First post, by bjwil1991
- Rank
- l33t
2 days ago, I tested a PC Chips M326 v5.2 motherboard to see if it works, but before I did all that, I removed the NiCd battery, even though it didn't leak, it's better to remove those before it leaks and the board in of itself is in pristine condition. I then cut the trace for the charging circuit for the positive terminal and soldered a wire to the external battery header that connects to another diode, then soldered a battery holder that I made using a CR2032 battery holder and a single AA battery in a broken GameBoy DMG-01 bottom chassis.
I then tested it yesterday after I installed a Trident TVGA8900 ISA video card and the WinBond ISA I/O card, 4MB SIMM-30 RAM from the other build, then the Cyrix FasMath 8D387-40GP FPU, but I didn't know how to install said FPU as I've never installed one before in a different orientation and got it to install correctly this time and the FPU is working since the board has circuit protection in case a CPU or FPU was inserted incorrectly or wrong, so that was a big sigh of relief.
Had to change the jumper to enable the FPU (NPU according to the diagram I found online).
On the positive side, the board is 100% functional, but as for booting from the HDD, I didn't install the network card and the BIOS ROM as I didn't want to screw up the file system again as the Promise EIDE Pro was used with the HDD after changing it from the WinBond so that I can have 1 less card installed in the system.
For a $50 board in pristine condition, that is amazing. Unfortunately, it's all ISA slots and 1 XT 8-bit slot, but that's no big deal. The biggest pro of the board is the jumper setting for changing between 33MHz and 40MHz and the clock speed is on an IC chip, which is pretty cool for a 386DX/486DLC board. It has 128KB L2 cache installed and has more options in the BIOS, such as setting the RAM and Cache timings, which is nice in of itself to get programs to run faster or slower, but can sometimes be really buggy in a couple of cases.
However, yesterday when I swapped boards around, the system decides to lock up everywhere: BIOS, OS on either diskette or hard drive, and so on. I do not see any resource conflicts anywhere and the only way to get the system to power on and act up again and the only one way to get it to unfreeze would be removing the batteries in the battery holder and waiting about an hour to get the settings to delete and setup again.
Not sure where to go at this point and the board itself is in pristine condition, so it could be either a short or something else, but I don't see or hear any crackling or Puff the Magic Dragon smoke.
Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser
