First post, by maksymke
Hello fellow neckbeard tinkerers!
I'm trying to bring back some life to this 386 motherboard with an AMD 386DX-25 onboard. Unfortunately there are some issues and the biggest mystery so far (but not a straight issue per se) is that I have no idea what make and model this motherboard might be...
Photos below, there are some numbers on it, but these bring me nowhere, except some faint ebay listings.
Trying to make it run is another story. Old battery has been replaced and there is not that much leak damage on the board. Some cirquits around the battery may look bad, but I gave it a proper wash and there are no broken paths. Tested the cirquit and sure enough all suspicious connections are just fine.
Powered up, there is no image. BIOS beeps one long and 8 short beeps - which in AmiBios is for an absent graphics adapter. I'm using Trident TVGA9000i-3 for testing this board (it's the only ISA graphics card that I own at this moment) that is fully operational in other computers.
I tried putting it in every slot on this motherboard, even turning it to an 8-bit mode back and forward - no result. Same 1 long-8 short beeps.
A while back I also got older version of this Trident, but it gave the same results.
Motherboard itself seems pretty responsive - if taken out RAM, it doesn't beep at all.
It responds to both RESET and TURBO as well: reset... sure it does the reset thing as expected and with the turbo switched on (slowed down) the 1-8 error beeps are longer and slower. So the CPU and the power supply are also working fine.
Is there anything I could do to this hardware to make it run? Maybe someone has the same board? Maybe you could see something I missed?
Cheers!