Just found this strange 386 at local "thrashman's" yard. He gave it to me for free 😀 Dirty as hell and without PSU, but i like idea of 386 with onboard VGA, IDE, I/O and 72-pin SIMM.

Wolfus wrote on 2019-12-28, 12:28:

Just found this strange 386 at local "thrashman's" yard. He gave it to me for free 😀 Dirty as hell and without PSU, but i like idea of 386 with onboard VGA, IDE, I/O and 72-pin SIMM.

That case reminds me a lot of the Elonex boxes I used in college back in the early/mid 90's. Esp the power switch on the right there next to the floppy drives, that's pretty much identical.

Power switch is funny. It has wire draw rod on it which leads to place where should be PSU, so the real power switch is on the PSU and that is a problem.

It's a bit like on some PS/2s machines, the switch on the outside if the case actually pulled another switch on the PSU itself.

This week some of may collegues at work started to throw out(for recycling) some old equipment used for industrial automation and I found this little SBC.
It's an Advantech PCA-6145B rev C2 with an Intel 486 DX4 @ 100 MHz. Unfortunately I don't know how to test it to see if it's working. I've read here a vogons, that it's not working by simply inserting it on a mobo's ISA slot, I would need a special board for it, an ISA backplane or I could use a dead motherboard but without any chips on it... Still need to document a little more to find a solution, if you have at hand some info on how to run these SBCs, would appreciate to share it...

Thanks!

bearking wrote on 2020-01-09, 21:39:

This week some of may collegues at work started to throw out(for recycling) some old equipment used for industrial automation and I found this little SBC.
It's an Advantech PCA-6145B rev C2 with an Intel 486 DX4 @ 100 MHz. Unfortunately I don't know how to test it to see if it's working. I've read here a vogons, that it's not working by simply inserting it on a mobo's ISA slot, I would need a special board for it, an ISA backplane or I could use a dead motherboard but without any chips on it... Still need to document a little more to find a solution, if you have at hand some info on how to run these SBCs, would appreciate to share it...

Thanks!

I suggest a new post with the title "How do I test a 386 SBC". ("new" as in "create a new thread", rather than post to an existing one)

It is a nice find, though. PC/104 and card edge connector.

gdjacobs wrote on 2020-01-10, 16:32:

It is a nice find, though. PC/104 and card edge connector.

Yes, thanks! I think I also saw a PC/104 card with PCMCIA header/connector on it. I didn't know what was it at that moment, but for sure I will get it...
Maybe I could find a sound card for it.

bearking wrote on 2020-01-10, 20:44:

gdjacobs wrote on 2020-01-10, 16:32:

It is a nice find, though. PC/104 and card edge connector.

Yes, thanks! I think I also saw a PC/104 card with PCMCIA header/connector on it. I didn't know what was it at that moment, but for sure I will get it...
Maybe I could find a sound card for it.

PC/104 sound cards are pretty rare and they are priced accordingly when they pop up.

Much, much, much easier and cheaper to get an ISA backplane which you will need anyway.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-10, 20:57:

...
PC/104 sound cards are pretty rare and they are priced accordingly when they pop up.

Much, much, much easier and cheaper to get an ISA backplane which you will need anyway.

I was thinking about a PCMCIA sound card for that PC/104 board, but yes, it could be pricey.

So, if I could find an ISA backplane with more than one ISA slot, than I could insert the SBC on one slot and a sound card(or any other ISA card) on a second slot and the SBC should "see"/use the sound card, just like that? That would be nice...
I'm pretty sure I could find an ISA backplane at my workplace, for sure this SBC came off of a blackplane... I guess.

Thanks!

Yep, that's how it works. I don't see any L2 cache on that SBC. Is there anything on the back?

Anyway, you can get backplanes with up to 20 slots. The smaller backplanes I am pretty sure can mount in a regular case. The larger ones use a large rackmount case.

There are also special cases for the super small backplanes... the ones that have 3-4 slots total. Pretty sure they would mount in a regular case as well though.

The 5-pin connector on the bottom edge near the bracket is to hook up the wire that goes to the backplane for the keyboard connector. The PS/2 connector may be for mouse only. One of my SBCs has jumpers to configure it for either mouse or keyboard.

On the back side it has five of these chips: IS61C256AH-12J. I guess these are the cache chips.
I found the manual of the board, have to read it.
Thanks a lot for the info!

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-10, 21:31:

Anyway, you can get backplanes with up to 20 slots.

Needless to say, this is generally not useful. The ISA bus doesn't have enough I/O resources to support, say, 10 sound cards. DAQ cards use tricks to work around this limitation.

bearking wrote on 2020-01-10, 23:21:

On the back side it has five of these chips: IS61C256AH-12J. I guess these are the cache chips.
I found the manual of the board, have to read it.
Thanks a lot for the info!

That's a great SBC, especially for free! You can run it by plugging it into a PC / molex floppy adapter. See here for how I had mine set up at one point: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
That was running off of a hard drive power supply that outputs 12v/5v to a molex connector, which I put the floppy power adapter onto.

The keyboard and mouse run through the same PS/2 port using a splitter. You can use any generic PS/2 splitter for that rather than the advantech one.
My solution for the ISA support is to either use an ISA riser like in the picture, or make an ISA riser that really just links the lines of 2 ISA ports - I've been meaning to design one up for ages but still haven't got around to it.
It worked pretty well with sound when I tried it with a Yamaha YMF715 card

Hey, that's great news! I'll give it a try today.
Thanks a lot!

Thermalwrong wrote on 2020-01-11, 01:15:

That's a great SBC, especially for free! You can run it by plugging it into a PC / molex floppy adapter. See here for how I had mine set up at one point: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
That was running off of a hard drive power supply that outputs 12v/5v to a molex connector, which I put the floppy power adapter onto.

I've set it up like you said, but directly to an AT power supply using the floppy connector. To the PS/2 port I've hooked up a keyboard and added also a floppy drive for booting and do some basic tests. So the board is working fine, the RAM stick it's a 32Mb one, 128 kb L2 cache. The battery seems to be ok, the date was right, only a couple of hours difference for the clock.
So the board is working fine, this could be a first step for a custom 486 mini PC build...
The only thing it's not working, and probably that's why this board was replaced in the first place, is the M-Systems DiskOnChip 2000 48Mb SSD. The BIOS is not detecting it at all, maybe this is normal, but a few times I managed to access it form DOS booted from the floppy. It has Windows 95 installed, all the drivers for the onboard stuff and some industrial apps. I tried to start Windows but scandisk found an error on the partition table and the system froze. fdisk can see the partition, but sometimes can't read the volume label. I didn't try to re-partition the drive, I'll try first to copy the drivers, if I can.
All in all, it's a nice find, I'm glad it's working! I'll try to recover that SSD, it would be nice to run a 486 system with a "period correct" SSD 😀

Thanks for the help!

A guy from Russia made a project with one of these industrial PCs where he mounted it inside a 5.25" bay of his main PC and used a KVM switch to actually have 2-in-1 computer. Times have changed though, I think it was back in the days when Core2 was hot and new, so it was a lot easier to build that kind of setup.

http://sannata.org/konkurs/2011/kt1111.shtml

you can still buy those disk on chip modules ^^ I got some for a few bucks especially for cases like these.

RacoonRider wrote on 2020-01-21, 18:47:

A guy from Russia made a project with one of these industrial PCs where he mounted it inside a 5.25" bay of his main PC and used a KVM switch to actually have 2-in-1 computer. Times have changed though, I think it was back in the days when Core2 was hot and new, so it was a lot easier to build that kind of setup.

http://sannata.org/konkurs/2011/kt1111.shtml

Hey, that's a really nice idea! Have to save that link...

imi wrote on 2020-01-21, 19:44:

you can still buy those disk on chip modules ^^ I got some for a few bucks especially for cases like these.

Yes, I saw on ebay... Anyway, the guys from my workplace - from where I got the SBC in the first place - said, they have a few spare units they will not use. So I'm covered. 😀