Building my first 486 PC // Pixel Fragment
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- I rescued a huge collection of mid-90s computers from being recycled, and I decided I finally have no excuse not to build a 486 system! Except of course... I have no idea what I'm doing.
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What are some ideas for "alternative" operating systems I could try on this 486 build besides the ones shown (DOS 6.22, Win 3.11, GEOS Ensemble 2.0)?
What about
OS/2 Warp?
windows 3.11 and Calmira xp . Maintain Dos support with a modern interface. Windows 9x for 486 .
SuSE Linux 5.0, if you want to try something really different.
windows NT 4 workstation will def run with all that ram and any of those cpus
COSTA, a GUI for MS-DOS
What an amazing haul! But well deserved, the machines are going to an awesome person and you'll have your work cutout. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, every machine you showed had more treasures 😁
Your haul is amazing. 486 and even socket 7 computers and parts are becoming much harder to find and more expensive. AT cases are really unobtanium at least where I am. You could however look to use a newer power supply with an AT to ATX cable adapter. It would be a crying shame to see the system taken out by a power supply failure. Your 486 machine is a wonderful throwback and such a great example of a brief window in time. For me exploring DOS and the programs from that era is gold. Wing Commander, Pool of Radiance and Wizardry under DOS6.22! Sweet.
They seem more easy to find in the US, i have even been finding AT cases.
I am so jelly for that haul of 486 era PCs! I cut my teeth on 386 & 486 era PCs back in the day which led to a 20+ year IT career. Back then I had a run of the mill Packard Bell 486 PC that by the end of it's life was seriously pimped out with all sorts of mods & upgrades. I also had friends that had other 386 & 486 machines so there was plenty of learning to be done then.
That machine turned out great. It's really fun to mess with "average" machines sometimes, not just the top tier stuff. Growing up with a 486 myself as my first real computer this hits home.
And my goodness all the glorious clicks and noises it made as it booted up. Brb digging out a 486 now too!
I wish a FRACTION of that nostalgia landed in my Tech Shed. Man, what a score - so jealous!!! I totally get how some folks say you don't "need" a 486 but I'm a purest and love using original hardware down to the floppies and period correct drives when available. I hope you gave that lady a $100 and let her know she was about to toss at least a grand worth of cases and hardware lol.
I surfed the early internet on my 486, and played around with swapping in a DX4/100, an AMD 5x86 133 and an old Pentium Overdrive 83MHz. I loved that machine, and miss it every day. This takes me back, thanks for sharing your journey. I love these machines. Get a PicoGUS for it!
Man I'm kicking myself for not buying one when I could. I just ASSUMED I didn't have a use for one and a car-load of old computers weren't about to drop on my office floor.
Ayyy he's back!
The Yamaha card... if you recap it, it will have one of the most noise-free inputs for a wavetable card on the header on it, on any lower-end ISA sound card ever. It is one of the most compatible not-sound-blaster cards ever as well, and I personally have one in my 386 all fully re-capped with a Diamond AdWave32 hanging off it.
You found a treasure of retro PCs stuff there. The 5 1/4" / 3 1/2" floppy combo drive is really cool, and many other parts are as well. Great to see you dive into the 486 world with us! The DX2/66 is capable of running Windows 95 , I had it running on an IBM Blue Lightning (Cyrix SX2/66) back in the days Maybe OS/2 might be an interesting OS to try.
I am half way rebuilding my own 486 DX2 66, on a VESA Local Bus motherboard. Spent a couple months sourcing components but it’s almost done. You are a lucky man to be at the right place at the right time! Nice video.
I appreciate that you end the clip with hard drive sounds, don't get to hear those as much with more people using flash adapters for their retro builds.
The worst thing about some PCChips 486 motherboards wasn't the fake cache, it was the knockoff chipsets some of their boards had. They'd put a sticker over them that could say various, often dishonest things about what chipset it was. Underneath, the chip itself had no coherent markings at all to identify who made it.
Very nice!, such a good thing that you rescued all those retro PC's :). My first PC's case (1994, and still have it) is almost identical it seems to the baby AT case that is second from the bottom left, mine has a black power button instead and the outer shell have indents on the top and sides, also the case structure is almost identical to the one you chose for you build :). Actually rebulding it now with both new and used parts, used to be a 486 DX2-66 VLB but will now be upgraded to a Pentium 166.
I was never much of a fan of the AMIBIOS thing after a while.
The Award BIOS often seemed a bit more "stable" overall.
Interesting how that hard drive didn't spin up at first, until the cable was connected.
Most drives will of course spin-up with only the power connected.
But I did have at least a few older (90s era) HDDs which didn't spin up without a controller.
I suspect on some of them, they just have a pull-down resistor instead of a pull-up on the IDE RESET_N signal.
I had one 4GB drive which needed to see the "Spin Up" ATA command, which was unusual.
I love all those retro computers, the 90's was a magical era for computers, and gaming..........and the rise of 3dfx...........we won't talk about what happened to them later. The 3dfx Interactive company ushered in 3D gaming on the home, or consumer PC, I bought my first computer in 1997, and I was so excited to get it; but, quickly became disappointed in the graphics when I bought NFS2se. Then I heard about the Diamond Monster 3D card, I bought one, and the transformation was magical.........and I've been hooked ever since. Love this channel and Phil's Computer Lab!
IRQ & ports settings reminds me of when we had an IBM AT with an expansion chassis running 6 CDROMs and there was one set of nonconflicting IRQs and ports that would work on the various card interfaces. This was before ISO 9660 so all the interfaces were proprietary!
The 'D' in the 'D' parameter stands for "device" not drive letter. It is the name the device driver registers itself under in memory.
Ah gotcha
I've never seen anyone so excited to see 66MHz displayed on a screen 😂
That Packard Bell looks amazing!
I love this stuff. I’ve been watching some channels lately where they take apart and test old machines like this (MikeTech and The Retro Recall if anyone is interested) and it’s been consuming most of my RUclips time lately.
I’d honestly like to see more like this.
Anyway, great vid!
That's a great pile of rescues!
Wish I still had some of those old 386s and 486s that I once owned. A few of them were towers, some were desktops. I had a buddy of mine that lived over 1000 miles away send me a huge 2ft x 2ft x 2.5ft box full of old computer stuff 20 years ago. It was like christmas. Bags of old ram modules, a graphics card that was over a foot and a half long. I use to love tinkering with the old 386/486 PCs back then. Especially installing Dos on them the old fashion way, nothing but floppies baby! Running DOOM... Having to modify the autoexec.bat file to make even the sound work correctly and tell it to boot. Installing windows 3.1 along side dos and having to type "win.exe" to make it run. Now I don't have those PCs anymore, so I rely on virtualbox to feel the nostalgia from time to time.
Soo jealous. I love the old beige systems
My 486 had a similar (if not the same) motherboard (M912). I got it with an 486DX2@66, 16M of 72-pin FPM RAM, Trident TGUi 4xxx VLB video with 1M VRAM and a dual IDE VLB mult iI/O card like yours. In time, I added a SB clone made by Terratek with an 2x Panasonic (or Mitsumi it was?) CDROM. I also upgraded the RAM to 48M (both 30-pin and 72 pin slots), VRAM to 2M and the CPU to AMD5x86 that I overclocked to 150MHz (50x3). I ran Win95 on it, it was very very good. I played Quake, Anno 1602, Dungeon Keeper 2, Civilization 2, Warcraft2, NFS 2, some of these games run better on my 486 that on my friend´s Pentiums.
Windows 95 ran like a champ, I was able to play mp3´s on it (with some tweaks in Winamp) at a good quality, even I could watck movies on VCD format. I run Office, programmed in Borland Pascal and Basic for dos and Windows 16-bit.
I had to upgrade to Pentium just because Starcraft was very slow on it.
Man, I wish to have it again. The motherboard was a beauty, with its WinBIOS, had many settings and tweaks that I tickled each and any to squeeze more power out of that computer.
I still have at least all working motherboards with cpu and ram from my clone pc's I owned from my Atari pc3 xt in the '80 up to my daily pc. 286, 386, 486, pentium, pentium 2 slot 1, etc... you name it. I never sold them. Every time I tried to keep the case and just swap hardware to upgrade. My intel i9 setup for example sits in an Aopen case from 2008 😂 The Atari pc3 and pc4 are complete systems to my knowledge. This video lets me want to take them out of the box again! 😊
Fellow socket 3 user here (and retro pc collector)
I'd say you should definitely grab a Am5x86 133ADW chip.
I have one in my asus pvi486sp3 board along with a cardex tseng labs et4000w32p vlb
Threw in a voodoo1 just for giggles and light glide gaming.
You'll love the extra speed! I have mine clocked at 160mhz. 512k cache board. Also 60ns ram.
I've been wanting to try out a yamaha card for ages. Haven't found one for a decent price yet. Until then I'm using an awe32 with the ram maxed out on it along with a terratec midi daughter card. I also have a dreamblaster s1 daughtercard to swap it with, but I i think I like the terratec better.
A project I may do soon is install a scsi controller and hdd.
I have an adaptec 2940W/UW scsi controller with a scsi Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm 4.3GB in my shelf that is fairly period correct.
It'll be a lot of work reinstalling everything but I i think worth the extra speed and scsi sound!
Congrats on your socket 3 journey and build. Good times.
Yeah I thought about getting that CPU. They aren't expensive. Just depends on how far I want to take it while still keeping it within the era.
Great save! Would like to see also a Socket 7 or Super Socket 7 build and more videos on retro gear!
Great to see another upload from you Nathan. It's interesting to see you learning as you record the video as I'm used to seeing your GPU videos where you are already knowledgeable and have a script.
Yes there are BIG gaps in my knowledge particularly around this period of hardware
/D for cdrom means "Device". It's the argument of "Device name". For letter, look the manual. Probably /L:E or something similar is what you want.
This video is really comfy
LETS GO
Call me crazy, for me a motherboard with the fake cache RAM chips is super-interesting. I've never seen one in real life, let alone own one.
You don't need 40megs to run 95. Windows 95 will run ok on a DX266 with 16 megs of ram. I ran one back in '96 for about 6 to 8 months before upgrading to a Pentium MMX. Also not all turbo switches work that way. Some turn off the cache but others DO downclock the system and others may even do a combo.
Ah ok so I wasn't COMPLETELY mistaken about the turbo
So nice of you to save them! Thank you!
Too cool. My first 486 was a PB Legend 845 (I think) i486SX-33, later upgraded it to ai DX4-100/OD cpu and more ram. Played Aces of the Pacific with no stutters then! Fun times.
You did a good deed, Sir!
...👏👍! ... also for the algorithms.
Been wanting that very top left case. That housed my first own PC
I have it without led display, beautiful case
in dos you got to load cdrom driver mouse driver lol i grew up in the early days of computing also in the config and autoexec files arranging the drivers and getting them in order changes the upper memory block has to be perfect to get the right amount of memory for dos games and dos4gw i miss those times i think ill build an old dos machine and play some old golf games they were fun.
De-oxy is your friend with old hardware. Good to see a new video Nathan.
I recently discovered your and cutting edge retro's podcast from a few years ago, I really enjoyed it! Any chance of bringing it back, even just spontaneous here and there?
Ah yeah those were fun! They were hard to coordinate because of our vastly different timezones. Cutting-Edge Retro has mostly retired from the hobby so there's little chance of another one. I've done a couple streams with Rik's Random Retro since, though.
Damn. I would love to buy the one with the cyan power button but I live all the way in South Africa, and I don't know how expensive it would be to ship something that large over that distance. 😢
Branching your content out into some occasional retro builds or examining some of those towers and doing some teardowns or fixes would all be welcome imho.
You should split those ribbon cables and tape them together to increase airflow
Hey mike! What if I put round cables in here lol
lol. I realized I owned two of those cases and if anyone ever asked me who made them or the model... hell if I know? 90s cases were so recognizable and generic at the same time.
Howdy! You're not still looking for homes for any of these machines, are you?
Amazing stuff
I would really love to have that one with the black visor (middle), damn it :( Very nice rescue im jealous a bit, hmm, ok quite a bit lol :)
You lucky son of a gun.
Best i did was a crt monitor in a block of flats 😂
Nice find there mate, im very slowly putting my 486 machine together. Enjoy say Hi to you other half for me.
very good
Greetings from Romania, the best retro Pc for me was a Pentium 2 system with 350 Mhz, 128 Mb Sd-Ram, VooDoo3 3000 agp, Yamaha sound card on Isa slot and Windows 98 that can boot in ms-dos mode.
What is the function of these seven-segment displays, used on the front of PC cabinets from the 90s?
Same thing as LED lights inside cases nowadays: to look cool.
Well, to be fair they also show different values when the turbo button is pressed, although there's also a separate LED for that, so yeah, to look cool is still the answer.
That Mitsubishi cdrom drive is not the best, install another
Apple Rhapsody DR2 or OpenStep?
Well done, now try making your first Pentium II PC.
I have one!
I can't find DOS era stuff. 😔
I need a old pc to run Windows 95 you can send me one
Please, do become a DOS channel 😅
Add some more memory and try Win XP.