"NEAT" was actually the chipset name "NewEnhancedAT" of chips&technolgies. Basically it was one of the first consumer chipsets with less jumpers, put a lot of timing settings (clock speeds for cpu, bus, waitstates for ram) in the bios. I spent hours of my youth trying to optimize the last 1/2 percent of benchmark speed on a NEAT286/16 around 1990.
I would have thought the sticker that reads "16/40" was indicating a 16MHz CPU and 40MB HDD. Mostly because computer retailers often sold systems based on clock speed and hard disk capacity as the biggest selling points in the 90's.
And also this one seems to have shipped with just the basic 640KB DOS memory, which was such a default amount for so long that it wasn't worth noting. Maybe if it had been upgraded in any way that would also have been noted... (like with an extra half or 1MB, 2MB, 2.5 or 4MB...)
@@Epictronics1 Perhaps some of them were 20MHz or 12MHz. Possibly they added a sticker first, then the front badges were added later down the assembly line :)
"Hey Bertie let's fix this rusted out Model-T Ford engine....... and once we fix it let's poor Nitro into it" 😏 Gotta say that is one beautiful Commodore, thanks for showing us.
I'm pretty sure the stiker simply indicated 16MHz and 40MB harddrive. 16MB of RAM is insane for a 286 and makes absolutely no sense, even if it was used with a 80287 MathCo for either CAD or large spreadsheets (Lotus 123?). Awesome machine nontheless. Keep up the good work! I always enjoy watching your videos.
Oh, forgot to mention - Since your 286 is quite fast, you might want to check out some of the speed sensitive games on it , like Wing Commander and Test Drive 3. I think both should run decently enough.
Thanks! I would agree. However, 16MHz is pretty crazy too for a 286. My 286 back in the day ran at 10MHz. Perhaps this speed demon can do 16MB too? I just installed 40! Mb of RAM in my 386, so there were a few silly boards back then :)
The 286 could address a maximum of 16 MB of RAM. This was a significant improvement over the older 8086, which could only address 1 MB of RAM. But ram prices were extremely high, 16 MB would have cost much more than the CPU or the hard drive.
@@Epictronics1 Eh, I have a 12MHz one that dates to like 1987, so 16MHz by the 90s isn't so much. The 68000 had about the same kind of speed range even quite early on (6 thru 16), and you have a 25MHz clone incoming... (and again, 68K clones can go at least as fast as that). The bigger issue is whether the board and its chipset (and the ISA bus, plus whatever dividers are present) can handle the higher clocks. 386s are a different matter, if it's a DX it has a much wider addressing range and may have been considered a high-end, server-class machine or a CAD workstation where the memory was also joined by a super hi-rez graphics card demanding a special monitor, magneto-optical drive and so-on, and probably quite a few more SIMM slots, particularly as you need a bank of four 30pin modules to feed a 32-bit CPU anyway. 286 and 386SX have 16MB as a hard limit of the processor and probably don't bother having as many slots, especially with onboard RAM like this one. Though I am curious as to how you hit 40MB, given that, say, 8 slots would get you up to 32 with 4MB modules, but the minimum that 16MB ones would allow is 64... double sided SIMMs of different densities in both banks? An 8MB block on the motherboard or an ISA card? Twelve or more sockets?? (Besides, later 386DXs overlapped with 486s and sometimes both used very slightly modified versions of the same board, same as 286 vs 386SX... 64MB wasn't so wild a maximum amount stated for a 486, at least in the 72pin era, so running to 48 or 64 with a large block of 30pins may not be too crazy for a later model) (on which note, it may be that memory just isn't mentioned for this machine because it just has the basic 640KB on board - maybe if SIMMs had been added to expand it, the upgraded amount may have also been noted on the back? But it was a fairly fungible thing that could be varied as an option by the customer even within an otherwise singular model designation, and might change by manufacturer choice as well in response to DRAM pricing fluctuations. And of course you have all the Conventional vs Higher / Upper / Expanded / Extended memory nonsense of this era so the SIMM area may have been considered as a "plus" amount to the default) But, the 386 also shows that you need not provide for the maximum theoretical amount that the processor supports. The DTK board may be listed as supporting 16MB max memory, but that may include expansion cards plugged into the ISA sockets etc and merely be a parroting of the CPU support. Maxing out at 4MB wouldn't have been unusual for a cheaper, low end model like a 386SX, or a 286 at the start of the 90s (there were still non-IBM-compatible rivals of similar performance on sale that had just that limit), as who was going to spend the quite considerable money to upgrade a system like that even up to that level, let alone 4x further? Also the arrangement of the memory map could be a thing. A 386SX with no onboard RAM is more likely to maybe allow 16MB (4 x 4MB SIMMs), or at least 8MB (using double-sided modules of 2MB), with a bit of a memory hole for I/O in the former case reducing the usable amount to 15.6MB or even 15.0MB. A 286 less likely, as it may be an older board design which doesn't support double sided SIMMs, and maybe doesn't have the necessary sense / address lines hooked up for 4MB modules. (My 1987 one actually only supports a single pair of 256K's, giving you half a meg of high memory to play with... it's just enough to run windows 3.1, stunningly enough, though I haven't bothered trying any software more complicated than Write, Paint, or Solitaire) So really what you want to look at, if the information is available, is what memory technology the board actually supports, and what hardware jumpers or software switches are provided. We know it has four SIMMs, but what maximum density - 1MB? 4MB? Maybe 2MB if it's late enough? Does it have a setting to knock out the onboard RAM if you do install 4 x 4MB and so avoid troublesome clashes? Can it shadow ROM into RAM, which would at least mean you're not truly wasting all of that "reserved" 384KB area with maxed out physical capacity? Maybe even there's a mix between the two, one bank supporting 4MB and the other 1MB, so your true maximum configuration without an EMS or XMS board becomes 10.625MB (8M + 2M + 640KB), and you can then add the last 5MB on a card if you like.
@@vanCaldenborgh Also you'd need either a whole pile of 1MB SIMMs, or to get hold of much less common and even pricier 4MB ones, assuming the board even supported those. I think I have a couple I used for upgrading an old laptop at some point, and my own 286 recognises/uses them just the same as the 1MBs... which is to say it assumes they're 256KB... Really seems like those were just for convenience, maybe even for the OEMs to use, so you could perform a minimal upgrade or stratify your offerings (1152K is nearly twice 640K after all) without having to waste a precious ISA slot. Truly big memory expansions seemed more limited to add-in cards, which were more able to give significant square centimetrage over to a field of soldered DRAMs or a long row of SIMM or SIPP sockets, and be more worth the sacrifice of a slot vs having a whole bunch of extra parts on the mobo which likely wouldn't get used by most owners. But yeah at the time this machine was selling, 640K was still considered practical and there were enough budget machines, PC or otherwise, selling with just 512K (or less in some extreme cases), and 1MB was at least a slight premium. Home software wasn't even designed to use more than that, and "serious" programs didn't routinely demand more than 2 or maybe 4MB max. Going higher was only for someone with specialist needs, who likely wouldn't be buying a budget rebrand of an already low end motherboard/chip/case combo for that purpose. It seems a bit mad to spend all that cash on RAM for your server or workstation yet base it around an older processor, with narrower and slower memory access in the first place, and reduced processing speed upon the data within? Our rather expensive family 486DX2 that turned up in 1994 only had 8MB... there was a 16MB option but it jacked the price up quite a bit, and simply nothing used that much. 8 itself was arguably not necessary other than for games, but may have helped a bit with CDROM software in Windows and allowed more practical disk cacheing which sped things up a little. It was quite some time before prices had fallen and our needs (or that of our software) increased such as to make upgrading _that_ machine to that actual level an affordable and needful thing.
I'm starting to think this was maybe not a Commodore design but a fairly common OEM case, and maybe motherboard range too. Because... it looks like an RM (Research Machines) 386SX-16 that my secondary school had a large fleet of when I first started there. For what is basically a bunch of rectangles and squares, it's a fairly distinctive layout. But scrolling through the comments, a lot of other people seem to know it by other names... and really all you need to change is the front panel badge. That might even be what's behind the handwritten sticker on the rear ... what the people putting the badges on need to know is which one to pick out of which set of trays, and the people actually building them don't need to know who's buying. Maybe you do a certain number all at once for a particular OEM customer, so you're just grabbing badges and putting indicator stickers on their branded boxes from a single column of the rack. Generally memory doesn't form part of the designation, as either it's fixed or can be very variable (easily changed and highly dependent on market prices), but the processor type, speed, and sometimes HDD space is part of it. So that's what you note, certainly if you're doing a bunch that only have the standard soldered 640KB and nothing else. Maybe if they've been expanded you'll add a third number. Also maybe the design changed for 386DX and 486 models? Seeing as it's using a part-integrated motherboard with some surface mount ports and any other functions being left to the ISA riser (a common space saving idea for poorly expandable pizzaboxes - I have a differently cased Tandon that follows a similar plan), both the 286 and 386SX models may have used essentially the same motherboard, just with a different CPU socket, and maybe a higher rated chipset for speeds above 16MHz (as the CHiPS, er, chip here has "16MHZ" prominently marked on it, probably safe to say you shouldn't officially be installing oscillators faster than 32MHz? And did 386SXes even come in higher speed ratings?), with the case being manufactured with suitable cutouts in the right places for those hardwired ports. Though there must have been some variation possible, e.g. maybe in whether you had the PS2 mouse or something else, as I could swear the RMs had a second DIN next to the keyboard for video output, using what must have been an extremely proprietary connector. Unless that was purely for its 186 compatibility mode and meant to drive a 15kHz TTL...? Could very much have had one of the COM port positions given over to an RGB or VGA port. I've seen some suggestion their models around that time even used 9-pin VGA... (I've no idea what the integrated video truly was, but it wasn't anything higher than basic VGA, possibly even EGA. Certainly hi-rez in Windows was 16-colour with relatively chonky pixels, and attempting to play video on it from a CDROM encyclopaedia - using an external caddy-load drive - was a horrible mess of low-colour fixed-palette dithering even when set to use low-rez full-screen. They did have something like 2MB, or maybe even a fat 4MB of RAM by the time they were scrapped. No idea about hard drive but it was probably a tiny 40MBer, maybe less, and the majority of them were set up to use a fairly strongly locked-down network environment so it didn't really matter once they'd booted up anyway) Oh and weirdly I have an actual DTK branded laptop, or the remains of one, hanging around in a cupboard here. It's just as poor spec as you'd expect, and may even be using a much scrunched-down LSI'd version of the same motherboard despite being a "486", as it's a 486SLC... seeing as it's in a fairly small and, again, extremely generic case which packs in a full size floppy drive AND 3.5" HDD (!) AND a 6x C-cell battery pack under the deep-travel keyboard (which doesn't have any built in pointer), the motherboard is but a tiny strip. Quite how they get even that CPU, 4MB of soldered non-upgradeable RAM, C&T SVGA graphics, a full PC chipset, drive connectors and external ports into the space I have no idea, but presumably there just wasn't room to have a 32-bit bus. It was likely quite cheap at point of sale though (also B&W LCD, no sound except beeper...). The person I got it off bartered it with me for a half full box of washing powder in 2002... it probably wasn't even as old as some modern laptops I've ended up retiring.
It is an AT There were a lot of ATs being made by almost every company. The 386s were a lot more rare than I thought They came out right around 1989 but the 486s came out very soon afterwards and many people were still buying ATs in 89 through 91. So, they upgraded from an AT to 486 Windows 3.1 really was the motivation for people to upgrade from an XT or AT to the 486
4:40 The small pcb at the back is likely converting it to use the PC standards for drive selecting DS1 and Ready where Amiga uses DS0, Disk Change and Ready signals and some are different pin numbers. The drive you have there is an Amiga Chinon FB357.... might be the same as the rare high density drive used in the Amiga 4000 which is a FB357A. There is also a FZ357 (I have one here) which is a slim HD FDD compatible with any standard PC HD floppy drive (i.e. nothing special). When you have time I need to see that small PCB in detail both sides.... it can be copied and plugged into an Amiga drive to convert it to a PC type without any hardware mods and reversed to convert a PC drive for use with Amiga. If you have any Amiga, plug the FB357 into it and see if it works as-is without the adapter.
Unfortunately, my Amigas are collecting dust in storage, unrestored and untested. So I can't do any tests right now. But I'll take high-resolution pictures and send them over to you when I make the follow-up video.
@@Epictronics1 ok no problem and no rush, my plate is overflowing with stuff to do here anyway. maybe look into it when you eventually get your Amigas out for restoration.
Have you checked underneath the ALS245?? I mean, it's close enough to the battery to have collected copius amount of juice. That also applies to the neighbouring SIMM slots.
I had a Commodore Colt for a short time during high school. It was second hand, so it was already old when I got it back in '94. I want to say it was a 286, but I don't really remember.
If you look at the datasheet of quality CR2032 batteries, they will show you how to use it in a circuit that normally has Vcc when on (e.g. save battery in retro carts like NES, SNES on SRAM) In all these cases, they use a 4148 diode + 1K resistor. The 1K resistor is extra protection that they all used and what I strongly suggest you start using as well. :)
That's exactly what I plan to do! I didn't like the look of the installation on this mobo so I looked around and found some tiny PCBs to use instead. They have pads for a resistor and a diode :) (Edit: I didn't know what the resistor was for, but now I know!)
Since the CMOS reported an error, the motherboard probably defaulted to 8mhz for safety. Once you excited the CMOS and the error as cleared, full speed ahead.
Heh, the bios used in this PC, and his little brother, is the same codebase used in the Amiga BridgeBoard. Also, Commodore was one of the first clients of Phoenix Technologies (before known as Phoenix Associates, an spinoff of the Compaq team which reversed the original IBM BIOS firmware).
Cute little PC and not yellowed, that's cool. Hope the closest trace to the battery at 12:57 does not corrode with time since you put the cion cell over it and wont be able to see it, looks like a potential battery damage or cut in the trace almost on the video at least. The FB is higher in dimension, the FZ is slimmer (like normal modern PC drives) 357 is HD, 357A is HD for Amiga 354 is DD for Amiga, 354C if I am not wrong is Commodore 65 prototype with special board/connector The adapter is for using older slot like cables, not the pin header. The older disk drives 5,25 had this style and old cables had only old plugs, some had even both standards or only the new one.
I wasn't happy with the new battery installment. I'm going to order some "Varta killer" boards and replace that coin cell holder. I'll check those traces at the same time, thanks for the clarification
Windows defender having virus signatures for ancient viruses seems a little unnecessary though it is interesting when it tells you when it finds something in some really old files (i recently had it find CIH on an old CD I burned in the 90s, no threat to my Windows 11 systems but it would be bad for my win9x systems). A timebomb waiting to happen when you try to transfer those files to a retro machine. We don't think about running anti-virus on our retro machines but they are vulnerable and old disks can have nasty surprises waiting for you like this system did. Old hard drives are delicate enough that you wouldn't consider doing a complete virus scan of a drive before using it
Incidentally, is that "slow" video card original to the system? If so, does it have both the VGA and TTL ports on it? IE is essentially a SuperEGA card with a VGA DAC added on? The plethora of oscillators makes me wonder. If so, would you be able to investigate if it has any wacky modes available (via drivers or whatever) and scope out their pixel clock and sync rates at all, pretty please? There's at least a couple that get quoted as selling points in old adverts and manuals for S-EGA upgrade cards (and early VGA clones) that were definitely nowhere close to any IBM standard and I've not been able to properly figure out the likely spec of. (e.g. 640x480 at a high-20s kHz scan rate, and particularly 752x410 or 752x420 at totally unknown rates... both different from the matching VGA modes or the slightly tweaked ones that would be used to emulate them on later purely (S)VGA cards... and some others besides, depending on the actual card and driver set) It's not anything at all important, really, but it bugs me greatly... and this information doesn't seem to exist anywhere on the net, and hasn't turned up in 10 years of occasional searching, so the only option seems to be to do some primary research. Sadly I just don't have the kit for that, nor am I likely to be able to afford it any time soon. If you have the hardware (both the computer/card and something to measure with) and suitable driver disks it might only take a couple minutes?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff oh, I didn't rewind to look... maybe it was just mislabelled, or the cards they were installing would have the ports in those same locations even if only one was present...?
I'll find the manual and see if the card is mentioned. If it's in the manual, it's original. Unfortunately, It's going to take a while. The next project is already taking up the bench
@@Epictronics1 No worries, I know how it goes :D ... if I'd been more together back when I had a decent income I could have just bought one off ebay, and a scope, done the checks myself, then sold them on. (what manuals I could find for these cards online don't give any useful clues, btw, and often seem to have outright errors for better-known aspects, so probably can't be fully trusted for the unknown stuff. Plus if it's actually more of a VGA card that happens to still support TTL output for some reason, but doesn't scan below 31kHz, it won't mean much because it'll just be emulating those old modes within a VGA / mild SVGA frame)
I read a few comments possibly suggesting 16mhz 40mb drive, but I have a feeling they kicked this thing into beast mode with 16mb RAM, why would you put that sticker on the back when the front label says 286 16? Nah.. that's 16mb, I can't wait for the follow up!!
the PCB on the floppy looks like it's meant to convert an IBM style floppy drive to something that's more original Shugart compatible, with DS jumpers.
Or to convert 3.5" floppy pins to accept the old 5 1/4" edge connector... at one time, there were A/B floppy cables that also had both types of connector
@@matthewday7565 usually those didn't have jumpers on them though. This adds those, when usually PCs didn't have jumpers on the floppy, using the twist in the cable to select the active drive.
Not sure if I agree this is a fast 286. I have a couple of 286 boards with the HT12 chipset clocked at 16MHz and I get about 4000 dhrystones in NSSI and 6.4 score in 3D Bench. The thing is my boards allow for 0 wait state memory operation and that speeds up things a bit. There’s a RUclips channel Nocito87, his 286 scores pretty much the same as mine.
I didn't have time to explore the BIOS settings in this vid. However, I noticed that the board was set to run with 1 wait state, so should be able to go faster. We'll explore it more once I get a Harris 286-25
Hu! I own a Commodore 486-SX 25MHz monster... With a really strange issue, the screen keep switching colours when I type at the keyboard and yes, I've tested a boot disc for Win 2000 I believe and it's the same behavior. But it is systematic so every time I hit let's say Enter the screen switches to blue and grey letters. Space green and blue and so on, unless it is a BIOS virus your guess is as good as mine. And yes I saved the MB from Varta-death before I saw anything.
That is the strangest fault I've heard of in a long time lol. I have no idea what could be causing it. Wipe the /MBR and make a clean install to begin with.
@@Epictronics1 I've searched the interwebs with no results either, but wipeing the MBR(Master Boot Record)? Could be some critters hiding in there maybe... If so, I would be able to disconnect the HDD and that would "solve" IF that is the issue. Worth a try.🤔
This motherboard and bios looks very similar to what came in Leading Edge computers. I have an old 386 Leading Edge pc that uses crtl alt S to enter the bios. I was just wondering if this commodore was the same before you figured it out. Had I been sitting next to you you would have figured it out without looking it up. Lol.
@@Epictronics1 I didn't see DTK on the board. The graphics card looks very similar which is what stood out to me since mine doesn't have a riser card. The BIOS chips say Daewoo on them.
There aren't that many 286 chipsets that can deal with 16MB -- all the ones I've been able to get my hands on top out at 8MB. I don't offhand recall which are good for it though, so maybe you got lucky!
Well, at least isn't one of those nasty Lithium/Thionyl Chloride batteries made by Taridan and Maxxell which Apple loved to use in their desktop computers. I'm sure Apple felt supaaa scientific when they used that stuff in consumer products, without measuring the cons and maintenance/disposal of these special batteries. When these things explode, them basically spurt Thionyl Chloride, a literal acid which eats on the board and every else it touches. A self destruct mechanism in all the rule. Also, like any strong acid, it can cause severe damage if the vapors get inhaled.
@@Epictronics1 Yup, these ones. Interesting enough, Apple kept using them up to the G5s.. Or at least is the same size format. I've seen some boards with white Sony "Lithium" batteries, and Sony is also listed as Li/Thionyl Chloride battery manufacturer. But I'm pretty sure the original G3 beige came with the purple Taridan battery built in. The SE/30 came with Maxxell Li/ThyCl battery if I remember well.
@@hyoenmadan I have never seen anything like the inside of my SE/30. It's an absolute disaster! I have replica boards for it, maybe, I'll try to build one up someday
"NEAT" was actually the chipset name "NewEnhancedAT" of chips&technolgies. Basically it was one of the first consumer chipsets with less jumpers, put a lot of timing settings (clock speeds for cpu, bus, waitstates for ram) in the bios. I spent hours of my youth trying to optimize the last 1/2 percent of benchmark speed on a NEAT286/16 around 1990.
Neat :)
That half a percent made what felt like WORLDS of difference back then!!
Pizza box designs are my favorite... loved the Sun SPARCstations!
I would have thought the sticker that reads "16/40" was indicating a 16MHz CPU and 40MB HDD. Mostly because computer retailers often sold systems based on clock speed and hard disk capacity as the biggest selling points in the 90's.
And also this one seems to have shipped with just the basic 640KB DOS memory, which was such a default amount for so long that it wasn't worth noting. Maybe if it had been upgraded in any way that would also have been noted... (like with an extra half or 1MB, 2MB, 2.5 or 4MB...)
16/40 sticker means 16MHz and a 40MB hard drive :)
Could be, but why add a sticker at the back when the machine is clearly a 286-16? Assuming they were all 16MHz 286s
@@Epictronics1 Perhaps some of them were 20MHz or 12MHz. Possibly they added a sticker first, then the front badges were added later down the assembly line :)
"Hey Bertie let's fix this rusted out Model-T Ford engine....... and once we fix it let's poor Nitro into it" 😏 Gotta say that is one beautiful Commodore, thanks for showing us.
Thanks :)
I'm pretty sure the stiker simply indicated 16MHz and 40MB harddrive. 16MB of RAM is insane for a 286 and makes absolutely no sense, even if it was used with a 80287 MathCo for either CAD or large spreadsheets (Lotus 123?).
Awesome machine nontheless.
Keep up the good work! I always enjoy watching your videos.
Oh, forgot to mention - Since your 286 is quite fast, you might want to check out some of the speed sensitive games on it , like Wing Commander and Test Drive 3. I think both should run decently enough.
Thanks! I would agree. However, 16MHz is pretty crazy too for a 286. My 286 back in the day ran at 10MHz. Perhaps this speed demon can do 16MB too? I just installed 40! Mb of RAM in my 386, so there were a few silly boards back then :)
The 286 could address a maximum of 16 MB of RAM. This was a significant improvement over the older 8086, which could only address 1 MB of RAM. But ram prices were extremely high, 16 MB would have cost much more than the CPU or the hard drive.
@@Epictronics1 Eh, I have a 12MHz one that dates to like 1987, so 16MHz by the 90s isn't so much. The 68000 had about the same kind of speed range even quite early on (6 thru 16), and you have a 25MHz clone incoming... (and again, 68K clones can go at least as fast as that). The bigger issue is whether the board and its chipset (and the ISA bus, plus whatever dividers are present) can handle the higher clocks.
386s are a different matter, if it's a DX it has a much wider addressing range and may have been considered a high-end, server-class machine or a CAD workstation where the memory was also joined by a super hi-rez graphics card demanding a special monitor, magneto-optical drive and so-on, and probably quite a few more SIMM slots, particularly as you need a bank of four 30pin modules to feed a 32-bit CPU anyway. 286 and 386SX have 16MB as a hard limit of the processor and probably don't bother having as many slots, especially with onboard RAM like this one. Though I am curious as to how you hit 40MB, given that, say, 8 slots would get you up to 32 with 4MB modules, but the minimum that 16MB ones would allow is 64... double sided SIMMs of different densities in both banks? An 8MB block on the motherboard or an ISA card? Twelve or more sockets?? (Besides, later 386DXs overlapped with 486s and sometimes both used very slightly modified versions of the same board, same as 286 vs 386SX... 64MB wasn't so wild a maximum amount stated for a 486, at least in the 72pin era, so running to 48 or 64 with a large block of 30pins may not be too crazy for a later model)
(on which note, it may be that memory just isn't mentioned for this machine because it just has the basic 640KB on board - maybe if SIMMs had been added to expand it, the upgraded amount may have also been noted on the back? But it was a fairly fungible thing that could be varied as an option by the customer even within an otherwise singular model designation, and might change by manufacturer choice as well in response to DRAM pricing fluctuations. And of course you have all the Conventional vs Higher / Upper / Expanded / Extended memory nonsense of this era so the SIMM area may have been considered as a "plus" amount to the default)
But, the 386 also shows that you need not provide for the maximum theoretical amount that the processor supports. The DTK board may be listed as supporting 16MB max memory, but that may include expansion cards plugged into the ISA sockets etc and merely be a parroting of the CPU support. Maxing out at 4MB wouldn't have been unusual for a cheaper, low end model like a 386SX, or a 286 at the start of the 90s (there were still non-IBM-compatible rivals of similar performance on sale that had just that limit), as who was going to spend the quite considerable money to upgrade a system like that even up to that level, let alone 4x further?
Also the arrangement of the memory map could be a thing. A 386SX with no onboard RAM is more likely to maybe allow 16MB (4 x 4MB SIMMs), or at least 8MB (using double-sided modules of 2MB), with a bit of a memory hole for I/O in the former case reducing the usable amount to 15.6MB or even 15.0MB. A 286 less likely, as it may be an older board design which doesn't support double sided SIMMs, and maybe doesn't have the necessary sense / address lines hooked up for 4MB modules. (My 1987 one actually only supports a single pair of 256K's, giving you half a meg of high memory to play with... it's just enough to run windows 3.1, stunningly enough, though I haven't bothered trying any software more complicated than Write, Paint, or Solitaire)
So really what you want to look at, if the information is available, is what memory technology the board actually supports, and what hardware jumpers or software switches are provided. We know it has four SIMMs, but what maximum density - 1MB? 4MB? Maybe 2MB if it's late enough? Does it have a setting to knock out the onboard RAM if you do install 4 x 4MB and so avoid troublesome clashes? Can it shadow ROM into RAM, which would at least mean you're not truly wasting all of that "reserved" 384KB area with maxed out physical capacity?
Maybe even there's a mix between the two, one bank supporting 4MB and the other 1MB, so your true maximum configuration without an EMS or XMS board becomes 10.625MB (8M + 2M + 640KB), and you can then add the last 5MB on a card if you like.
@@vanCaldenborgh Also you'd need either a whole pile of 1MB SIMMs, or to get hold of much less common and even pricier 4MB ones, assuming the board even supported those. I think I have a couple I used for upgrading an old laptop at some point, and my own 286 recognises/uses them just the same as the 1MBs... which is to say it assumes they're 256KB... Really seems like those were just for convenience, maybe even for the OEMs to use, so you could perform a minimal upgrade or stratify your offerings (1152K is nearly twice 640K after all) without having to waste a precious ISA slot. Truly big memory expansions seemed more limited to add-in cards, which were more able to give significant square centimetrage over to a field of soldered DRAMs or a long row of SIMM or SIPP sockets, and be more worth the sacrifice of a slot vs having a whole bunch of extra parts on the mobo which likely wouldn't get used by most owners.
But yeah at the time this machine was selling, 640K was still considered practical and there were enough budget machines, PC or otherwise, selling with just 512K (or less in some extreme cases), and 1MB was at least a slight premium. Home software wasn't even designed to use more than that, and "serious" programs didn't routinely demand more than 2 or maybe 4MB max. Going higher was only for someone with specialist needs, who likely wouldn't be buying a budget rebrand of an already low end motherboard/chip/case combo for that purpose. It seems a bit mad to spend all that cash on RAM for your server or workstation yet base it around an older processor, with narrower and slower memory access in the first place, and reduced processing speed upon the data within?
Our rather expensive family 486DX2 that turned up in 1994 only had 8MB... there was a 16MB option but it jacked the price up quite a bit, and simply nothing used that much. 8 itself was arguably not necessary other than for games, but may have helped a bit with CDROM software in Windows and allowed more practical disk cacheing which sped things up a little. It was quite some time before prices had fallen and our needs (or that of our software) increased such as to make upgrading _that_ machine to that actual level an affordable and needful thing.
So fast you can't keep up with your Commodore. 😉
I'm starting to think this was maybe not a Commodore design but a fairly common OEM case, and maybe motherboard range too.
Because... it looks like an RM (Research Machines) 386SX-16 that my secondary school had a large fleet of when I first started there. For what is basically a bunch of rectangles and squares, it's a fairly distinctive layout. But scrolling through the comments, a lot of other people seem to know it by other names... and really all you need to change is the front panel badge.
That might even be what's behind the handwritten sticker on the rear ... what the people putting the badges on need to know is which one to pick out of which set of trays, and the people actually building them don't need to know who's buying. Maybe you do a certain number all at once for a particular OEM customer, so you're just grabbing badges and putting indicator stickers on their branded boxes from a single column of the rack. Generally memory doesn't form part of the designation, as either it's fixed or can be very variable (easily changed and highly dependent on market prices), but the processor type, speed, and sometimes HDD space is part of it. So that's what you note, certainly if you're doing a bunch that only have the standard soldered 640KB and nothing else. Maybe if they've been expanded you'll add a third number.
Also maybe the design changed for 386DX and 486 models? Seeing as it's using a part-integrated motherboard with some surface mount ports and any other functions being left to the ISA riser (a common space saving idea for poorly expandable pizzaboxes - I have a differently cased Tandon that follows a similar plan), both the 286 and 386SX models may have used essentially the same motherboard, just with a different CPU socket, and maybe a higher rated chipset for speeds above 16MHz (as the CHiPS, er, chip here has "16MHZ" prominently marked on it, probably safe to say you shouldn't officially be installing oscillators faster than 32MHz? And did 386SXes even come in higher speed ratings?), with the case being manufactured with suitable cutouts in the right places for those hardwired ports.
Though there must have been some variation possible, e.g. maybe in whether you had the PS2 mouse or something else, as I could swear the RMs had a second DIN next to the keyboard for video output, using what must have been an extremely proprietary connector. Unless that was purely for its 186 compatibility mode and meant to drive a 15kHz TTL...? Could very much have had one of the COM port positions given over to an RGB or VGA port. I've seen some suggestion their models around that time even used 9-pin VGA...
(I've no idea what the integrated video truly was, but it wasn't anything higher than basic VGA, possibly even EGA. Certainly hi-rez in Windows was 16-colour with relatively chonky pixels, and attempting to play video on it from a CDROM encyclopaedia - using an external caddy-load drive - was a horrible mess of low-colour fixed-palette dithering even when set to use low-rez full-screen. They did have something like 2MB, or maybe even a fat 4MB of RAM by the time they were scrapped. No idea about hard drive but it was probably a tiny 40MBer, maybe less, and the majority of them were set up to use a fairly strongly locked-down network environment so it didn't really matter once they'd booted up anyway)
Oh and weirdly I have an actual DTK branded laptop, or the remains of one, hanging around in a cupboard here. It's just as poor spec as you'd expect, and may even be using a much scrunched-down LSI'd version of the same motherboard despite being a "486", as it's a 486SLC... seeing as it's in a fairly small and, again, extremely generic case which packs in a full size floppy drive AND 3.5" HDD (!) AND a 6x C-cell battery pack under the deep-travel keyboard (which doesn't have any built in pointer), the motherboard is but a tiny strip. Quite how they get even that CPU, 4MB of soldered non-upgradeable RAM, C&T SVGA graphics, a full PC chipset, drive connectors and external ports into the space I have no idea, but presumably there just wasn't room to have a 32-bit bus. It was likely quite cheap at point of sale though (also B&W LCD, no sound except beeper...). The person I got it off bartered it with me for a half full box of washing powder in 2002... it probably wasn't even as old as some modern laptops I've ended up retiring.
It is an AT
There were a lot of ATs being made by almost every company.
The 386s were a lot more rare than I thought
They came out right around 1989 but the 486s came out very soon afterwards and many people were still buying ATs in 89 through 91.
So, they upgraded from an AT to 486
Windows 3.1 really was the motivation for people to upgrade from an XT or AT to the 486
4:40 The small pcb at the back is likely converting it to use the PC standards for drive selecting DS1 and Ready where Amiga uses DS0, Disk Change and Ready signals and some are different pin numbers. The drive you have there is an Amiga Chinon FB357.... might be the same as the rare high density drive used in the Amiga 4000 which is a FB357A. There is also a FZ357 (I have one here) which is a slim HD FDD compatible with any standard PC HD floppy drive (i.e. nothing special). When you have time I need to see that small PCB in detail both sides.... it can be copied and plugged into an Amiga drive to convert it to a PC type without any hardware mods and reversed to convert a PC drive for use with Amiga. If you have any Amiga, plug the FB357 into it and see if it works as-is without the adapter.
Unfortunately, my Amigas are collecting dust in storage, unrestored and untested. So I can't do any tests right now. But I'll take high-resolution pictures and send them over to you when I make the follow-up video.
@@Epictronics1 ok no problem and no rush, my plate is overflowing with stuff to do here anyway. maybe look into it when you eventually get your Amigas out for restoration.
I have a add on 286 card for my atari mega st I bought on ebay, I'm going to have to see what it can do.
Hi Epictronics, Nice repair again. Commodore make beautiful machines at that time. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Thanks!
Oh wow. What a beautiful case
Have you checked underneath the ALS245?? I mean, it's close enough to the battery to have collected copius amount of juice. That also applies to the neighbouring SIMM slots.
I should have checked! I'll probably check in the follow-up video.
I had a Commodore Colt for a short time during high school. It was second hand, so it was already old when I got it back in '94. I want to say it was a 286, but I don't really remember.
Now that's what you call a Var-ta-ster! 😱
Really nice machine and repair. Glad the battery damage wasn’t super bad!
Thanks! Yeah, It cleaned up pretty well!
It's not fair to blame Varta, I could bet that the battery was not intended to be used 35 years later.
Maybe you're right but I have several PCs from 1987 with Panasonic barrel batteries that have not leaked.
If you look at the datasheet of quality CR2032 batteries, they will show you how to use it in a circuit that normally has Vcc when on (e.g. save battery in retro carts like NES, SNES on SRAM) In all these cases, they use a 4148 diode + 1K resistor. The 1K resistor is extra protection that they all used and what I strongly suggest you start using as well. :)
That's exactly what I plan to do! I didn't like the look of the installation on this mobo so I looked around and found some tiny PCBs to use instead. They have pads for a resistor and a diode :) (Edit: I didn't know what the resistor was for, but now I know!)
Commodore sure did love its floppy drive chins.
3:40 pretty common design for slim/ultraslim cases of that time.
4:53 seems as 3.5"/5.25" adapter with a/b switch
Very nice. Glad you could get it working.😊
Thanks :)
Bomb at 1:58 😂
Since the CMOS reported an error, the motherboard probably defaulted to 8mhz for safety. Once you excited the CMOS and the error as cleared, full speed ahead.
Pretty sure that's an Amiga floppy drive with a simple adapter to the AT/XT style floppy cable.
That was my guess. But I'm not sure
These Chinons with some modifications were used in many Amiga computers :)
Heh, the bios used in this PC, and his little brother, is the same codebase used in the Amiga BridgeBoard. Also, Commodore was one of the first clients of Phoenix Technologies (before known as Phoenix Associates, an spinoff of the Compaq team which reversed the original IBM BIOS firmware).
This was fun! Awesome! Put OS/2 on it!
Thanks! I have another machine in mind for OS/2 :)
A few years ago I bought a Commodore 386SX in an identical case.
Party in a cylinder.
I like your efficient style.
There were 25 MHz versions of Harris 286 CPU so maybe Yours will work at that speed?
Already on the way in the mail :)
Cute little PC and not yellowed, that's cool. Hope the closest trace to the battery at 12:57 does not corrode with time since you put the cion cell over it and wont be able to see it, looks like a potential battery damage or cut in the trace almost on the video at least.
The FB is higher in dimension, the FZ is slimmer (like normal modern PC drives)
357 is HD, 357A is HD for Amiga
354 is DD for Amiga, 354C if I am not wrong is Commodore 65 prototype with special board/connector
The adapter is for using older slot like cables, not the pin header. The older disk drives 5,25 had this style and old cables had only old plugs, some had even both standards or only the new one.
I wasn't happy with the new battery installment. I'm going to order some "Varta killer" boards and replace that coin cell holder. I'll check those traces at the same time, thanks for the clarification
Windows defender having virus signatures for ancient viruses seems a little unnecessary though it is interesting when it tells you when it finds something in some really old files (i recently had it find CIH on an old CD I burned in the 90s, no threat to my Windows 11 systems but it would be bad for my win9x systems). A timebomb waiting to happen when you try to transfer those files to a retro machine. We don't think about running anti-virus on our retro machines but they are vulnerable and old disks can have nasty surprises waiting for you like this system did. Old hard drives are delicate enough that you wouldn't consider doing a complete virus scan of a drive before using it
Incidentally, is that "slow" video card original to the system? If so, does it have both the VGA and TTL ports on it? IE is essentially a SuperEGA card with a VGA DAC added on? The plethora of oscillators makes me wonder.
If so, would you be able to investigate if it has any wacky modes available (via drivers or whatever) and scope out their pixel clock and sync rates at all, pretty please? There's at least a couple that get quoted as selling points in old adverts and manuals for S-EGA upgrade cards (and early VGA clones) that were definitely nowhere close to any IBM standard and I've not been able to properly figure out the likely spec of. (e.g. 640x480 at a high-20s kHz scan rate, and particularly 752x410 or 752x420 at totally unknown rates... both different from the matching VGA modes or the slightly tweaked ones that would be used to emulate them on later purely (S)VGA cards... and some others besides, depending on the actual card and driver set)
It's not anything at all important, really, but it bugs me greatly... and this information doesn't seem to exist anywhere on the net, and hasn't turned up in 10 years of occasional searching, so the only option seems to be to do some primary research. Sadly I just don't have the kit for that, nor am I likely to be able to afford it any time soon. If you have the hardware (both the computer/card and something to measure with) and suitable driver disks it might only take a couple minutes?
I was wondering the same thing. The back of the case has a TTL and VGA labels... but that card only had one connector. What was the original card?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff oh, I didn't rewind to look... maybe it was just mislabelled, or the cards they were installing would have the ports in those same locations even if only one was present...?
I'll find the manual and see if the card is mentioned. If it's in the manual, it's original. Unfortunately, It's going to take a while. The next project is already taking up the bench
@@Epictronics1 No worries, I know how it goes :D ... if I'd been more together back when I had a decent income I could have just bought one off ebay, and a scope, done the checks myself, then sold them on.
(what manuals I could find for these cards online don't give any useful clues, btw, and often seem to have outright errors for better-known aspects, so probably can't be fully trusted for the unknown stuff. Plus if it's actually more of a VGA card that happens to still support TTL output for some reason, but doesn't scan below 31kHz, it won't mean much because it'll just be emulating those old modes within a VGA / mild SVGA frame)
my night is a good 1 with a vid from u and mr black
Tantalum capacitors are the best!❤
I read a few comments possibly suggesting 16mhz 40mb drive, but I have a feeling they kicked this thing into beast mode with 16mb RAM, why would you put that sticker on the back when the front label says 286 16? Nah.. that's 16mb, I can't wait for the follow up!!
I think you're right. That sticker doesn't make sense on this machine without 16MB RAM
the PCB on the floppy looks like it's meant to convert an IBM style floppy drive to something that's more original Shugart compatible, with DS jumpers.
perhaps an Amiga drive
Or to convert 3.5" floppy pins to accept the old 5 1/4" edge connector... at one time, there were A/B floppy cables that also had both types of connector
@@matthewday7565 usually those didn't have jumpers on them though. This adds those, when usually PCs didn't have jumpers on the floppy, using the twist in the cable to select the active drive.
@@matthewday7565 Yes, but this board also does something else with those jumpers
@@Nukle0n Yes, it has jumpers for drive A/B but it also does something else
I had a PCChips all-in-one MB, and boy did Linux hate that thing, ie, never seen an OS get corrupted so fast, sometimes after 1st boot - lol -.
IIRC these Commodore pizza box PC's are a lot more common in Europe, in particular in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Pre ide drives nice!
Not sure if I agree this is a fast 286. I have a couple of 286 boards with the HT12 chipset clocked at 16MHz and I get about 4000 dhrystones in NSSI and 6.4 score in 3D Bench.
The thing is my boards allow for 0 wait state memory operation and that speeds up things a bit. There’s a RUclips channel Nocito87, his 286 scores pretty much the same as mine.
I didn't have time to explore the BIOS settings in this vid. However, I noticed that the board was set to run with 1 wait state, so should be able to go faster. We'll explore it more once I get a Harris 286-25
@@Epictronics1 Nice!!
You lucked out on this new/old machine.
Very cute box! Does the overclock affect the ISA bus and it runs now @10MHz instead of 8?
I'll check!
Great video. Thanks! What are those red/green markers that you use?
Thanks. They are Pilot Pintor
I can't bring myself to think of these as proper Commodore machines. To me they are more IBM than Commodore.
A Commodore 386 SX-25 (which looks identical to this 286) on ebay UK on the 9th of October sold for £1,020! 😬
Yeah, I watched that thing go silly! In September someone picked one up on fleabay for a third of that price lol
I don't think it ever had 16mb of ram.
It was probably just signifying a 16MHz CPU.
There's only one way to find out
Oh yes, chipset. I remember those.
Wow, AntiEXE virus. My first PC i got in 1994 came with that too.
That damn thing is still around lol
Hu! I own a Commodore 486-SX 25MHz monster...
With a really strange issue, the screen keep switching colours when I type at the keyboard and yes, I've tested a boot disc for Win 2000 I believe and it's the same behavior.
But it is systematic so every time I hit let's say Enter the screen switches to blue and grey letters. Space green and blue and so on, unless it is a BIOS virus your guess is as good as mine.
And yes I saved the MB from Varta-death before I saw anything.
That is the strangest fault I've heard of in a long time lol. I have no idea what could be causing it. Wipe the /MBR and make a clean install to begin with.
@@Epictronics1 I've searched the interwebs with no results either, but wipeing the MBR(Master Boot Record)?
Could be some critters hiding in there maybe...
If so, I would be able to disconnect the HDD and that would "solve" IF that is the issue.
Worth a try.🤔
This motherboard and bios looks very similar to what came in Leading Edge computers. I have an old 386 Leading Edge pc that uses crtl alt S to enter the bios. I was just wondering if this commodore was the same before you figured it out. Had I been sitting next to you you would have figured it out without looking it up. Lol.
Does the Leading Edge computer use a DTK board too? This could also be a decision made by the BIOS manufacturer
@@Epictronics1 I'll have to take a closer look to see. It currently has the same problem where the battery has leaked all over the board.
@@Epictronics1 I didn't see DTK on the board. The graphics card looks very similar which is what stood out to me since mine doesn't have a riser card. The BIOS chips say Daewoo on them.
Great show!
Thanks!
I wonder if the virus is why the machine was mothballed after barely seeing any use?
That's quite possible
I have this exact machine.
It has a FLOPPY drive! ❤it!
There aren't that many 286 chipsets that can deal with 16MB -- all the ones I've been able to get my hands on top out at 8MB. I don't offhand recall which are good for it though, so maybe you got lucky!
We'll find out!
The sticker is indicating 16MHz not 16MB.
Cool
played the Tetris music in my head :)
:)
Are you really using IPA for cleaning the motherboard and not cheaper denaturated ethanol?
I only use denatured alcohol when IPA isn't strong enough. I pay about $10€ for one liter/qt. It lasts for months. Is that expensive?
Varta. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, at least isn't one of those nasty Lithium/Thionyl Chloride batteries made by Taridan and Maxxell which Apple loved to use in their desktop computers. I'm sure Apple felt supaaa scientific when they used that stuff in consumer products, without measuring the cons and maintenance/disposal of these special batteries.
When these things explode, them basically spurt Thionyl Chloride, a literal acid which eats on the board and every else it touches. A self destruct mechanism in all the rule. Also, like any strong acid, it can cause severe damage if the vapors get inhaled.
@@hyoenmadan Is that what I found in my SE/30? Your description sure fits what I found inside it :(
@@Epictronics1 Yup, these ones. Interesting enough, Apple kept using them up to the G5s.. Or at least is the same size format. I've seen some boards with white Sony "Lithium" batteries, and Sony is also listed as Li/Thionyl Chloride battery manufacturer.
But I'm pretty sure the original G3 beige came with the purple Taridan battery built in. The SE/30 came with Maxxell Li/ThyCl battery if I remember well.
@@hyoenmadan I have never seen anything like the inside of my SE/30. It's an absolute disaster! I have replica boards for it, maybe, I'll try to build one up someday
The battery exploded coz someone copied a floppy.