Cobra42898 wrote on 2020-08-27, 13:45:
I meant to ask: is this win95 installation worth having? or should I wipe it out and start fresh?
or could I install win 3.11 also, and use both? HDD space may become a problem, though I have some smaller HDDs if I need it.
the win95 seems okay to navigate, though boot time seems long. shuts down fast though.
Win95 on a DX33 with sufficient RAM will itself run happily (I had to suffer Win95 on DX33 with 4MB as a student - that was another matter 😦 ), but a DX33 is hardly going to be able to run any demanding Win9x games, so I'd say unless you want to run Office and MS paint on this that DOS and Win3.1(1) would make more sense -and save HDD space.
As for cache and video, I'd say the exact opposite of chinny: VGA is simple, cache can be a headache.
Those chips are invariably 4Mb (512kB) SOJ DRAM chips, and can indeed be harvested from just about any PCI video card, so long as the latency (last digit after the dash on the chip) is at most equal to the existing chips. Given that the 864 was one of the first to use SOJ chips, pretty much anything else will be rated faster so work fine. You won't notice any difference in DOS (the current 1MB onboard is more than enough for any VESA mode actually used by games), but in Windows it will increase resolution and/or colour depth - now you are limited to 1024x768 with 8bit colour (256) or 800x600 with 16bit colour (65k). With 2MB you could do 1024x768 with 16b colour or 800x600 with 24b colour (16.7M). In both cases I'd recommend 16b colour as the sweet spot, looking much better than 8b, but getting higher resolution than 24b.
Cache on the other hand means figuring out what config the board wants and how to set jumpers accordingly... the specs indicate you need 15ns SRAM DIPs with 256kb (32kB) per chip, but doesn't list organization or pin count. That said, adding cache to a cacheless system will seriously improve performance, so this is very much a recommended upgrade.