First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
I've had the idea of restoring a clone 286 in the back of my mind for a while but they ain't easy to find around these parts. OEM stuff is a little more common perhaps but not nearly as interesting I don’t think, so when this locally made AMD 286 16MHz showed up on the 'bays, I snagged it.
It's complete and original; each component has the dealer’s date of assembly sticker on it and they all match - 31/7/1991. The seller reported that the machine did POST, but was giving a "replace CMOS battery" error and wouldn’t boot. He went on to say that he couldn't find the battery, which of course was because it's hidden in a Dallas RTC. The Dallas chip is a blessing and a curse because the alternative would have been a barrel battery, which would probably have leaked and killed the motherboard long ago. But the RTC on this thing isn’t socketed, so bypassing the flat battery – which is encased in the chip – requires some modding.
Here it is as it arrived, looking a little worse for wear. The whole front of the case was bent out of shape:
First things first I needed to make sure that I could successfully mod the RTC, if not then the project was over before it started. This is a pretty well documented mod (http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm) but I was dreading it all the same, particularly because the chip was soldered to the board. There is a modern replacement for this chip, but I read that it might not be compatible with the 286, so I decided to just have a go at modding the original chip in situ - hopefully not wrecking the whole board in the process. I masked off the area, melted away the top layer of plastic with a soldering iron, and then carefully cut into the epoxy with a small, sharpened screwdriver. It was slow going but easy enough, and then it was just a matter of disconnecting the old battery and soldering on a button battery holder. To my relief it worked first time:
Next up was the warped case. I happened to have another of the same one in the shed, so it was volunteered to donate its internal metal work. Donor on the left, recipient on the right:
Does anyone else braid their case wiring? No? Just me?
Motherboard in:
These PSU’s with the side switch are getting hard to find and the last 2 I’ve seen had bad caps, so I was very happy with this one. It’s very heavy, and clean as a bean inside.
Coming together:
The HDD is a very nice Seagate ST-351 A/X 40MB (http://redhill.net.au/d/16.php). Like most of the old drives I come across it was complete with OS and games, in this case DOS 5, Windows 3.0, and a handful of classic games like Prince of Persia, Outrun, Stunts, Cal Games II, etc. It was using XTree Gold for a menu system, and Word Perfect 5.1 was also thrown into the deal + a whole lot of the original owner’s documents – privacy wasn’t a big concern in the early 90’s I guess. I’ll clean up a few things but leave it as-is for the most part.
Drives in and looking very handsome if I do say so myself. I really like how original this thing is but of course I’m tempted to upgrade it a bit. It currently has 640K + 384K “Extended RAM”, so I might look into some more memory at some stage. This board doesn’t take SIMMS, but rather those strange looking SIP RAM modules. All banks are currently empty, so I have some room to move if I can find them. The VGA card is an “AHEAD” branded thing and works fine, but I’m tempted to swap in a Tseng ET3000 card I’ve had stashed away. And finally there’s the issue of sound - to keep it period correct I should leave it as PC speaker only, but I just can’t hack it anymore. I might be forced to corrupt this machine’s simple beauty with a Sound Blaster 2.0, which wasn’t available until late ’91 but is close to being period correct.
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
