Nice board, though I didn't realise Morse did boards beyond 286/386. I have seen Morse for 386 but not thought much of it.

That second socket is for a Weitek 4167, a form of FPU that maps memory differently than typical FPU's and are generally only used in RISC applications and lower level programming i.e. Unix and C etc.

386_junkie wrote:

Nice board, though I didn't realise Morse did boards beyond 286/386. I have seen Morse for 386 but not thought much of it.

That second socket is for a Weitek 4167, a form of FPU that maps memory differently than typical FPU's and are generally only used in RISC applications and lower level programming i.e. Unix and C etc.

Indeed it is very nice, it had so much dust that i had to take out a paint brush and now looks like brand new. I like it a lot. The battery is kind of green on one side, might have to be replaced. but i don´t know the model number of the board. I really doubt i can upgrade it to a DX2 cpu 🙁

I can't see the battery (off the page!) but I would take it off straight away... it'll eat the board alive and may cause permanent damage.

I don't see why a DX2 can't be used... both DX and DX2's are 5v CPU's... it should not be a problem.

A DX4 will not be possible however as this CPU runs off 3.3v. If you have an adapter to step down the voltage from 5v to 3.3v then it will be possible... but then you would ask if this is worthwhile on an ISA only board.

fount it!

MORSE P1

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/M/MO … INC-486-P1.html

can do
Processor
80486SX/80487SX/80486DX

Processor Speed
16/20/25/33MHz

ah well its nice extra to have, i wanted the case anyway. 😀

Sometimes the jumper configs online are not always correct or complete... it would not surprise me if the board did actually run with a DX2.

What case?... Did you post a picture?

The DX2 chips just run double the speed of the FSB.

They should work fine no problem I would think.

wow you just made me want to buy a dx2 chip to see if it works or not on this board.
the case is nothing fancy , i actually paid 2 dollars for everything

plastic turned yellowish, but i know that if you buy hydrogen peroxide (H202) solution and OxiClean. and leave it at the sun the white comes back

Pabloz wrote:

wow you just made me want to buy a dx2 chip to see if it works or not on this board.
the case is nothing fancy , i actually paid 2 dollars for everything

plastic turned yellowish, but i know that if you buy hydrogen peroxide (H202) solution and OxiClean. and leave it at the sun the white comes back

Hi, Pabloz! Do you still have that board? I found exactly the same board, but the BIOS chip is empty. I tried several BIOS for 486 I found around there, some of them works, but neither of them are capable of using SRAM cache, so it is very slow. Can you dump the BIOS chip and share it with me? Thank you!

If Pabloz can't I might be able to. I found 8 of these NOS, 7 of which worked (the battery juice demon had gotten the 8th); sold most, but still have one.

I'll see if I have time to read the BIOS this evening.

dionb wrote:

If Pabloz can't I might be able to. I found 8 of these NOS, 7 of which worked (the battery juice demon had gotten the 8th); sold most, but still have one.

I'll see if I have time to read the BIOS this evening.

That would be great! Thanks a lot.

Done:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … menustate=29,28

dionb wrote:

Done:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … menustate=29,28

Back to live again! One more board for the retro-computing colletion. Thanks for your help.

davidmorom wrote:

dionb wrote:

Done:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … menustate=29,28

Back to live again! One more board for the retro-computing colletion. Thanks for your help.

Great!

Out of interest: how did you confirm that the cache was working?

I just checked mine and it claimed cache was enabled, doesn't give any POST errors for bad cache - but cachechk doesn't find any (L1 or L2), and speedsys shows very poor results, indicating that cachechk is right about it not working...

I have 256kB 25ns Mosel SRAM L2 - and I've tried everything from the original, supported i486DX-33 (8k L1) to an AMD 5x86-PR75 (133MHz with 16k L1 - via a voltage interposer), but absolutely nothing gets cached.

dionb wrote:

I found 8 of these NOS, 7 of which worked (the battery juice demon had gotten the 8th); sold most, but still have one.

You wouldn't still happen to have the dead board, would you? I do board level trace repair, and am always looking for dead boards to revive!

dkarguth wrote:

dionb wrote:

I found 8 of these NOS, 7 of which worked (the battery juice demon had gotten the 8th); sold most, but still have one.

You wouldn't still happen to have the dead board, would you? I do board level trace repair, and am always looking for dead boards to revive!

That's a special kind of masochism. I think I still have it. Doesn't look too bad, but as soon as you power it on, it blows a tantalum cap. Replace the cap and it blows it straight again... if it's worth transatlantic shipping to you (EUR 24) you're welcome to it, and I can chuck in at least one more (386) board with bad battery damage too. PM me 😀

dionb wrote:

Great! […]
Show full quote

davidmorom wrote:

dionb wrote:

Done:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … menustate=29,28

Back to live again! One more board for the retro-computing colletion. Thanks for your help.

Great!

Out of interest: how did you confirm that the cache was working?

I just checked mine and it claimed cache was enabled, doesn't give any POST errors for bad cache - but cachechk doesn't find any (L1 or L2), and speedsys shows very poor results, indicating that cachechk is right about it not working...

I have 256kB 25ns Mosel SRAM L2 - and I've tried everything from the original, supported i486DX-33 (8k L1) to an AMD 5x86-PR75 (133MHz with 16k L1 - via a voltage interposer), but absolutely nothing gets cached.

Well, I don't really know if cache is working, I assumed it is just because POST prints the following:

Internal (486) cache controller enabled
External cache controller enabled
External cache size 256KB

With other BIOS images I tried before, POST just said Cache: 0KB. And everything was REALLY, REALLY slow. For example, in the BIOS setup, I could see the characters appearing on the screen almost one by one. But maybe this is not related with cache, and it is another side-effect of using the wrong BIOS.

Next week I'll do some deeper testing, to see if I can figure out something. One guess: maybe the turbo header has something to do in the behaviour of the cache? With it shorted is much faster than with it opened. Maybe this board disables cache when the trubo header is open?

dionb wrote:

dkarguth wrote:

dionb wrote:

I found 8 of these NOS, 7 of which worked (the battery juice demon had gotten the 8th); sold most, but still have one.

You wouldn't still happen to have the dead board, would you? I do board level trace repair, and am always looking for dead boards to revive!

That's a special kind of masochism. I think I still have it. Doesn't look too bad, but as soon as you power it on, it blows a tantalum cap. Replace the cap and it blows it straight again... if it's worth transatlantic shipping to you (EUR 24) you're welcome to it, and I can chuck in at least one more (386) board with bad battery damage too. PM me 😀

If dkarguth doesn't take advantage of your offer, I'm jumping right in. Same kind of masochism, I guess 😁

I just did some benchmarking, and it seems cache is working and performance is the expected for this processor. Cachechk only detects 256KB of L2 cache, but speedsys detects both of them, 8KB of L1 and 256KB of L2. The CPU benchmark result is between a 386DX at 40MHz and a 486DX2 at 50MHz, which I think is just correct for a 486DX at 33MHz.

I attach some captures of the results.

Check if you have BIOS setting for internal cache. Could be it's set to disabled, while at the same time external cache is enabled. Speedsys might be enabling L1 on it's own during the test.