berk98 wrote on 2023-08-01, 04:42:

Hi everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I bought this motherboard on the cheap because it was filthy. It cleaned up al […]
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Hi everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I bought this motherboard on the cheap because it was filthy. It cleaned up alright, and seems to work!

• Manufactured by TP Enterprise (Technology Power Enterprise, maybe?)
• Came with a 386 @ 25MHz
• Chip dates suggest this was manufactured in late 1989
• Socketed DS1287 chip. No battery leakage here 😁
• No real chipset that I can see, just a VL82C100 (DMA + interrupts + counters)
• POST string is DINT-1294-022589-K8
• VERY rudimentary CMOS setup

front.jpg
back.jpg
boot.jpg
cmos_setup.jpg

But I can't find any information on this board or the manufacturer. And I'm curious about a few things:

1. Jumper settings. I see W1 through W9, plus four positions on SW1.
2. Buttons and LEDs. The headers above the SIMM slots appear to be a likely candidate.
3. That extra-long ISA slot. Presumably it's a RAM upgrade slot, but I figured that's what the 30-pin SIMMS are for.

Interestingly, it posts without any SIMMs installed at all. Perhaps that's common, but it was a surprise to me 😁

Does anyone have any info or insights on this? Photos are attached. BIOS dump is also attached.
Mystery_386_BIOS_Dump.zip

Thanks!

Welcome to Vogons 😀

No info as such, but am guessing its from TPE - https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?manufac … 89&showImages=1 - so any info, pics you have can be added there.

64KB of onboard ram 😮
Looks like its an early 386 design still manufactured in 1994, this couldnt be economical in any way considering 1992-93 saw flood of extremely cost optimized Am386 + one chip chipset mini baby AT boards like

http://www.amoretro.de/2012/02/unichip-367c-u … otherboard.html https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dataexpert-367c
http://www.amoretro.de/2012/06/pc-chips-m326- … otherboard.html https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m326-v3.1
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-ak3
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/bek-tronic-bek-3708
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/bek-tronic-bek-3739
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/biostar-mb-1333ucg
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/cx-technology-in-s3d
etc etc

I tried looking up the bios ident string, but nobody seems to have mfg ID 1294 in their tables.

The bios release code says it was released on feb 25, 2009, which seems... odd. Especially for a 386.

Blurry image is blurry, thats an 8, not a 0. Woops.

Feb 25, 1989.

Still no hit on mfg code 1294

Seeing as this is clearly a rare bird, dumping this bios for posterity / community stewardship might be advisable?

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2023-08-01, 05:52:

No info as such, but am guessing its from TPE - https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?manufac … 89&showImages=1 - so any info, pics you have can be added there.

another board with same form factor from TPE https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/old-1 … manual.3545923/
same bios DINT- string https://imgur.com/a/M6W0397 and https://books.google.pl/books?id=2jT7iztEdKcC … %20mips&f=false "Technology Power Enterprise" ad in PC Mag 24 Apr 1990
and same characteristic elongated proprietary ISA like slot for most likely memory expansion card. My guess would be both your and this one from tomshardware thread went into same Server chassis.
"DE-M" and "E108357" seem to be their board house standard marking, lots of other boards/simms have same print.

Made in USA stickers, VLSI chipset + tons of PALs. This might have been manufactured in USA.