radiounix wrote on 2020-12-23, 15:19:

286s get little love, but these late 286s are very important in my opinion

There are lots of things that were very important at one time but have since been superseded and are no longer especially useful.

OSkar000 wrote on 2020-12-22, 18:26:

And its a line of computers that I grew up with so its much nostalgia involved.

If there's nostalgia involved, then isn't it up to you to decide what software makes you feel nostalgic?

I'll shut up now.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-12-24, 01:23:

There are lots of things that were very important at one time but have since been superseded and are no longer especially useful […]
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radiounix wrote on 2020-12-23, 15:19:

286s get little love, but these late 286s are very important in my opinion

There are lots of things that were very important at one time but have since been superseded and are no longer especially useful.

OSkar000 wrote on 2020-12-22, 18:26:

And its a line of computers that I grew up with so its much nostalgia involved.

If there's nostalgia involved, then isn't it up to you to decide what software makes you feel nostalgic?

I'll shut up now.

All of this hardware is superseded, plainly obsolete. Some of it is just more fashionably obsolete because it can play Doom at a cinematic framerate. Other stuff is terribly unfashionable, really anything before a 386DX/40. Just a question of aesthetic experience you're after, which on an early 286 or XT machine, is primitive enough to be humbling . I think 286s get no respect because on one end, stuff from the mid 80s, they properly are kitted with Hercules or real EGA graphics, 84 key keyboards, stepper MFM drives and a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and on the later end, the discount store 286/12s and stuff don't really feel much different experientially from a faster and more compatible 386SX machine of the same year. One is basically a killer XT-style machine, the other a poor man's 386SX.

Personally, I would like to have a proper mid 80s 286 screamer with real EGA graphics and a stepper drive. It's not practical, but I think it's cool -- despite what people say about them being rare, they couldn't have been terribly so-- every back pages computer dealer had them advertised for under $2000 complete with color monitor and hard disk, and every parts dealer advertised an array of EGA cards and monitors.

386SXs from the same year and speed as late 286s were SLOWER running Window 3.x in 386 Enhanced mode or Standard Mode than a 286 running Windows 3.x in Standard mode.

As I posted earlier the early 386SXs were a con job by the computer industry.

Just saying..

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-24, 05:51:

386SXs from the same year and speed as late 286s were SLOWER running Window 3.x in 386 Enhanced mode or Standard Mode than a 286 running Windows 3.x in Standard mode.

As I posted earlier the early 386SXs were a con job by the computer industry.

Just saying..

You are completely discounting the fact that 386SX VGA systems at the time of their release were MUCH LESS expensive than fast 286 VGA systems were ate their time of release. They were not con jobs, they were perfectly acceptable gateways to home computing for their time.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-24, 09:07:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-24, 05:51:

386SXs from the same year and speed as late 286s were SLOWER running Window 3.x in 386 Enhanced mode or Standard Mode than a 286 running Windows 3.x in Standard mode.

As I posted earlier the early 386SXs were a con job by the computer industry.

Just saying..

You are completely discounting the fact that 386SX VGA systems at the time of their release were MUCH LESS expensive than fast 286 VGA systems were ate their time of release.

Why ,pray tell, do you think that was? They only had 2meg of ram. Hardly good enough to run anything useful on Windows 3.x. And that is why they were produced to push 🤣. Consumers around here were just hanging on to there older systems then moved on to 486s. Which is exactly what did.

386SX was cheap because you could basically take your 286 motherboard design and then put in a 386SX cpu and everything pretty much magically worked with very little adjustment to the motherboard's or chipset's design...

Heh, there was already this thread - A 286 computer, is it totally useless?

Grzyb wrote on 2020-12-24, 22:50:

Heh, there was already this thread - A 286 computer, is it totally useless?

And as mute as it was back then....

Damn good info in it of what a 286 is capable of. The processor is still used in embedded modern aircraft control systems.

A 386sx was a pretty decent system in 1990, pretty fast really compared to the XTs and Apple IIs people would be coming from. They might have quickly become obsolete in Windows workloads as software grew more complex, but even a 2MB one could run more than one Windows program in a reasonable fashion back in the 1990/91 time frame when they were sold as budget machines. Prior to that, before 3.0 came out and took the world by storm, the mags were screaming recommendations to buy 32-bit to future proof. So there’s that too. Even simple DOS programs often used i386 instructions by the mid 90s, and text-based OS-2 was supposed to be our computing salvation.

If you weren’t yet sold on Windows, they could readily be had with Hercules graphics and 1Mb of RAM. Ready to upgrade to Windows when you had the money and need, and really fast running one’s existing DOS software like Wordperfect.

From what I recall, 386SX at some point became "386 for the price of 286", and that's why late 286 PCs were selling so poorly.
12 and 16 MHz 286 machines are ubiquitous, but 20 and 25 MHz ones are pretty rare.

The irony of the whole story was that the original 386 already had the possibility to interface in 16+24-Bit mode.

So the 386SX essentially was a crippled version of that with fewer pins.
It's as much as a technological archivement as the 8088 was in comparison to the 8086.
Maybe even less so.

From a logical point of view, making the 386SX was a waste of resources.
A 386/386DX would have had worked just as good on a 286 chipset. And to make it cheap, Intel could instead just have had recommended the plastic package version torwards makers of lower priced "386SX" mainboards.
But that's marketing, I suppose, which I have little knowledge of. 😅

Edit: Sorry for my poor English. The 386SX mainboards were not bad at all, of course.
They were based on mature, intelligent 286 chipsets.

Got a few hours over this week and spent some time with the 286.

A test was made with Dos 5.0 and Windows 3.0 and most things seemed to work ok...

So I'm currently installing Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1 😀

Tried out mTCP to make it easier to copy files to and from it and it saved me a lot of time compared to my old network setup that I have used for Dos earlier.

More games:
Jill of the Jungle
MinerVGA
Stunts
LHX Attack Chopper
Maniac Mansion
Prince of Persia
AlleyCat
Avoid the Noid

Applications/Programming:
Visual Basic 1.0 (or 2.0, 3.0)
Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 (predecessor of Borland Pascal 7 Windows)
Delphi 1.0
dBase Fast
Klick&Play
Profan 5.0b

Applications:
WinGIF
MOD4WIN 1.x
Autodesk Animation Player for Windows (AAWIN/AAPLAY)
WinFract
Video for Windows 1.0

Games/DOS:
In Search of Dr. Riptide
Monuments of Mars
Jetpack
Digger
Frederick Pohl's Gateway (Freeware release)
Telekommando 2 (German)
Mission Supernova (German)

Games/Win:
Warpath!
WinTrek
Jiji
SimCity
(and many, many more)
Boxedwine (Wine on multiple platforms)

Edit: Some emulators running on Windows 3.1 may also be 286 compatible.
Emulation on MS Windows 3.1x ?