0084 A battery powered 486DX2/66 setup and a 386 motherboard with a fancy BIOS
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 апр 2024
- On the next super mini mail call episode, we have a super mint 386DX motherboard complete with math co-processor that was found at a value village in Canada. THen we look at a brand new power supply replacement for IBM PC and compatibles that can enable you to easily run your computer off a battery power via USB Type-C Power Deliver.
-- Video Links
The New Retro Show:
/ @thenewretroshow
PicoRC:
github.com/dekuNukem/PicoRC/b...
www.tindie.com/products/dekun...
ATX4VC:
github.com/dekuNukem/ATX4VC
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
Adrian's Digital Basement (Main Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino 
Наука
I have found with old BIOS CMOS setups, the +/- on numpad are the only keys that work, regardless of numlock status
Heh that's quite rude -- but I kind of figured that was what was happening. I know to try a full size keyboard next time :-)
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I guess nobody cared back in the day as TKL (Tenkeyless) keyboards became popular way later...
Yeh makes sense, thinking about it. All keyboards had the numpad then.
Maybe it's not a real biz computer if you're not doing spreadsheet data entry? I always found having to reach that far over to be annoying, and I agree it sucks. Accessibility and usability was certainly not a consideration back then
My memory may be old but I remember one machine I ran across that did something similar. I had to use the shift key with the "+" and "-" or shift with "+" but not "-".
That's a really nice 386 board. I don't think I've ever seen that BIOS before.
Yeah that is a very unique bios
In the strings you can still read American Megatrends... So is probably a very customized AMIBIOS tree by Mylex. Just like Acer BIOSes (Actually, looks like American Megatrends and Acer partnered to make the AMIBIOS).
Other OEMs did the same but using Phoenix BIOS as core. Actually only a very few did really their own BIOS stuff at home, as Olivetti, Compaq (partnered with Phoenix to RE IBM stuff and create the Compaq BIOS, and later Phoenix was allowed to use that code to create their own), AT&T or IBM.
The USB powered 486 is such a cool trick - logically makes perfect sense but breaks my brain.
Same here! But, remember, USB powers devices we use everyday that do laps around a 486. What breaks my brain is the leaps in tech in such little time.
This was pretty much how 386/486 laptops worked. Take a desktop PC, shrink everything down as much as possible, connect a battery. :-)
Technically there were SL chips, but it was just as common to see full on SX and DX chips in there.
Imagine cramming all thaat (486, picoATX, battery, LCD) into a minitel sized case for RETRO AWESOMENESS!
“Dollary-doo “ is Australian. We call our dollars “Loonies”
DollarBucks is now the correct Australian word thanks to Bluey
Saw the VGCats webcomic refer to them as "Canadian Dollary-doos" at one point. I feel like Adrian would be the type to have read VGCats back in the day.
The Bic pen mod, Adrian knows all the old tricks! I'm assuming its the same as we always did, either sand or trim the opening just a bit with a hobby knife. Perfect fit, no damaged boards. Still have mine from 30 years ago.
Never did the bic pen trick, always just used a needle nosed pliers, never had an issue. I heard about it, but never felt that i needed any help.
A viewer sent that in. Adrian has lauded this person ever since.
I made one with a brass tube soldered to a thick copper ring as a handle. I used the tip of a needle nosed pliers as a tapered cone to flare out the business end of the tube.
We definitely have Value Village, at least up here in Washington. Unfortunately my local one stopped selling as much electronics, but I occassionaly still get a deal there.
I've recently seen some wild crap systems at my two closest Seattle area stores lately. A couple of complete or almost complete HP desktop shovel systems from the mid 00s
There is 1 Value Village in the Portland, OR area. It is in Tigard, which ~9 miles SW of downtown Portland.
I am very aware, I have family in Canada. And when I was a young guy, I spent many summers there. After I grew up, I visited my cousins there also. They loved getting me drunk. But it was so fun driving my car there! I have many friends in Toronto. I have had those Ketchup. And have ate a few bags of them. I really like them too!!
Ketchup crisps are the best!
I grew up in Port Huron, MI, across the river from Sarnia, Ontario. We had a big Victorian house on the St. Clair River, and I could see Canada from my bedroom window. I would always grab ketchup chips when over there. They were great to much on when in queue on the Blue Water Bridge after a night drinking at Campbell Street Station. For those that didn't get to grow up in a border town, the drinking age in Ontario is 19. Pre 9/11 and border crossing hassles we have now, it was a right of passage to go over on the weekends. MMMM... ketchup chips and coffee crisp candy bars.
10:42 - Sometimes back in those days I used a very thin screwdriver to unleash the standoffs. But, yes, it's really a pain in the buttom!
That 386 is a pretty neat piece of history and in excellent condition too, wow!
Looks like a server board. The mem test on server boards is always a thorough test and slow.
The logo on that T-shirt looks like the boot screen of my portable oscilloscope
wooo! thanks for the city shout-out, adrian! ya got a few fans here in Windsor, Ontario! :D
This Mylex board may be a server type board. Mylex made a lot of high end disk controllers
I vote that the word of the day is, "chonky." A perfect description of those switches.
Love the vids keeps me entertained i may even start tinkering with this older stuff, seems so much easier to fix than modern pc systems
51:23 - Looks like your USB battery bank supports 15V3A and 20V3A output as well. If you have a WI variant (Wide Input) of PicoPSU, you can feed it with anything between 12-25V. Surely you'll need the appropriate trigger cable, or maybe use a ZY-PDN USB-C decoy (
Value Village (also called Savers) is all over the US and Canada but the only one I saw in Oregon is in Tigard.
The man says: I have enough RAM for the rest of my life. Don't send me any more. Someone: sends RAM
In Wisconsin we have a Gas Station Chain that has their own brand of Ketchup Chips and All Dressed :D
Nice video, Cool M/B, custom Bios.
Cool. Need to get some of these.
Interestingly, those USB power banks can have microcontrollers of their own. Running a retrocomputer off of a battery with more computing power than the system it’s powering is surely some flex.
keep up the vids Adrian
Those Pico PSU's are awesome!
I have always wanted one of those My386 boards
Whenever I have to remove standoffs I'm using a suitable size rawplugs (the ones used for mounting screws in concrete walls), I use to have 3-4 different size in my toolbox, works like a charm to remove those stubborn standoffs.
Looking forward to the Deskpro 286 useful video ;) hehehe
ketchup chips are the best, i live in maine near one of the borders, when my niece goes up there to see her half sister i have her bring some back.
always a pleasure seeing pc motherboard videos (my favorites) on your channels
In the past, for those plastic standoffs, I recall using a 3mm nut driver....maybe 3mm was not the right size, but I remember sliding it over tightly.
Awesome video as always. Just as an FYI Adrian, we do have Value Village here on the west coast. There is one currently in Tigard, we used to have one here in Salem, but it closed and I want to say there was one in Keizer as well. Then of course Eugene, Corvallis, but I think Tigard is all that’s left sadly.
Ohh the copy /B option, happy to see you use it!
As a unix user, Microsoft has always had weird commands.
cat is where it's at.
cat 1.bin 2.bin > 3.bin
I’ve always wondered why that was necessary too. Is there something in DOS redirection that tells copy to use text mode by default? You don’t have to specify binary mode when copying files normally…
@@nickwallette6201 Every one was using xcopy back in the day. That was always in binary mode. Most people knew that using 'copy' could mess up your exe and com files, but only a few knew to use the /B option. Why text mode was the default? Only MicroSoft knows. Or maybe even the Q-Dos guys :-)
I wish I could offer a better suggestion, but I was a needle nose pliers guy too at our shop. The good news is that we can get ketchup potato chips pretty often here in the Midwest. I believe the original of these is actually Herr's in Pennsylvania. The also make some outstanding cheese curls! We can usually find them at Menards or Ollies.
30:26 It was probably just opened for inspection at random (i.e. not x-rayed or anything like that). I used to work for DHL many years ago. We would have to randomly open and inspect a proportion of international packages at our local depot before they even left the country.
You can exclude a part of memory from being cached so extensions cards can use this part per DMA without causing every write to get the cache flushed IIRC.
There's a Value Village in Tigard...theres a woodworking shop next door.
This was a really tricked out ISA computer! I remember Mylex as a maker of RAID controllers. I don't remember mobos from them. This is a very nice board and deserves a period-correct case! And OS/2! :)
Hey Adrian. Regarding repacked shipments, some federal transport authorities require carriers to conduct and document inspections of outgoing shipments on the authority's behalf, so that repack probably happened before the shipment even left the UK. For DHL in particular that's the only tape they have and they can end up using it even for first-time packing when senders show up at a shipping centre without their own packing materials. They have a policy where they're not allowed to use or even possess any other kind of packing tape on their premises, so they couldn't use clear packing tape even if they wanted to.
I would love to see you run memory and CPU benchmarks with the power meter attached just to confirm your point about power draw being invariant with workload on old machines.
Smarties are available in Canada and the UK, and were originally a Cadbury product (not sure if they still are). The candies that are called Smarties in the US are sold under the name Rockets here. They're sour, chalky, and (if I'm being honest) kind of nasty.
You most certainly can get Ketchup potato chips in the US. Every single Indian or Pakistani grocery store I've ever been to carries them.
I think the new retro show was at VCF East, I think I remember seeing the logo there.
There are about a dozen Value Villages here in the Seattle area!
About the blade type car fuses: there is some recent fuzz about chinese ones that don’t pop at the right current or within the right time. The guy with the swiss accent and some other people did some testing and published videos on youtube. You should defenitely check them out.
I don't know where all guys are looking but I see smarties and ketchup chips all over the place in the central United States.
There are Value village locations on the left coast. There are 10 in the Seattle area, and at least 1 near you in Tigard.
Holy cow batman! 20MB of RAM is insane for a 386!
there is Value Villages in the US. there at least used to be one in Tigard (south of portland)
I never needed a tool for the nylon standoff removal. I would just squeeze one side, angle it down into the hole to hold it "closed" and then squeeze the other side while pushing it through.
You'd need a numbers keypad - the "+/-" on there would work in the BIOS.
We have Value Village on the West Coast. Here in Washington.
BIC pens get worn out after a while. The plastic just doesn't last long.
It was common to have non-cacheable regions to support things like EMS memory cards.
I live in Windsor. We definitely have ketchup lays here.
We have many value village stores in the Seattle Area.
We have some Value Village stores here in Washington State.
Hello All From The UK👋
1991 was when AMD won against Intel regarding production of their own 386, which would drive down the price of 32bit PC computing. Seeing a great motherboard from just before that era is neat!
Given the low power draw of the system maybe you could mod the power supply with an internal rechargeable battery something like a 7AH and have it "portable (luggable)".
That pico ATX card edge is Amazing!
Guess i gotta visit Windsor
i've gotta check out value village i guess lol
Someone has been watching Action Retro with the 'portable' computing device he came up with.
That 386 looks like it may be conformally coated.
Lots of those power banks or power supplies really limit the output of the ports when using more than one connector, so that's something to be mindful of too course, but hopefully it'd just mean it won't power on.
Honestly the plastic standoffs were so cheap we used to just cut them to save time and effort.
you need to use plus and minus on the numeric keypad to change BIOS settings. Which means you'd need to use a full-sized keyboard.
When I was in Ottawa I went to McDonalds. They had some weird white gravy stuff on the fries and they were in a bowl. Nice people. Everyone spoke French first but then when you said something in English they switched to perfect English. People would just come up to my table and sit down and start talking to me. I would say I was from America, and they would look at me funny, and be like well yeah, but where? I leaned I had to say "The States", they consider themselves from America too (Which they are). I would tell them I was from Ohio and they would be like "Oh, I hear Ohio is a nice city, eh." The blinking green arrow traffic lights I never figured out though. And I came home with Ketchup Chips and Ketchup Popcorn!
they had ketchup flavor Doritios chips over here for sale a few months ago and i liked them, i had no idea they're just everywhere in Canada normally!! 0_0
Hi Adrian, did you try the famous CTRL-ALT-+ or CTRL-ALT-"-"?
What is that BBC Model-B Motherboard at 38:46? Remake I presume? It's beautiful!
Herrs makes a killer ketchup chip in the us
53:10 re "power draw" I don't recall exactly when but around the Cyrix M2/AMD K6 era if you repeatedly issued a HLT instruction in a loop (while something like windows was running to wake the CPU up) it would actually draw less power because the idle task (which is literally just a loop) actually consumed more power than halting the CPU completely.
This might not be the case for 386/486/586 era cpus I don't recall.
There were a slew of windows "utilities" that would do this and you could measure a small CPU temp delta at least on idle setups when it's present.
That's more of a problem with DOS and classic Windows. Real OSes tended to issue the HLT instruction. Linux used to have a "no-halt" option to suppress this because the lower power consumption was known to make some power supplies go out of spec (or something like that).
I haven't looked into it but I suspect all static CMOS processors save power with the HLT instruction and older HMOS models don't. The 286 was mostly HMOS but the 386 appears to be only CMOS so halting would make a difference to CPU consumption. However the 386 never used much power so the reduction didn't matter.
Lays are Walkers crisps or chips in the uk.😊
I assume the animation on boot is it testing the video memory, cycling all the bits.
just change the keyboard, I'm sure you have like 100 keyboards in your basement, XT, AT, PS2, and ps2 to at adaptors too. the "I can't change things in the bios" problem was very easy to fix.
Noncached RAM might have to do with some expansion cards mapping RAM and reacting bad to random cached updates? Not sure if memory mapped IO was a big thing on ISA cards, but I heard something similar with cached HDD controllers once...
Value Village is here in the US. There is actually one in Tigard.
In certain regions. In other ones it's called Savers.
I thought Mike was from Canmore....
BIOS definitely needs Keypad +/- (different keycode from the other +/-)
They also sell ketchup flavoured chipß here in Argentina.
Value Village, aka Savers in the US
Wegmans near me in VA has ketchup potato chips!
You need to use the numpad + and - keys.
value village is still in Washington state as of 1 year ago.
We can get ketchup in the Boston area now.
Try F5/F6 to change values.
It's crazy to think about that most of the power draw from these old computers is in the hard drives and monitors. I just grabbed a random IDE 80gb spinning rust drive off my shelf and it's listed at 0.8A for 5v and 0.75A for 12v. That's almost 75% of the power draw of that whole setup in one drive. And this is a newer drive, the drives that would have gone with these 386/486 computers would have taken a lot more I bet.
Before the early 2000s most consumer-level drives were lower RPM which saves tons of power. AFAIK it's a square relationship so the spindle power of a 5400rpm drive is barely half that of a 7200rpm one. Also the labelled power usage of a hard drive isn't strongly correlated to the actual power draw, it's more of a maximum. But not a real maximum, any drive pulls more than its rated current on spin-up.
value village is here in Washington
Maybe that BIOS requires you use the num pad keys.
Do you have a link to the rom dumper? I've tried others on a specific board I've got, and none of them seem to output correctly.
Couldn’t I use the picopsu with atx-at adapter cable? I use those cables on my vintage AT powered pcs. Do I need atx4vc?
lol my old Socket 7 DOS Topbench entry keeps coming on Adrian’s videos
any chance it needs a full size keyboard to get the plus and minus next to the keypad?? Or perhaps a specific one?
I love ketchup. I love potato chips. But I've never had the ketchup potato chips, and I'm afraid I never will 😢
i would LOVE to have a "USBPD4VC" that has a direct USB-C connector and PD chip onboard!
I'm just wondering whether we could power a modestly modern PC with the adapter board shown in the second half of this video. Should modern PCs not simply pull even less Watts from the power bank?
if you need another size stand off remover i think you could make one out of a pen, just pull out the ink part and drill the end of the pen to the correct size. thats pretty much all that is anyway.
We have ketchup chips in Buffalo NY.
If been given a 486dx4 motherboard but has no built in stuff. It's been so long since I have done anything with ISA what would be a good video card (pref VGA), ide card and sound card for it? Ideally I'd love to have modern recreations of them if possible!
Most ISA IDE adapters should work identically, get whatever one is available. For a sound card probably a Sound Blaster for compatibility. PicoGUS now has SB emulation so you could use that if desired. For VGA, I have no idea.