derSammler wrote:

Re-attached the display, added a CF card and installed DOS 6.22 - works! 😀

AMAZING! 😁

What's special about it? Is it faster or rarer compared to the other 486 CPUs?

It's very fast, does not require a heatsink, and is very low-power. Also, it was forbidden to sell it in the USA. 😉

The BIOS reports the CPU as running with 100 MHz, even though it only runs at 33 MHz.

liqmat wrote:

Can we please get the sexy Hollywood wide shot with the system on?

Yes, but probably not today.

After a few weeks with no time to even look at my vintage hardware, I managed to get a little bit in this evening. Quick benchmark of my Alaris Leopard (IBM486SLC2-66) board, specifically VGA performance of VLB vs ISA. This CPU only has a 16b external bus, so wanted to see how VLB performed.

3DMark2
UMC 85C418F 32.6
S3 928 VLB 31.4
CL 5424 VLB 31.4
WDC 90C31A ISA 25.2
Tseng ET4000AX ISA 25.2
UMC 85C408F ISA 23.3
Tseng ET3000AX ISA 15.6

Those ISA scores are identical to what I benched on my 5x86 VLB system, so clearly that's the bus being a bottleneck. The VLB scores - though better - are significantly lower, about 3/4 of what I benched on IIRC (can't find my figures now 😮 ). Of course the CPU is also running at 3/4 of the clock speed of the 5x86, but something tells me as this is DOS they were both just bottlenecking on the VLB.

Does once again show how nice the UMC 85C418F is for DOS, right up there with the ARK1000VL. It also has an interesting character set, looks slightly more like CGA/MDA/EGA than most VGA cards.

Now I still haven't though what to do with this little beauty of a system. So many options 😜

Found this the other day. Never seen one of'em before!
..of course, as far as i am concerned...im just happy there is a huge visual aide on the back bottom right corner in the form of a big fat red tick, boldly declaring that this game is "virus free"...cause i wouldn't put into any one of my old my computer's unless this symbol was on it. 😒

My little ode to the 5th & 6th generation of x86 is now hanging in its place of honor (next to my only other framed "retro computing" item.)

...Now that this is up, I'm DEFINITELY gonna have to take it down and re-do it. I don't particularly like my mounting system (which is causing it to hang tilted forward like that) and I'm not overly happy with the matting I made. It looks OK in the photo, but I can do better. 😀 Still, good enough for now.

Had to replace the FDD on my ThinkPad 380D again (would throw a general read error and track 0 bad when attempting to do a dir A: or format A: command).

I've been considering getting a gamepad or a joystick with microswitches for DOS arcade games.

Anybody have any idea if this Competition Pro gameport version is any good? I've never owned one of them clicky joysticks.

Reinstalling Windows 98 after 1000 errors with installing games. Don't ever install unofficial SP3 for windows 98, just don't do it if you have normal PII/PIII computer. You don;t need this and it will only give you more errors and bad performance in games...

I normally install the DST fix from the SP3 software and nothing else.

liqmat wrote:

Can we please get the sexy Hollywood wide shot with the system on?

The first one got a bit blurry...

Still have to turn the battery into an empty dummy. It's not that trivial actually, as the weight of the battery is important. Without the weight of the battery, the notebook easily tips over. So I have to fill the empty battery case with something heavy.

Very nice sir.

Fixed an issue with a 286 board. Started tearing down an Antec 480w supply from 2003 with some low voltages, has a few bad caps from visual inspection. Hmmm.... so where can I get 2200uF 16v caps that are only 8mm wide (they are 8mm x 25mm) ? Checked around and 10mm are the smallest in diameter but with 6 in a group that extra width will not fit.

Took out my Pentium MMX @ 3.5x75MHz and installed a 10GB 7200rpm Maxtor HDD.
The previously used CF card became a secondary slave together with CD drive.

Then installed Windows 98SE and spent most of the night figuring out, how to enable DMA on HDD. But as it seems, if you use any higher UDMA mode than UDMA-66, the DMA checkbox in device manager is not going to stay ticked, while the DMA really seems to be enabled. (Working currently at UDMA-100) The CD drive works at UDMA-33, and the DMA checkbox stays ticked.

Any absolutely reliable way to check the current active transfer mode under windows 98? As far as i tried different tools from Everest to some weird random things, everything showed HDD running in UDMA-100 mode. Any hints are appreciated. 😀

GigAHerZ wrote:

Took out my Pentium MMX @ 3.5x75MHz and installed a 10GB 7200rpm Maxtor HDD. The previously used CF card became a secondary slav […]
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Took out my Pentium MMX @ 3.5x75MHz and installed a 10GB 7200rpm Maxtor HDD.
The previously used CF card became a secondary slave together with CD drive.

Then installed Windows 98SE and spent most of the night figuring out, how to enable DMA on HDD. But as it seems, if you use any higher UDMA mode than UDMA-66, the DMA checkbox in device manager is not going to stay ticked, while the DMA really seems to be enabled. (Working currently at UDMA-100) The CD drive works at UDMA-33, and the DMA checkbox stays ticked.

Any absolutely reliable way to check the current active transfer mode under windows 98? As far as i tried different tools from Everest to some weird random things, everything showed HDD running in UDMA-100 mode. Any hints are appreciated. 😀

Just use HDD testing software. Try HDTach to test burst speeds and Threadmark to test CPU utilization.

@appiah4, i tried some hdd benchmarking software too. Cached reads were well over 20MB/s, which would imply, it's in DMA mode. (PIO goes, on best case, up to 16.6MB/s, AFAIK)

I quickly didn't find HDTach that would be compatible with Win98, but i'll try to find one again later.

20+MB/s is definitely UDMA.

Seems like just another quirk of Windows 9x, that wasted maybe 3-4 hours of my time to truly understand. (Oh, how many times i reinstalled and searched for all kinds of different IDE controller drivers and stuff like that...)

I replaced the motherboard of my Athlon64 system yet again and reverted to the K8V Deluxe (K8T800) yet again. Now I am having a dilemma; do I stick to keeping it as a Windows XP box or do I make it a dual boot Windows 98/XP box, and add in a second PCI card for SB Emulation (Likely a Terratec 128i ESS Solo-1).. I can't decide and it's driving me nuts. Alternatively I could just set up DosBox on the PC and use that for DOS games but I have no idea how well it would run an a Socket 754 Athlon 3700+..

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

kolderman wrote:

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

I already have two for DOS (386SX-25 DOS 5.0 and 486SX40 DOS 6.22), three for Windows 9x (P133 Win95, K6-2/500 Win98 and PIII-1200 WinMe) so this was meant to be the XP PC originally.. Maybe I should stick to that plan. I may still install a modernish Linux distro on it though..)