I think it's going to be easy to find a keyboard controller. Any chip from 286/386 boards should work. On the other hand, most 286 boards I've seen use the AMI bios. I have a 12MHz suntac also board, which was hard to use in the beginning, as it used 48 chips for a total of 1MB, and some of them were faulty. It would give me a parity error all the time. I changed the bios chips, with a couple of others I had from a broken board(headland chipset iirc) and it worked fine. But it was also AMI bios, only much newer.

I find the 286 BIOSes to be pretty interchangeable. Though most of my swaps have been on boards that used discrete logic.

Is it better to build a 386 SX computer instead of building a 286 computer? Because 386 stuff is a little bit easier to find..
I dont like the thing that more memory on 286 is just wastless because of that `brain dead 286 chip`

I have already a 386-40mhz build over here, but i want a machine thats more slower like a 286 12-16mhz..

In my opinion, anything above 1MB is useless on a 286. A 386sx is going to be a little faster than a 286. But it's going to be easy to build(most boards use simms, and the cpu runs a lot cooler).

finding the bios for a board of that age, its probably going to be harder than find than aliens on the moon. You would have better luck writing a whole new bios from scratch. I'm not saying the stars can't align and hell freeze over and you find it. I'm saying winning the lotto is a more likely.

building a 386 is a LOT more economically feasible, not to mention just plain easier to build. However if your heart is set, I would recommend scrapping the board you have and looking to score a complete old system from someone local. I've been known to show up at "free computer recycle days" with a sign saying I pay money for old systems. I'd usually have at least one or two candidates. Although they stopped me from doing that. I'm sure people in the netherlands dont have sticks up their asses like they do here in the states...

One 286 Suntac BIOS set (odd+even) here (2suw001.zip): http://chukaev.ru54.com/bios.htm

iulianv wrote:

One 286 Suntac BIOS set (odd+even) here (2suw001.zip): http://chukaev.ru54.com/bios.htm

Can i use that bios for any 286 board with Suntac chipset? Or does it have any limitations on it?

Markk wrote:

In my opinion, anything above 1MB is useless on a 286. A 386sx is going to be a little faster than a 286. But it's going to be easy to build(most boards use simms, and the cpu runs a lot cooler).

Yeah i know, i red this two on donutkings 286 system page.. He said that all off the protected mode software requires a 80386 processors..

My main concern is that i have a NEC V20 XT system, i like it alot and iam not doing it away or so, but for some games its just to slow.. When i use it with a 80386 -40mhz system, then i have got i problem that some of the games are to speedy,.. So my guess is that is probably better when iam using a 286 - 12, 16mhz for it... And i like it a lot when i have:

An XT, 80286, 80386, 80486, pentium 95, pentium II, High end win98 system with Athlon XP 2600+

Its different when i dont have got a 286 system, instead of a 386 SX system..

Markk wrote:

In my opinion, anything above 1MB is useless on a 286. A 386sx is going to be a little faster than a 286. But it's going to be easy to build(most boards use simms, and the cpu runs a lot cooler).

Simms or dips arent a really problem here.. I have got a spare DIP chips here that i have backuped all ready..
But simms are really easier to install comparing to dips.. And its handy when you have a manual or information sheet about the board you want to use dips. Simms you could really easy trying out..

Could a EMS board have benefit over the 1MB that the 286 computer can use mainly? Or is it just for loading windows 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.11 up?

Software has to be explicitly written to support EMS. Some games do (X-Wing is one immediately comes to mind) but many of these won't run very well on a 286 anyway.

If your games/software don't use EMS then about the only thing its good for is a RAM disk.

So you installed an EMS board in you 286 just for as RAMdisk?

Is it possible to use a 386 SX processor in a 386 DX motherboard?

Not normally. I've seen a few boards that support both, but they are rare. Why would you want to do that anyway?

Robin4 wrote:

So you installed an EMS board in you 286 just for as RAMdisk?

I mainly just did that for the sake of it. Very few games that I played on the 286 used EMS.

Some 286 motherboard chipsets have support for UMB and EMS, these are quite useful as you can use the normally 'wasted' 384k space between 640k-1024k area to load drivers that would normally reduce your base memory. My HT12 chipset is one such example, but there are others.

With my 4mb 286, I use some of the 384k area to load drivers, and the rest to load the 4Dos command interpreter (a much nicer 'shell' - tab completion, colour coding, command history etc). That still leaves me with 3mb of XMS (or EMS, depending on how I want it configured) and around 600k of base memory.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Not normally. I've seen a few boards that support both, but they are rare. Why would you want to do that anyway?

Because i already have two 386 board laying over here.. Then i could just use those instead of buying a new one..

Having gone through a similar exercise with the "Super Tandy," I can tell you that a large number of real-mode games, from 1990 onward, make use of (and in quite a few cases, require) EMS for graphics/sound caching and support. Sierra's SCI1+ games, MicroProse's adventures, and quite a few Lucasarts titles fall into this category. Because of the limited CPU, EMS can be particularly useful on a 286, where a number of these games might be unplayable otherwise.

Some 286 motherboard chipsets have support for UMB and EMS, these are quite useful as you can use the normally 'wasted' 384k space between 640k-1024k area to load drivers that would normally reduce your base memory
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Is this also possible for my NEC V20 XT build?? I want indeed load those drivers on the other side of the unused memory.. And would it possble to use an memory board en use that memory to load those drivers on..

Besides iam going furter on the 286 system.. I looks the finding a 386 SX board without a soldered processor would be to hard i guess.. Dont want to use a 386 SX- 25-40 mhz processor for the 286 build that i want, because that 386 SX would be to fast in my opinion.

I already bought 2 new EMS boards..
One is the bocaram AT iam trying out.. The other is a Everex EV-159 (think this could be a 3000 deluxe one that also can be set to 8-bit data bus.. So i think its possible to use it in my NEC V20 XT build..

Robin4 wrote:

Some 286 motherboard chipsets have support for UMB and EMS, these are quite useful as you can use the normally 'wasted' 384k space between 640k-1024k area to load drivers that would normally reduce your base memory
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Is this also possible for my NEC V20 XT build?? I want indeed load those drivers on the other side of the unused memory.. And would it possble to use an memory board en use that memory to load those drivers on..

Unfortunately it all depends on the chipset of the motherboard - with an XT style board it may be early enough that those features are not available. You'll need to look at the main logic chips on the motherboard (e.g. Headland, Chips and Technologies, LSI etc) and try and track down any drivers on the old msdos ftp sites.

I have learned from this that if you using an award version, you also need a award keyboard bios..
And when using an AMI bios you need to use a Intel keyboard bios or an AMI keyboard bios..

Award keyboard bioses dont accepts calls from AMI bioses. So you cant use the keyboard in any way..

In my opinion the AMI older bioses are more advanced then award bioses..

I hope some could help me with a Suntac 286 AMI bios instead of a Award one.. Because i only have one award keyboard bios available.

megatron-uk wrote:

Some 286 motherboard chipsets have support for UMB and EMS, these are quite useful as you can use the normally 'wasted' 384k space between 640k-1024k area to load drivers that would normally reduce your base memory. My HT12 chipset is one such example, but there are others.

With my 4mb 286, I use some of the 384k area to load drivers, and the rest to load the 4Dos command interpreter (a much nicer 'shell' - tab completion, colour coding, command history etc). That still leaves me with 3mb of XMS (or EMS, depending on how I want it configured) and around 600k of base memory.

Which memory manager are you using to load drivers into Upper Memory and where can I get it?
I also have the HT12 chipset in my 286 computer and want to upload some device drivers 😀

I also have a HT12 286, but I have not found a UMB driver. HT12MM.SYS will get you hardware EMS. There are other drivers that use the EMS window to give you 64kB of UMB instead, but you lose EMS in that case (so e.g. no digital audio in Monster Bash, which requires EMS.)

As far as I could find, you can't get more than 64kB of UMB with the HT12 chipset, and you get no UMB if you want hardware EMS.

I believe one memory manager provides 64kB UMB then takes 16kB of that to provide "software EMS", leaving you with 48kB of UMB and EMS support, however it's software EMS which is implemented by copying memory so it's a bit slow.