A week ago I was lucky enough to find (and find out it worked) the cheapest 386 motherboard on eBay, which might also happen to be the basis for my short-lived Packard Bell Legend 316SX from 1992. It was a board that fried when I plugged in a joystick with the power on. Which has never happened with any other motherboard or soundcard for that matter.

This particular 386SX-20 board shipped with 2MB of memory. Unsatisfied with that miniscule amount, I attempted to max it out at 16MB, but my board was having nothing of my 4MB 3-chip SIMMs. Memory tests would always fail at exactly 8MB. Two 4MB and two 2MB modules would show 4MB total, not 10MB. So, I would have to settle for 4MB of RAM.

Next it was time to turn to the video section. Unsatisfied with the weak Oak GPU and with a Diamond Speedstar 64 in hand, I installed it in an ISA slot. Sadly, after trying everything, it looks like it's dead. The first video card I ever bought with my own money back in 1994, which would give the machine the GPU horsepower it needed, seems to be a brick. I have the next worst thing on the way, the INFAMOUS (to me) Trident 8900C, probably the least-overpriced ISA VGA card.

The IDE section would be a mess for the most part. A 13.6GB hard drive with the CHS values set to 1023/16/63 would work, accepting the capacity limitations. I only needed 502MB anyways and that was the lowest capacity drive I had. As for the IDE section, there were two glaring issues: Disabling BIOS ROM shadowing would prevent the machine from booting, and slowing down the machine with CTRL-ALT-Minus would also cause any attempt of disk access to freeze the machine. Oh, and if there was no spinning hard disk connected, the floppy drive would NOT work. I figured that out when I tried my CF to IDE adapter. So I had an idea... I would pull out a SIIG EIDE ISA adapter, install it in the machine after disabling the onboard IDE and FDD controllers, and much to my dismay, the machine would freeze any time a disk write was attempted. That reminded me of Adrian Black's YouTube video on when he had issues with disk access on his 286.

So in summary so far:
Stuck with 4MB of RAM
BIOS ROM shadowing ON allows the IDE controller to work
Floppy drive doesn't work unless an IDE drive is found
Machine doesn't POST if an 80-conductor IDE cable is connected to the board
SIIG EIDE card blocks disk writes
Data transfer rates are at 1.5MB per second max, likely CPU limited
Video ROM shadowing has no effect
Made my head spin a lot. Fortunately this has PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports so there's that.