sure you can find something else to work with. but with only 1mb ram and no hdd, and probably a 386sx, what can be done indeed seems rather limited.

That would make a great machine for playing real-mode DOS games that don't require any more RAM than the standard 1MB. Such as Commander Keen and all of the Keen mods (there are a LOT of them that are as good or better than the originals), and anything about the same time period or that came before. Sound card is optional, most games from that period had only PC speaker sound anyway. And PC speaker sounds kind of cool. But you can pick up a cheap Sound Blaster or compatible at eBay for ~$15. As for a hard drive, just use any old IDE drive and make a Maxtor MaxBlast floppy disk (or some other overlay utility) and install that on the hard drive, that will make it work with the old BIOS (probably, worked for me).

There's actually no way for me to attach a hdd to a 386n , there's no cable that will work for it.

Oh, my bad, sorry, at least you can put games like Keen on bootable floppies and run them 😐 That's what I would do if I didn't have a hard drive & cable for it.

Supposedly if I actually found a cable and ram compatible with the machine I could just barely run windows 3.11 or 95.

Which I think would be fun. I like pushing hardware to it's limits.

Well, 95 would be pretty dang slow on that. 3.1 would work though. Good for word processing basically. But if you can get a hard drive and ram then it makes a great low-end DOS gaming machine.

well i have plenty of drives it's finding a cable that will actually connect a drive to the 386n. Don't know why they made it so difficult , the floppy drive cable is normal why not the ide? 🤣

windows 2 should technically run on this right?

Yep, no problem though win2 was so crappy I don't know why you'd want it 🤣 other than for historical value of course.

Well I guess it would be the only gui that that machine could run. Or at least the only I can think of are there others?

Is it a Compaq Deskpro 386n ? I had a Deskpro 486! 😁
Should be possible to upgrade this machine to 16MB with cheap modules (isn't it using PS/2 SIMMs ?).
Yes, Win 3.1 will definitely run on that (in standard mode even with 1MB of RAM).
The processor is speedy enough but I'd strongly recommend to add a bit more of RAM for that.
For an extra boost, you can then load Smartdrive or enable 32Bit-Disk-Access (FastDisk).
To work properly, Win 3.1 needs to have enough contiguous memory.
I remember a lot of 286 machines where blamed to be utterly slow just because of the lack of RAM (most of them were limited to 1MB of DIL chips and had no sockets for SIPP/SIMM soldered in).
When I got my first 286 PC, my dad installed 4MB of SIMMs because of that.
And it was working quite well, played a lot of windows games back then (anyone remembering Warpath!, EmPipe or GnuChess ?).
Later I got a Compaq SLT 286 laptop and upgraded it to 4MB aswell, using those propitary memory modules. Again, Win 3.1 was running smoothly on this. 😀

Geoworks or GEM with FreeDOS might be more appropriate GUIs. One of the older versions of OS/2 would work if you could get the RAM up into the neighborhood of 2-4MB. Maybe 1.3 or 2.0? OS/2 was damn slow without enough RAM, though.

As far as what you can do with it, if you can't update the RAM at all, go to Mobygames and do a search for games supporting 1MB or less. There is lots of stuff that will run on 1MB or less. Probably a lot of the stuff that you'd want a 386 for you'd need more like 2 to 4MB though.
Last time I checked there were like 800 games that would run on 640k or less, I'm sure the 1MB numbers are double that.

Assuming this thing has at least a couple slots, a multi I/O board and an IDE to compact flash (or XTIDE with a compact flash card) might solve your hard disk problems.

snorg wrote:

Assuming this thing has at least a couple slots, a multi I/O board and an IDE to compact flash (or XTIDE with a compact flash card) might solve your hard disk problems.

I imagine to make a board like that work I would have to have a floppy disk to load the drivers for the card first so the machine can use it to boot?

Well, you could use an old SCSI controller aswell.
The better ones have a firmware onboard and need no drivers.
Or you could boot from floppy and use an external ZIP drive as a HDD replacement.
And there's always the the possibility to use your main PC as a hard disk.
You only need to have a serial cable (null modem) and a bit of software then.
Simply put a small driver on your boot floppy and run the other one on your main PC.
Then you can access all files on your main PC's hard disk (or start games from it).
If your main PC isn't running DOS or Win9x you can use a VM.

I've attached two such drivers (shareware).

Oh, and XTIDE has serial boot, too.
And in auto mode it detects you CF card without any setup required
(only the firmware has to be uploaded first).

Been digging through some info found on google... There should be a controller on the reiser card.
Anyway... The first link does not give any clue to what type of HDD-Drive it should be.
None the less, there is some part numbers at the 120mb location.

https://www.google.dk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc= … yZGy8vg&cad=rja

Looking at a picture from "Amoretro" you can clearly see the two ribbon cables.
(too big, so I posted as a link)

http://www.amoretro.de/ebay/2015/02/386n_3b.jpg

Is the Compaq Deskpro 386s/20n frome the same line ?
It seems to indeed use PS/2 SIMMs, but they have to be FPM (Fast Page Mode) SIMMs.
The cable could be the "Compaq Deskpro Ribbon Cable 118608-001A".
At least the floppy cable seems to be a "Compaq 105880-001".

There was a thread at linuxmisc about the right kind of memory.
http://www.linuxmisc.com/4-linux/eec6c3de13a2792d.htm

But really, the easiest way is to stick in a multi I/O card or an controller for AT-Bus drives (aka IDE, ATA-0)
and put an Disk on Module (DOM) on top of it. They're really cheap (128MB types for a few cents) and need no adapter (just a 2pin power cable).
Basically "XTIDE on the cheap".

I can't say if and what line, as there is no picture attached of the machine in question.
It is all based on the few information that I can dig out of what Emosun has posted.
Actually pretty much the same as on a lot of his posts. Asking + not providing any pictures.
So I really had hoped for some more information from him this time.

Ok, that's true. Thanks for the hi-res picture of the 386n internals!
Maybe the OP can check if that's the one he has (and tell the part number).
I had several Compaq machines. They're cool, but have a lot of proprietary stuff (including special drivers).
Which isn't bad, I think. Just cumbersome to repair. And the cases are often of similar design despite their different internals..
That beeing said, I guess he needs the diagnostic disks, aswell, to enter setup utility.
My newer Compaq, a P75, and my Contura 420C had a hidden diagnostics partition on the original fixed disk.
It totally looked like Win 3.x (I think it was custom version of it)!
Without those disks he could try to use one of these 512MB or 1GB flash disks (DOM, CF or SD).
They don't care for drive geometry as long as it doesn't exceed the total capacity.
SCSI or XTIDE have their own BIOS, so that's no problem there.

SCSI are nice in those old system's. (If you have a complete kit).
Most likely, the CF card solution is the best way to go.