oeuvre wrote:

Definitely sell them, you can get some pennies for them.

idk if this is sarcasm or not, but regardless of how much money you can get, selling them to someone more or less guarantees they will go to someone who appreciates the hardware and saves it from going to waste

selling stuff on this forum isn't allowed but VCF has a marketplace

Yes, I have the manual. Looked around but could not find the ref disk. It's too late now, the deed is done.

Out of those three, for usage outside of gaming, if I had to pick one, it'd be the 386.

I'd sell the XT and 286 to people who appreciate them, then use that money to fund hopping the 386 up (Max out RAM, bigger 8GB HDD with DDO, Math Coprocessor or Weitek, SVGA card, decent sound, maybe Ethernet card - if not already there).

Personally, for something used for useful productivity, I'd go with a 486 DX4-100 as that's my favorite era ...as that's what I use personally for vintage-pc internet/pcbCAD/DAW stuff,, but a 386 DX-25 can be quite a kicking machine too if tuned right with the right hardware behind it.

creepingnet wrote:

Out of those three, for usage outside of gaming, if I had to pick one, it'd be the 386.

I'd sell the XT and 286 to people who appreciate them, then use that money to fund hopping the 386 up (Max out RAM, bigger 8GB HDD with DDO, Math Coprocessor or Weitek, SVGA card, decent sound, maybe Ethernet card - if not already there).

That's pretty much what I'll be doing. The 386/25 is already maxed out; 8MB ram, 387, SVGA, etc. It has a front-panel switch for 25, 12, or 8MHz operation, and cache can be disabled in the BIOS setup. That was the clincher for me. It's easy to make it behave like a previous-gen machine if one wants/needs that. The EPROM burner I was using required it to be throttled back to 12MHz.

Precaud and I talked about this as a matter of coincidence and hindsight, but I am now the owner of the 286 motherboard. I saw this thread, saw a neat(or should I say NEAT chipset 😜) motherboard with the manual on eBay a few days later, and bought it. In a message attached to the purchase I said the manual sealed the deal for me, he replied, I mentioned VOGONS, and then the obvious became very clear rather quickly. Super obvious it was the same board in retrospect.

So I've got this in a case with two 5.25" bays and two 3.5" bays. I'm thinking of doing a CD-ROM drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and a 3.5" Zip drive. Obviously I'll need an IO controller and at least a sound card with a CD-ROM connector for all three of the IDE devices. For the 5.25" floppy, will I be gimping the machine if I use a 360k drive? I somewhat enjoy tossing PC booters into machines over hard drive conversions now and then. At the very least I'd like to see if Wizardry runs a bit comfortably faster. I'm sure I can always test it and see if there's little to no utility in doing so.

Personally, I would pick the 386 myself. You have the most upgrade capabilities, it can run Windows 3.x decently well, and with a bit more $$$ down the hole you can probably get by with Windows 95, even.

Most games I see people playing on vintage systems lately are the early FPS games (Wolfenstein 3D, DooM, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake I / II, etc), and most of those won't run at all on a 286 (or very poorly at that), let alone an 8088. Even my 20MHz 286 struggles to pull off Lotus III.

A big part of it is which machine you want to emulate. The 286 is mostly out of the running, it's very much between the 8088 and 386 in every sense. Everything the 286 can do, a 386 can do better, and the 8088 can run all that speed sensitive software some people might care about. The 286 can't.

I'd say it comes down to whether or not you need more than 640K for your software. If that's going to be an issue, you'll have to have the 386.

Oh, and the 386 will obviously be much faster for usage outside of gaming. That much should be plainly obvious. The 16-bit bus will also help you dramatically in tracking down expansion cards for things like SVGA and ethernet, and any you do find will be drastically faster than the 8088.

P.S. How much are you looking to get for the machines you're getting rid of, whichever they may be? I'd be interested in any of them.

FAMICOMASTER wrote:

Everything the 286 can do, a 386 can do better, and the 8088 can run all that speed sensitive software some people might care about. The 286 can't.

In my research I found there are a handful of use cases where the target system is a 286 at 12 MHz. Ultima VI is one. The VOGONS Wiki recommends not surpassing a 386 at 25 MHz, but as you can see in Root42's video that opening animations cycle way too fast at that speed. You can also find a patch to correct speaker sounds here, which indicates that surpassing the speed of a 286 breaks sound effects. If your other DOS machines can slow down to the right speed then you're in good shape. Of course, a 386 that can de-turbo to 8 MHz would likely play most of these games fine. Can't ignore the counterpoints 😀

I've also read mentions that Deathtrack starts to run fast beyond a 12 MHz 286. In fact, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the games that could utilize all the fun sound options on FMonster would be right at home on a 286.

Obviously, a 286 isn't a necessity as far as DOS gaming goes, but I've managed to find some target cases and therefore another excuse for another machine. I've also read that installing a Make-It 486 upgrade won't bump the speed too much or even decrease benchmark results until the cache is activated, but that's adding a bizarre amount of complexity in an attempt to hit certain benchmarks only for oddball cases. Then again, I've spent half my evening citing multiple sites with technical information regarding sound card conflicts and the other half utilizing a laserdisc player using S-video through a RetroTINK-2X for HDMI, then through an HDMI to VGA converter, so I could watch Urotsukidoji subtitled and uncensored. At this point the next logical step is a 286 for a tiny handful of speed sensitive games with unique sound device support.

MrSmiley381 wrote:

Precaud and I talked about this as a matter of coincidence and hindsight, but I am now the owner of the 286 motherboard.

MrSmiley is a great guy, and it pleased me very much that the 286 board, which carried me through quite a large period of time (PC-wise), is in good and appreciative hands.

I do wish it had sold a few days later. I hadn't finished testing all of my MFM drives, and had assumed that I could simply move the controller into the 386 and finish it there. But the 386 is not recognizing that controller. So, a 386 can't do everything that a 286 can do... is it ok if I borrow the 286 for a few days? 🤣

For the 5.25" floppy, will I be gimping the machine if I use a 360k drive?

If all you need to do is read 360 disks, the 1.2MB drives will do that well. Writing them, not so well...

FAMICOMASTER wrote:

P.S. How much are you looking to get for the machines you're getting rid of, whichever they may be? I'd be interested
in any of them.

Thanks for your interest, but they're both sold.

I'd say it comes down to whether or not you need more than 640K for your software. If that's going to be an issue, you'll have to have the 386.

That was one of the clinchers for me. The programming environment I worked in most (HTBasic) requires a 386 memory manager (Phar Lap). Otherwise, the 286 would have been fine.