Picking a 386 motherboard? \ VOGONS

Picking a 386 motherboard?

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First post, by jheronimus

Posted on 2017-07-18, 01:35

jheronimus Offline

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Hi, all

I've recently got my hands on Intel 386dx-33 and an i387, so I'm thinking of building a 386 machine for MT-32 games like Wing Commander, Ultima 7&Ultima Underworld, Monkey Island 1/2 and some Legend Entertainment titles.

I have RAM, 16-bit multi I/O, some ISA videocards from Trident, Realtek and Acumos (no Cirrus Logic/Tseng though), an ISA 3COM NIC and a working 420MB hard disk. So basically all I need is a motherboard. Problem is, most motherboards on my local market are late Am386DX40 tiny boards that can only take an FPU upgrade, and AFAIK, DX40 might be too fast for some of the games I've listed and overall defeats the purpose of making a dedicated 386 build.

I've never used a 386 before and so I'd like an advice on picking a board to avoid compatibility issues. What should I be looking for in my case? Are boards that have soldered-on Am386DX40 with free CPU and FPU sockets okay? Are there different sockets? (I know some Cyrix DLC/SLC CPUs required a specific socket, and FPUs have at least two types of sockets) What about chipsets?

Thanks!

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Reply 1 of 5, by Anonymous Coward

Posted on 2017-07-18, 02:55

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I recommend a board with an AMI (1991 core or later) or a MR-BIOS. Most of those boards are modern enough to be relatively bug free. The only thing to watch out for on the 1993/94 boards is that sometimes they have buggy 206 system chips which cause problems with devices which use high DMA.

In my experience, all boards with a soldered CPU which also have an extra CPU socket require the soldered chip to be sliced off before the socket can be used.

For chipsets, I would strongly consider one based on UMC, as those are pretty good performers, well documented and were mass produced (easy to get).

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V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 2 of 5, by jheronimus

Posted on 2017-07-18, 09:50

jheronimus Offline

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Anonymous Coward wrote:
In my experience, all boards with a soldered CPU which also have an extra CPU socket require the soldered chip to be sliced off before the socket can be used.

That's brutal. Also... why? What's the point of having a CPU socket if you can't use it unless you permanently cripple your board?

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Reply 3 of 5, by Deksor

Posted on 2017-07-18, 09:56

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Maybe just lifting the VCC pins would be enough though

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Reply 4 of 5, by jesolo

Posted on 2017-07-18, 10:38

jesolo Offline

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Based on some schematics and manuals I've seen of these type of motherboards, there are sometimes jumpers that you can set to either select the PGA or surface mounted (QFP) chip.

Reply 5 of 5, by kanecvr

Posted on 2017-07-18, 23:19

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jesolo wrote:
Based on some schematics and manuals I've seen of these type of motherboards, there are sometimes jumpers that you can set to either select the PGA or surface mounted (QFP) chip.

This. I had a couple of these. Some have the jumpers removed, and simply soldering them back on and setting them to the correct configuration will let you use the socket instead of the on board chip.

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