A 486 you have? Your soul the dark side now possess 😀

BTW,

you put the 28 pin dips to the "back end" of the 32 pin socket - but the oriention is the same as if you were to put in a 32 pin module. The indent on the module must match the indent on the socket.

The tag module is the "lookup library" of the cache. In most cases the cache will not operate without it. You want to have a speedy TAG RAM. Matching or faster than the cache modules.

512 kb is good for 64 MB ram, write-back scheme or 128 MB, write-thru mode
1024 kb you need for 128 MB write-back mode

The ES1868-F is a good alternative to OPL3. Not perfect but one of the better ones. Warlords 2 test might reveal some distortion on the high freqs. Very easy setup, no TSRs. Sort of a beginners' card.

Excellent! This machine will not go above 64mb ram so 512k cache sounds just right. Hopefully the modules are all good..

So far the ESS audio is good enough but I haven't gotten far with testing. I really need to work on conventional memory now - with the stock AST boot files it's LOW at 545k. Rem'ing all but Mouse it climbs to 581 which is still too low. That's what's making me think the Phar Lap extender is drawing down ram, but I have no experience with it so don't know. My normal memory setup doesn't seem to be working this time but it's early yet and I'm not familiar with ESS and CL drivers much either..

The dX2 66 was a legendary machine, for years it was listed in the system requirements... ok maybe in the minimum requirements which is the wrong side of the scale but it was also the family’s first and only PC till 98 so It will always be special.
It’s still sitting in the garage at home and have all the original parts accept the original 8Mb ram (Its final upgrade was 64MB) and have full intentions of bringing it back to life when next we are reunited. Over in the UK I came across a £3 DX2/66 this time with PCI, Upgraded to a DX4 120 after all those years of wishing for a DX4 100 back in the day and now can’t dream of leaving it behind.
Thing is they are surplus, All my games are new enough to run on my P3 without issues or better, I can use “fancy new” stuff like ATX power, 3d cards, Windows 9x, etc but that’s the point right? I can do the same in dosbox or I can play with the hardware and this was the last generation when all the CPU’s manufactures chips still worked on the same board.
So it may not be the most practical retro PC in terms of gaming but it’s great fun for building different systems…he says as my HDD just failed last week

Yes, the DX2-66...a legend. Being manufactured for 13! years. It is the VW Beetle of CPUs 😀

Ooh i thought the am5x86 was one of the most produced 486's to compete with early intel pentium.

Btw we want to see a pic of the motherboard in general, elite group.

chinny22 wrote:

…he says as my HDD just failed last week

Must be the season!- I lost three in the last 9-10 months - a 2.1 WD [from my first bought new rig in 1997], a 10gb Seagate and a 100gb Maxtor workhorse in operation since about 2000... At this point all but 1 of my ide's are now in service in various retro boxes so I can't afford more "disappoint" just yet. What I need is to stumble on a box of old drives in a dumpster...

The 486 is more about understanding pre-Pentium, but will also be home to games that get wobbly with faster cpu's. The next step up in the stable is a P233 which is a bit 'hot' for some on the early W9x era stuff - even getting the transition fades in Myst to work nice needs a much slower setup. A P90/100 would probably be ideal for these, but I'm excited about the step into a new architecture.

Soon as I get pix uploaded to one of those sites I plan on posting a few - the other rigs too.

Anyone with pointers on the "Phar Lap Dos Extender"?

Yes, cache makes a huge difference. The turbo switch on my DX2/66 only disables cache, it doesn't alter clock speed. Still, it's like night and day with cache off. Try playing Doom now, and then play it with cache. You'll see. Even increasing my cache from 128k to 256k made a noticable difference in frame rates.

As for hard disks, cheap CF cards are about the same capacity you'd see from period hard disks. They work great with an IDE adaptor.

Hatta wrote:

As for hard disks, cheap CF cards are about the same capacity you'd see from period hard disks. They work great with an IDE adaptor.

Yes, I see now. With a rear plate type, CFs can be easily swapped between machines...

For now I use a central ide hard drive that I backup all the retro rigs with: via USB2/3 if I can, removable caddy otherwise. Partitions for FAT16/FAT32/NTFS.

I have a lot of 1gb and 2gb dom disk on module, anyone interested? They are not fast but get the job done on older machines.

Btw what happened to the broken hdd's? No spinup or bad sectors no detection?

Ahh the VW's another one of my loves. Mum has had one since new (74) that's even longer then she's known my father! Been all round Oz, taught 2 sons to drive and still going strong. (but that's for another forum)

I've just ordered 2 backplate mounted CF card readers. Got a 800MB HDD for the system. Thinking Ill use the CF card for games drive partly for ease of backup like you say plus after loading all the games not much writing will be done accept the occasional savegame.

Think this strange thing of having almost 2 warm weeks in London in not a well ventilated AT case pushed my drive over the edge.

2.5GB = Click{s} of death: it's trying to spin/making loud clicking noises.

10gb = not sure: isn't detected by any FDISK boot disk, or OS, yet partition magic sees it but won't perform any operations on it. It initially went down in a major OS crash and I don't think it's mechanical problem.

100gb = A silent death: not detected on any system I've plugged it into for some time.

Keeping them just in case I've missed something obvious or get lucky with a tweak.

One of the great things about using a CF card on your 486, is that you can pull the card, put it in a USB CF reader, and mount the volume with DOSBOX. You can play the exact same game at home and on the go with no copying save files back and forth. Really nice for long form RPGs and 4x games.

CF cards are indeed awesome! I used that rear slot adapter for a while as well, very convenient. I have a K6-3 based Time-Machine and a lot of CD based games which quickly fills up 2GB so I now use a PCI SATA controller card and a 320GB notebook drive with a single 30GB FAT32 partition.

To fill it I just eject the HDD from the front and put it into a HDD dock on the desktop. This works very well.

This 486 will remain fairly primitive I think. I just finished a fresh re-install of W95a - AST was kind enough to leave the cab files - and that has cleared up the Phar Lap Dos Extender/conventional memory issue for the moment.

I transfered the cannibalized video ram modules to the motherboard. It turns out that the ones already soldered are 256k each [x2 = 512k stock], and the ones I picked up were likewise 256k each [not 512 as I'd hoped], so I *think* I have 1meg total video ram. Unfortunately I don't see a way of confirming this - no video ram listed at POST for instance. One clue is that I still can't set the monitor at 1024 yet, even with 256 colors and I thought the Cirrus Logic chip could deliver that with 1M. But maybe it needs 2..
[EDIT: just realized I'm using the stock W95 Cirrus driver - I'll try one of the more recent 'real' drivers on my CD..]

I also found that with no autoexec.bat and an empty config.sys mem reports a robust 605k, and dos games that run through a windows doxbox go to it fine - mouse/audio etc.. But boot to dos suffers without necessary drivers loading. I quickly tested the previous boot files and ESS/Cirrus Logic dos drivers, but mem fell to 565k. Evidently this is were I need to focus.

But it's progress. Tested 2 games: Aces Of The Pacific now plays at a reasonable speed with realistic roll rates. But I can feel Aces Over Europe could use a little more horepower. So somewhere between these two lies this 486's performance dividing line.

Waiting for the cache modules...

It's worth spending some time with UMBINFO to figure out exactly what memory ranges EMM386 can use. There are good instructions here. You can also use Jemmex to replace himem.sys and emm386 which takes less conventional memory. Replacing command.com with 4dos will save even more conventional memory.

Once you get those cache modules, both Aces games will run like butter.

Hatta wrote:

It's worth spending some time with UMBINFO to figure out exactly what memory ranges EMM386 can use. There are good instructions here. You can also use Jemmex to replace himem.sys and emm386 which takes less conventional memory. Replacing command.com with 4dos will save even more conventional memory.

Once you get those cache modules, both Aces games will run like butter.

Thanks for the link - just what I need. This is new ground for me - I am pretty proficient configuring conventional memory on Win/Dos Pentium era systems but this is new territory for me now. I'm looking forward to playing around with the cache to see how it's done and what it really does.

Re the Aces games, I'm actually satisfied with Aces Of The Pacific for the first time in a long while since the 486 rig runs the simulation at a more reasonable speed.

Much more game testing lies ahead...

Ah ha! the cache modules just arrived [from the Ukraine]. Tonight I'll take a stab at installing them and configuring the jumpers - but with only cryptic jumper inscriptions on the motherboard to go by so this has 'trial and error' written all over it.

The drive caddy also came in. I think I'll park the 3.3gb drive in the caddy - this will free up space above the motherboard cache area, necessitating only the removal of the floppy to have full access.

I'll try to get pictures going to.

Are there no model numbers on the motherboard? Failing that, I've had good luck with google and stason.org. Something like "site:stason.org inurl:motherboards AST 486 -VESA -PCI -PS/2" can help narrow down the options so you can match your board to the images they have.

Edit: I just re-read your first post. Is this your motherboard: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/E/EL … 10-8810A-V.html

If so, the cache jumper configuration is listed there. Looks like a pretty sweet board. I never liked boards with riser cards, but a PS/2 mouse port and 128mb of RAM are nice options.

Mine is version 3.4 as printed on the board, 3.6 during post. The layout differs quite a bit from the v1.1 model posted on stason.org, and I'm not sure yet if it will help. The jumpers numbers don't appear to correspond either. I discovered the site myself a few weeks ago when researching. It was the most comprehensive catalog I found but was missing my particular board.

The board has a cache jumper diagram printed on it. I *think* I can figure it out. If I can upload a close-up pic the 486 crowd would probably know exactly what's going on. It seems I need to set the jumpers in a particular way to achieve 512k with all 8 slots filled + TAG.