Realised that I haven't posted here in a while, but found some stuff I'm excited about. Time for a show and tell 🤣
Intel Advanced/ATX motherboard aka Thor. AFAIK it's the first ATX motherboard ever. Has onboard S3 Trio64V+ chip, Crystal 4232+Yamaha OPL3 — basically a full system on a board (sans modem/NIC). The only unpopulated sockets are COAST (my motherboard has 256KB onboard L2 cache) and VRM (I don't know what it's for. The fastest CPU in the manual is P1-166).
I prefer ATX over AT and I am a fan of Intel boards, so to me this is a perfect alternative to late 486 boards. It has an option to disable cache with Ctrl+Alt+"-" shortcut (kind of turbo, gives mid 386 speeds), so it's a great platform for a very late DOS machine. Right now I'm messing with Windows 3.11, but I want to test my new SB32 and I might get my hands on PowerVR PCX2 soon, so I might switch to original Windows 95 and then this build will be like a true granddaddy of modern PCs: 25 years old, but pretty much exactly the same as any modern computer 😀
Another Intel board, a TC430HX. Has onboard Yamaha YMF chip. I would love to find a fully loaded version with S3 and OPL4. But as it stands it's the last MMX-capable Intel board to have earlier AMIBIOS with "turbo" functionality as 430TX boards have a different BIOS.
The board actually came with a full Socket 7 system, but the case was in terrible condition. I've spent a day cleaning off all the dust, dirt and rust only to realise the plastic parts got pretty brittle. It was a machine made by "Vist" — probably the only Russian big-name company to adopt ATX Intel boards early on, but their ATX cases were abysmal. Unnecessarily complicated design where you always have to remove the front bezel to access anything, and the whole thing was held by plastic clips that break all the time.
I also have an Intel Batman (Socket 4 AT), an Advanced/ML (Marl, a cheap 430HX-based board without MMX support), a VS440FX (Socket 8 ATX) and an AP440FX (Socket 8 LPX). Guess I'll have to get rid of most of my 430TX Socket 7 AT boards as I can't imagine using them again — ATX is just that much convenient.
Creative SoundBlaster 32, CT3930. It's a weird beast — a Vibra-based AWE board with a dedicated OPL3 chip. Everything is set through jumpers which is nice, because I always stick like 2-3 soundcards in my machines. I am pretty excited about this card because AWE32 is my favourite wavetable card and I always wanted a model with OPL3. Also Vibras usually have pretty clean sound in my experience. The downside is buggy MPU401, but I'm not going to use this board with external MIDI. Also AFAIK Vibra can't control bass/treble in mixer the way normal AWE32 can, but that's okay too.
Too bad the card only shines under Windows 95 though. I can't imagine how people felt about AWE32 in 1994 when there was only Win3.11 and DOS. The musicians could of course load soundfonts under Windows, but it's impossible to run most games that way.
A socketed AMD 386DX40. I have a couple of PC-CHIPS M321 motherboards which I believe have a jumper to switch between 33 and 40MHz chips. Guess I can get rid of all my integrated AMD 386DX boards now 😀 Have to find an FPU for it though as all my chips are 25 or 33 MHz.
A Radeon 7200 32MB SDR. Not the most exciting card, but only cost me 1.5 bucks, so why not.
A SIS 315 AGP card. I know nothing about it, but it was also very cheap.
An Intel NIC to go with my Intel boards 😀 All my other NICs are 3COM, so I've thought this might be nice for a change. Don't think it's going to be noticeably better that a typical 3C905 though.
