4GB of RAM!? 😜

Continuing, more internal shots:

I've had the CF card working in this machine before, but I couldn't get it working this time. Even tried Ontrack, but no dice. I slapped a 40MB IDE guy in there, and we're off to the races.

By far, my favourite media for these PCs is a Gotek with Flashfloppy installed:

And here she is! Unfortunately, I can't get the 5.25" working, but I haven't tried really hard.

From a lurker, this site has been a great help! Thanks, guys!

GigAHerZ wrote:

4GB of RAM!? 😜

Fixed!

was there any software able to utilize all 4MB of ram on 286? other than maybe Win3.1?

Yeah, I know Windows uses it, because the performance difference is incredible.
I've never seen anything else use it, however.

rasz_pl wrote:

was there any software able to utilize all 4MB of ram on 286? other than maybe Win3.1?

OS/2 1.3 ? I don't know for sure, but some 16-Bit Protected Mode games (Wing Commander ?) or disk cache software might have used it.
From what i remember, lots of programs that used EMS also were happy with atleast 512 to 1024KiB of extra RAM.
If you add that with 640kiB of Base Memory and some memory for UMBs, having a bit more than 2MiB on a 286 made sense.
That being said, I had 4MiB of RAM on my 286, too (in the 90s). Windows 3.1 and other programs never complained about too little memory. 😀

Nice 286 setup!

Hm even 16Megs can be used.

Compiling Things, open big word documents, jpegs and such stuff on Windows 3.1 make it useful.
Maybe a TCP/IP Stack (Winsock / winpkt.com and ftp client..)

I had some problems with the Yamaha sound card on my 286. It worked fine in DOS, but the windows 3.1 drives always crashed the system on startup.

I think I'm going to swap it with a Sound Blaster 2.0, whose windows drivers work fine on 286 computers.

rasz_pl wrote:

was there any software able to utilize all 4MB of ram on 286? other than maybe Win3.1?

Various cad and drawing packages

Lotus could as well

Then there was ibms weird cash register POS stuff that could use the full 1gb virtual memory space

DESQView and PC-MOS could have had also benefited from extra memory.
I heard that for PC-MOS (or was it PC-MOS/386 ?), there was an extra CPU module which added another MMU to 286 machines.
Such an upgraded 286 could have used 4MB very well for multi-tasking purposes.

rmay635703 wrote:

rasz_pl wrote:

was there any software able to utilize all 4MB of ram on 286? other than maybe Win3.1?

Various cad and drawing packages
[..]

Right, now that you mention it, AutoSketch v3 for DOS also added EMS support.. 😁
This allowed for larger drawings. I'll have to check if it works on a 286 with EMM286.

Edit:

canthearu wrote:

I had some problems with the Yamaha sound card on my 286.
It worked fine in DOS, but the windows 3.1 drives always crashed the system on startup.
I think I'm going to swap it with a Sound Blaster 2.0, whose windows drivers work fine on 286 computers.

Wait, you can also try the default driver for Sound Blaster 1.5 that comes with Windows 3.1.
It's not very powerful, but does okay for "most" games ("most", because some included 16-Bit Wave files by accident).

Edit: Typos fixed.

GigAHerZ wrote:

4GB of RAM!? 😜

RAM was expensive back in 1993.
1mb. Of ram use to costs $100

I don’t know the manufacture date of that 286 but I am sure ram was expensive back then.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

RAM was expensive back in 1993. 1mb. Of ram use to costs $100 […]
Show full quote

GigAHerZ wrote:

4GB of RAM!? 😜

RAM was expensive back in 1993.
1mb. Of ram use to costs $100

I don’t know the manufacture date of that 286 but I am sure ram was expensive back then.

Okay? What are you saying?

canthearu wrote:

I had some problems with the Yamaha sound card on my 286. It worked fine in DOS, but the windows 3.1 drives always crashed the system on startup.

I think I'm going to swap it with a Sound Blaster 2.0, whose windows drivers work fine on 286 computers.

I get an error when I exit setupsa.exe in DOS, but otherwise it works for me there. I don't remember ever getting it to work in Windows either.

GigAHerZ wrote:

Intel486dx33 wrote:

RAM was expensive back in 1993. 1mb. Of ram use to costs $100 […]
Show full quote

GigAHerZ wrote:

4GB of RAM!? 😜

RAM was expensive back in 1993.
1mb. Of ram use to costs $100

I don’t know the manufacture date of that 286 but I am sure ram was expensive back then.

Okay? What are you saying?

$400,000 is a very affordable and common price for a 286

rmay635703 wrote:

$400,000 is a very affordable and common price for a 286

The thread had 4GB in heading (now fixed), you can still see it in posts' headings...

I never put less than 8 GB of RAM in my 286's, even back in the day I would drop $1,000,000,000 on RAM just like that.

4 MB? Pfffft.