines potential as a games machine, but it needed some upgrades in the VGA and sound departments first. For the graphics card I tied 2 different Tseng Labs ET4000AX cards, a Paradise chipset based thing, the Trident it came with, and even an 8 bit Tseng ET3000 just for fun. It’s interesting how much difference in speed there was between these cards, but - using Wolf3D as a test - the Tseng ET4000AX provides noticeably smoother gameplay and produces easily the best image quality of the bunch.
For one half of the sound solution I added a Roland MPU-IPC-T, which will drive an MT-32. For the other half I had a Sound Blaster 2.0 (CT1350B) in it for a time (found on the same scrap heap), but as much as I wanted to like it, the lack of a mixer was just too annoying. All my other machines let me mix an external module via the sound card’s line in, and I like that – I don’t want an external mixer cluttering up the joint and I don’t want to fiddle around with wiring just for one machine. So in the end I went with a Sound Blaster Pro 2 which has an easy-to-use mixer and sounds better to boot.
With the upgrades complete this machine is ready to rock Red Baron, Wing Commander, and a ton of other great early 90’s titles – I’ve been reading early copies of Computer Gaming World (http://www.cgwmuseum.org/) and have quite a long ‘to-do’ list.
The turbo button on this motherboard is quite useful in that it slows the machine down to the equivalent of a 386 33MHz, which is about perfect for Wing Commander. And the MT-32 of course sounds gorgeous – I’m glad I didn’t know about these things back when I could barely afford a Sound Blaster 2.0 Value - it would have broken my heart to know that there was something so much better out there. Red Baron for example sounds amazing with the MT-32, but with the Sound Blaster… not so amazing.
Some pics:
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
