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Story about C386-33 and me

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First post, by McBierle

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Hi, i wanted to share this little story of a 386 motherboard (and me).
A few months ago i got this 386 motherboard with a ram-extender card. I diddn't find any info on stason or th99. If anyone has more on this one please tell me.

I started my retrolife around 1,5y ago and have some 386 motherboards (among other). This motherboard was somehow special because i never have seen a board without ram sockets.

Sadly i forgot to make pics in its original state. The cache sockets, 2 isa slots and most parts in the topleft corner showed corrosion, also some traces of the top layer. First i cleaned it the usual way but i decided it wouldn't be enough, also it wouldn't post.
So as someone once said i decided to remove everything from that corner and replace it with new parts, not because it is easy but because it is hard... 😁

Here you see it in mid removing. And the corroded top layer of the traces.
Corroded-Top-Layer.jpg

Hooray i removed everything.
Everythin-gone.jpg

Cleaning the corrosion from the traces.
After-Cleaning.jpg

Midway resoldering. Three extra sockets for logic chips, sadly no room under the keyboard bios.
Resoldering.jpg

Aaaand finished.
Finished.jpg

I braced myself for the case that it still wouldn't life. First power on i was the first time lucky that i wear glases, because one tantalum exploded and hit my glases. After replacing the corpse of that tantalum i was lucky the second time because my wife haddn't her mobile at hand because the board posted and i did a probably stupid looking dance...

Some pics of the setup:
Setup.jpg
POST.jpg
CMOS.jpg
Cachechk.jpg
NSSI.jpg

Sooo now i have this board with 16mb ram and an XCMOS i never had before and don't know whta to do with. Who needed 16mb ram back then. What is this xcmos, new things to learn....

Backgroundinfo:
As i stated earlier i started this "retrolife" roughly 1,5y ago. Before i just had some floppy bigbox games i had from back then. To whomever asks i always say maybe it's my midlife crisis, but i wanted to remake the first pc i had. Well now i have tons of "old" stuff. I have a soldering iron i never did anything with before. And i'm still working on my ongoing special project which involves working with wood, also new to me.
It all takes loads of time, which i asume you know from your own experience. Between my family and work everything takes sooooo long.

Disclaimer: Sorry for bad grammar and stuff. Firstly I'm not a native speaker and secondly i had some drinks 😀

Greetings!

Reply 3 of 7, by Caluser2000

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Well done. You can't have enough ram.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 4 of 7, by pipmastah

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Dusting off this topic 😀

That's a very nice rebuild indeed, McBierle! A friend of mine gave me an old big tower with a similar but slightly older C386 mainboard. This one is the 25Mhz flavour 😉
Mine is also completely destroyed by the evil Varta and there are a few parts missing like the CPU, the cache controller and the 32-bit external memorycard.
This memorycard seems to be unobtainium so I was wondering what type/brand this unit is... Looks to be an "ISA130" card but I have no idea what search term to put in the old googly box to find even a single picture of one.. The only picture I found was your giant card with 16 SIMM sockets but I have no idea what brand/model number/FCC ID this thing has. Could you help me with that? Very much appreciated! 😀

Reply 5 of 7, by ChrisXF

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My 386 board has a similar bonkers '32 bit RAM slot':

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/D/D … BACK-CACHE.html

I also have no idea what's meant to go in there, or why it would be useful when the board has SIMM space for the full compliment of RAM possible? Maybe to allow you to upgrade without spending on new RAM?

Reply 6 of 7, by pipmastah

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McBierle wrote on 2019-06-01, 21:05:

Hi, i wanted to share this little story of a 386 motherboard (and me).

Hi McBierle,

Could you please post some pictures of the 32-bit memory expansion card that came with your C386 mainboard? I would appreciate this very much as I got one of these mainboard from a friend.. Mine is a C386-25 and it does POST but it lacks the memory board which seems unobtainium rendering this thing of beauty entirely useless as far as I know.. I've been searching for weeks for boards like these but the only info I could find is your post.. I wonder if that memory card is somehow standardized or has a type / brand badge on it.. It's also unclear who manufactured these mainboards. Mine only has a label "Celem" on it which appears to be a reseller from Belgium (I'm in the Netherlands). It also has no FCC id so it's next to impossible to determine what this alien board even is 😉 The only thing printed on the board itself is "C386-25" and "Made in Taiwan R.O.C." which is about as generic and useful as "This is a thing" 😉
Thanks in advance for any extra pictures of this memory board you may want to share if you're still active here on Vogons!

Cheers!

Reply 7 of 7, by rasz_pl

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+1 please post pictures of the memory card back and front.

Its interesting to see its not just SIMM slots but has logic chips onboard, thankfully they all look standard 74 series and not custom programmed PAL/GAL so reproduction is entirely doable.

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

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