I know that my 486 dx40 can't play anything at all really. crashes with 3d aps. seems rock solid with everything else. I blame all the crappy parts it has.

How much memory were budget systems rocking back then? 4 MB?

Doom needs 4MB so probably in that 4-8mb range. Think of a Doom-motivated upgrade (disaster) scenario 😀

I built one in '96 for $20 out of the junk boxes under the tables at computer fairs, everything a buck or two. Was a pine technology VLB board, LIF, 5V only, stuck a DX33 in it, used VLB i/o card, actually the $1 one turned out to be "too good" had 16550 UARTs on, so swapped that for the one in my main rig with the lame 16450s. Think it was a chips and technology ISA VGA card, HDD was shatty, lots of bad sectors partitioned out, and another 3/4 height 3.5 40MB that was slow as molasses. Don't think I bothered with sound. Anyway it was my b!tch box for trying out slackware on and other experiments. Funny thing was, it ran faster than this machine a guy called Jay had, who was in the EE course with a buddy of mine... He spent $200 on this ex "high end CAD workstation" 2nd hand 486, with an original AT type desktop case you normally only see on 286es and a few 386, and it must have been a '91 or something, DX33, EISA motherboard with weird long slot extensions with discrete chip memory expansion boards that gave him 8MB but about 13 wait states because it was so slow, don't think the board had L2 either, 1MB on a VGA card and that thing was full length too to get the MB in 32 or so chips. It also had a weitek co-pro, only one I've ever seen, but pretty useless for anything but autocad. Anyway, he needed 2 levels of border to play doom deathmatch on it and not get killed pretty much instantly.

Seen some short, all ISA boards with a SX soldered on, they can't be all that zippy. There's someone around here with that U5S board, which unfortunately doesn't show off the U5S to great advantage.

There's some big ole VGA cards around full height nearly with 512MB on and 100ns RAM that aren't terribly swift, they'd be pedestrian in a 386 though. Thinking western digital for some reason, think I had one with an edge connector feature connector and 9 and 15 pin outputs.

leileilol wrote:

Doom needs 4MB so probably in that 4-8mb range. Think of a Doom-motivated upgrade (disaster) scenario 😀

386 motherboard with 64kb of L2 cache and a 40MHz 486DLC stuck to it - 512k OAK technology video card, ISA I/O card, ISA opti chipset sound card, 4MB of ram and a 360GB conner HDD. No CD-ROM. It has to be the slowest 486 machine I've ever seen. I bought it for the case, not knowing what was inside the thing - but here's the most interesting bit - the motherboard has a 386 and a 486 socket - so the original owner (or the person who upgraded it) could have bought a 33MHz DX.... but for some reason he went for the 40MHz DLC... perhaps he tough it would be faster since it's clocket 7MHz higher... who knows.

I got the thing, looked inside, sorted it out a bit an powered it on. The HDD was dead (clank of death) and the case and PSU had a few rust spots - it's been obviously left outside in the elements for a while. Battery had leaked, and I cleaned up the acid with vinegar an contact cleaner. It worked for a while. I did manage to install a larger 540MB HDD, and got dos running on it. Doom is barely playable, and duke 3d is a slideshow. Descent won't even start, even tough I swapped the 4x1MB memory modules for 2x4MB ones. Changing the wait states in BIOS results in the machine hanging on post. Oh, the motherboard has an opti chipset.

The machine ran for about 2 days, and on the third, the motherboard blew up when I powered it on - it seems the corrosion damage was more severe then I originally tought - several traces leading from the AT power connector were corroded and "thinned" - and that's where the board blew out. Kind of a shame, It's the first mainboard with both sockets I've ever seen.

I have pictures of it if anyone is interested - it's the only mainboard I've seen with socket for both 486 and 386 chips.

My first PC (from 1993) was pretty much that. It was a generic clone featuring:

- ISA-only motherboard, probably an unbranded abomination
- Soldered 486SX-40 (I think from AMD) with no CPU upgrade capabilities
- 4MB of RAM (30-pin SIMM slots only, of course)
- 8-bit OAK VGA with 256K of RAM 😒
- No sound card or CD-ROM drive

Later on I added a Sound Blaster Pro 2 and a 4x Acer CD-ROM drive.

Doom required a few memory management tricks to start with only 4MB, especially considering I knew little about computers at the time. But even though it ran it was completely unplayable, a frustrating slideshow, and SVGA only games such as SimCity 2000 didn't even work due to video memory being < 512KB.

At least I was able to play graphic adventures and older games, I think a slightly better video card and 4 more megs of RAM would have helped a great deal with resource hungry games, but memory in particular was really expensive, at least where I live... I remember 4MB going for more than USD 200 at the time.

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My 486 is a DX2 66MHz, with 32MB of RAM, a 512k ISA video card, Linksys LNE2000T ISA 10Mbps ethernet NIC, SoundBlaster Vibra16 CT4170, with a dying 1GB HDD, rocking Windows for Workgroups. No CDROM drive because the BIOS doesn't recognize anything but hard drives, but I don't really want to install a controller card just to be able to use CDs with it. I bought it on eBay for about a hundred bucks, plus a mint for shipping. I also have a 33MHz 486 tower and a 60MHz Pentium tower that are identical on the outside, so I'll use those for study.

My first computer is to my left, an AMD K6-2 300, resurrected from spending a almost two decades in an open cardboard box in the basement. I'll be forever bitter that I got it when I was 20, and not a 386 when I was 10.

Reminder that I put "486s" in "quotes". (i.e. not actually 486y 486s, which there seems to be more than enough anecdotes about here)

gosh how could we have all missed that, anecdote removed

If you are to be time period correct, I believe the budget "486"-ish computer would be an LPX semi-proprietary branded thing, like with a couple of ISA slots and the rest on-board. Of course not that exciting, probably sx-25, opti chipset yadi-yadi-ya...

I guess you aim to do a DIY build anno 1993 on a budget, possibly re-using as much as you can. I wonder which of the two approaches would give most bang-for-the-bucks here?

My setup, while not budget for 1994, is certainly budget for now, since everything in the system was scoured from one of my boxes of random ISA cards and old hard drives acquired from a failed computer repair business. Buying anything better online starts approaching $50 per part. Budget in 1993 or so would have been using a 286 or 386 with pirated DOS and other software, and pirated Windows 3, in the case of a 386.

Oh right.... you'd probably be better off finding the "486" upgrade chip first, there was 286 versions as as well as 386 versions and a 386 PLCC packaged one. The manufacturers I remember using them were Zenith Data Systems and IBM, some of their late 386 ranges had a "486" option.

Although I'd say the cheapest thing in '93 that gave you "486" performance was one of those mini AMD 386sx40 ISA boards, it pretty much matched a 486sx25

TheMobRules wrote:

Doom required a few memory management tricks to start with only 4MB, especially considering I knew little about computers at the time.

There was some boards around, thankfully few, that were right bastards for Doom or getting linux to boot, they insisted on grabbing some of the UMA for their own purposes, BIOS caching maybe. Anyway, no matter what you did you were always a few kilobytes short of a full 4096 available. I think they'd usually display 3968 on boot.

My box in those days had slightly better specs but I still used to play Doom in F5 low-res mode for the speed bump.