PC archeology: Mystery 486 Mini-Tower
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- Опубликовано: 19 сен 2024
- The viewers asked for it, so here it is! Let's take a look inside the Mini-Tower PC I rescued from a local recycler and get it working.
The first PC Archeology video, the Leading Edge Model "D":
• PC archeology: Leading...
#doscember official playlist:
bit.ly/DOScemb...
#doscember Participating Channels:
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Adrian%27s Digital Basement: / adriansdigitalbasement
ctrl-alt-rees: / ctrlaltrees
DaveJustDave: / mrdavejustdave
Jan Beta: / janbeta
Josh Malone: / joshmalone_48kram
LGR: / lazygamereviews
MindFlareRetro: / mindflareretro
Mr Lurch's Things: / mrlurchsthings
Noel's Retro Lab: / noelsretrolab
Ovesen.net / ovesennet
RetroBytes / retrobytesuk
RetroSpector78: / retrospector78
RMC: / rmcretro
RoseTintedSpectrum: / rosetintedspectrum
Tech Tangents: / akbkuku
The 8-Bit Guy: / adric22
TheRetroChannel: / theretrochannel
--- Info / Keywords
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 Video Card
Thunder Audio Spectrum 16
Contaq 82C596 A
Galaxy V3
--- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/...
Jonard Tools EX-2 Chip Extractor:
amzn.to/2VazxDS
www.jonard.com...
Wiha Chip Lifter:
amzn.to/3a9ftWw
www.wihatools....
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.co...
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...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/i...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.co...
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/i...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfrei...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/i...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/i...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/mis...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorec...
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino
Outro Music:
Abyss by | e s c p | escp-music.ban...
Music promoted by www.free-stock...
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
creativecommon...
Always an adventure diving into machines like these! Thank goodness the battery didn’t yet go all 2020 onto the motherboard and ruin it. And I just love that funky CD tray.
Nice impression too 😄
I was actually confused for a moment :D
I don't know about pro audio thunder, but a true pro audio spectrum sounds much better than a sb16. I had one back in the day and I replaced with an awe 32 or an awe 64, I don't remember which, but I was disappointed in the replacement. The PAS had great sound in the games I ran.
I also had that same exact CD rom drive. Man that thing is SLOW.
I see a lot of memories on that tree.
Rammy has a new punny friend. :)
@@yakskiis7426 Just don't unplug it or the memories will be lost.
A lot of old memories.
@@kenkobra - unless you spray it with liquid nitrogen first... then you’ve got a few minutes. 😉
I forget
It's also nice to see Rami moving around. That means she is a dynamic ram, not a static ram! Baaaa haaa haaa! I'll show myself out now... ;)
Call it "Ram-a-thorn" (Super Troopers reference). Howdy kd5byb. 73s de kc8rlu.
@@minty_Joe :) Greetings and 73!
@@minty_Joe Ahhh it's 73 not 73s! Such a pet peeve of mine. 73 from a mysterious VA3...
Christmas tree needs an Energy Star on top :D
You win this comment section.
That memory tree is the best part of DOSC:\ember
posible 2x2mb & 2x1mb but the bad mem test is coz the clock is set at 50mhz
I looked up that FCC ID, and sure enough, they got this computer certified in 1993. That's some dedication.
...and that company is still in business in Oregon!
Might have been a requirement for some government customers.
back when folks were still concerned about fed gov't enforcement...
@@rillloudmother They are still concerned, if your last name is Trump.
He’s not the one who added 80,000 IRS agents to the payroll, douche.
leaving a USB floppy attached to your Windows 10 machine and rebooting to a 'non-system disk or disk error' is just accidental retrocomputing
Windows really is just a jenga tower
@ 1:45 - great Clint Basinger impression :D
(1:54)
In 1993 some friends of mine and I started a computer company -- we'd build and sell computers using off-the-shelf parts. This video brings back LOTS of memories for me. I honestly do not know how many of these exact computers I built and sold in 1993 and 1994. Dozens and dozens and dozens. This generic mid-tower case, the generic Winbond I/O card, the generic VL-bus-equipped 486 motherboard, the generic 30-pin RAM, etc., etc., etc... So many memories! Very cool to see this machine still working after all these years. :-)
By the extra set of socket holes around the processor, you can see that this board would also accept an Intel Overdrive
22:45 I remember being bedridden with something similar to measles when my Grandfather broke the news to me that he'd managed to break the motherboard of a PC we'd been working on. "I connected the power supply connectors to it the wrong way round". "Ah." I nodded sagely, confident in the finality of its demise.
Theoretically, those little pins on the connectors are supposed to stop you from putting the connectors in wrong. Apparently on this mbd, they didn't clip the openings so the connectors would slide in straight. Unfortunately, they can be put in with a little tilt to get around that protection... :)
In the 90s, the *cover* was the cable management technique of choice. :)
I did notice that the clock speed had gone back to 50mhz in the BIOS again. Vaguely remember that odd multiplier's caused issues with the IRQ for the less popular sound cards?
Could explain the pitches being wrong in the PC Beeper music too. Worth a look-in, as well as possibly checking the filter caps. An ESR meter would do him well, as some caps fail without leaking, they just dry up. Others are totally fine and would be possibly a downgrade to replace if they're not measured.
The mix of cards could introduce irq conflict, also if ram is of different speed rating could effect program speed. Try checking if turbo jumper not closed - this may return bios control of setting.
PS - removed bios battery...🤔🙄😆
That CPU would most likely overheat and crash pretty quickly if it ran at 50MHz, so I doubt that setting actually changed the FSB. EDIT: Unless it actually set the FSB to 25MHz, that's possible.
ED was extended density. They were more common on IBM PS/2 models and capped out at 2.88mb.
The drives might be common on those systems, but the disks? I've never seen ED floppies.
@@mrnmrn1 I used to volunteer for a nonprofit that recycled e-waste and I only came across a 2mb diskette once. My family used to have a whole box of the ls120 ones, though.
@@richardestes6499 2-megabyte 3.5" disks are just HD disks. Their basic capacity is 2 MB, but formatting takes a chunk of the space for the file structure. In case of the FAT12 used on PC, the usable capacity is 1.44 MB. On some other systems, it would be different. (If I remember correctly, Macs of the time used their own formatting.) In the early 90's the non-formatted disks were a little cheaper, and they would be typically labelled as 2 MB (or the DD's as 1 MB). Later it became standard for the disks be factory formatted for PC -- but if you needed them for non-PC system, you'd just format them on the system, just like you would do in case of non-formatted disks.
I've never seen the 2.88 MB disks, but I'd suppose their non-formatted capacity would be 4 MB.
@@enginerd80 And, there were utilities to format them to higher capacities by utilizing more tracks. Hit or miss on reliability depending on the drive as well as the physical disks used.
"Black to black's got your back" is the saying that I remember...
I've always said "Black to back or you'll never go back"
I've always used "Red to red, you're dead"
I've blown *one* motherboard because I didn't know what I was doing...
I always use : "Red on red, tou're dead, Black on black you're back"
@@TheotanyaSama No, if you power it up with red to red, the motherboard's dead, and no amount of black on black will bring it back.
I just remembered it by saying that "blacks are supposed to stick together." Never blew a motherboard in the AT era by messing that up, what little time there was of it for me. (94-97 then ATX pretty much took over). The next motherboard I recall ruining wasn't until LGA 775 (screwed up the socket pins somehow).
Finally a video about mini-tower. I had a Pentium 166 MMX in exact same case many years ago.
IIRC, there was an initialization program to run, for SB compatibility to work. I know that once I had everything set up right, my PAS16 worked for any SoundBlaster program I threw at it.
22:28 "Read to Red, you'll always be dead, Black to Black, you're safe Jack"
but what if i'm not called Jack?
48:56 The nice thing about Windows 3.x was that an incorrect video mode could be corrected directly from DOS. Running SETUP.EXE from the Windows directory was usually the preferred way for most people, while the SYSTEM.INI edits were the more hardcore way (and in some ways faster for those of us who did that enough.)
Fun thing about dialup is my ISP still supplies an "emergency phone number" for dialup when the broadband craps out, but when the broadband crapped out for me a couple months back, the phoneline itself was failing so dialup wouldn't have even worked anyway!!! :P
the darkside of VoIP
i remember the early days of the CB demise - that channel 36 was used by wireless data testers - to link a 9600b and send files over CB
@@herauthon Here in the UK, the majority of our phonelines are still copper, so not VoIP just yet, but when there's corroded and broken wires, it doesn't matter either way, call and data are going nowhere... :P
@@twocvbloke
Well, we got Cable - and i assume it is a cupper connection - but the modem uses VoIP - to convert analogue phone signal to digital signal - effectively VoIP. [ ihmo ]
Juno still offers free dial up internet 🤣
"Black to black, no flack, red to red, you're dead" is the way I learned. Usually I've found that in most cases (I've tried, with power off and PSU discharged) it won't even let you plug it in red to red, those little hooks never let it fit.
These old 486 systems in a non-descript box, with that purple, orange, and green BIOS, oh man those systems were HORRIBLE! Just like the weird issues you kept having that would pop up and seemingly go away, that's how these things ran. Quirky at best. Some days good, some days bad.
The way it used to be, with those multi-I/O cards, a million jumpers, and no documentation, endless reboots and running test programs to make sure you had no conflicts, drove a lot of techs back then to drink. I'd love to finish that with "ask me how I know", but fortunately I can say I wasn't old enough to drink then!
I used to have a 486DX50 around, sound card, Ethernet, and had some sort of proprietary Sony CD-ROM drive that hooked to the Sound Blaster card's Sony connector. Even added the drivers to the Windows 98 boot disk back then for it. And the MicroSolutions BackPack parallel port connected CD-ROM drive. I actually have seen the type of CD-ROM you had in this machine, that thing's a gem. I had an old 2X drive, it actually had a 1X/2X light on the front, and when it could achieve 2X speeds it would light up that light. Back when they made the hardware do something fun in and of its own right. I don't think anybody ever had a problem with more blinkenlights.
A perfect example of what problems you had with PCs back in the time. You got a PC from someone and something didnt work. Three hours later fiddeling around with cables, cards, adresses and interrupts the thing worked perfectly fine. When the guy got around to pick up the PC and asked "What did you do to fix it?" you would normally answer "I have no idea".
That's the exact cabinet of my very first PC. A Cyrix 486 DX 4MB RAM, 540 MB HD. The small display has a glowing green color for CPU speed... 88 to 100 on turbo or something like that. A very lovely present from my mother.
I had a "Thunder Board for Windows", Thunder Board was MediaVision's 8-bit Sound Blaster clone. It was a great pairing with my 33mhz 486DX. The "for Windows" variant just came with some Windows 3.x software (like the excellent Sound Forge 1.0!). I wasn't aware they used this Thunder branding on their PAS at some point in its lifespan!
Have you ever tried Xtree Gold file management software, was a great DOS utility and I used in to about 2000.
Watching this video takes me back to my early days of PC, my first PC was a 386, it's great to tinker around with old computers but by goodness thankfully things have moved on in the real world and the average person can achieve amazing things with a modern PC.
I sold my first CTL computer in 1988, a 286. Computer Technology Link or CTL is still in Portland selling computers wholesale. The owner David Kim had me design some logos for him and the Big K with the im in the leg is the one he chose. I sold their computers even after I retired up until about 2010 when I retired again. For a time they made their motherboards in California using their own designs. I visited the plant once, it was pretty amazing. Their monitors were made in their own plant in Korea. I still have a pallet load of 17 & 21 inch monitors. They are good people to deal with if you are a computer reseller. Thanks for the video!
The metal standoffs for the motherboard have another purpose. They ground the motherboard to the chassis.
Don't ditch that sound card as they tend to be pretty good to even desirable for collectors so maybe check the caps.
Agreed 🍩
I don’t think he ditches anything. The dead parts bin would agree with me in this
He has the wrong drivers.
HighTreason610 has some valid concerns regarding the SoundBlaster 16's audio quality vs the PAS16:
ruclips.net/video/sdphd742Oqs/видео.html
I haven’t heard of this particular board, but I had a PAS16 back in the day and it was fine. It was an upgrade from an SBPro, before the SB16 was readily available, and came with a fancy MOD player that played in 16-bit stereo mixing.
My only complaint was that Wolf3D wasn’t in stereo, and maybe one or two other scene demos or something that could only use the Sound Blaster compatibility.
What I didn’t realize back then was that the SB compatibility was actually provided by a dedicated chip from the Thunder Board (an SB clone) and meant I could have used two wave devices in Windows - which would have been a pretty neat trick back then!
Anyway, it was a solid card, so I suspect the drivers aren’t working right or something here.
Oh, and the PC speaker thing - it actually listens to the IO address of the timer to intercept and emulate it.
2.88MB drives were used mainly in PS/2 and RS/6000/POWERstation systems.
Case looks familiar to me too. I purchased many of these type of mini/midi tower cases back in the 1990s for various businesses I worked for.
This one looks like a great 486DX66 machine I used to use and was very proud of!
Also - some cases had sharp edges on the internal case metalwork. The times I skinned my knuckles getting a mobo out of a non-tray case!!
5:03 - Name-brand 80486 boxen usually came with an Intel Inside sticker. The ones we had in high school all had them.
Nice LGR impression 😎
I have hate-love relationship with mini towers of early 90ties. My first two PCs 386 and 486 had them so I have nostalgia love for them but this was era when I changed a lot in them and cheapo towers where heavy stamped metal with lots of burr and sharp edges so in those tight spaces I lost a lot of blood fitting different drives, ISA and PCI cards, ram modules...
Yep. Building a computer back then meant walking away looking like you danced with Freddy Kruger.
How you attached the cr2032 with a diode was the part I wanted to see most. Anyway, another great video.
He's shown it in earlier videos, but it's basically just a bit of solder and heat shrink tubing anyway.
@@kaitlyn__L I have a need to do it on several machines and I realize it is easy but I want to get it correct and the diodes location and orientation is not obvious to me as it seems to be to many.
That's exactly how I remember PC's in the early 90's. Those all seem like typical problems we all encountered.
I had a Mac in this era -- a Centris 650 -- and it just worked, elegantly and beautifully.
@@iocat Yup. I was still primarily an Amiga user at the time. Same story. Those just worked.
These old PCs live on to this day in machine shops. Mills and lathes that have been converted to CNC are frequently based on PC motherboards like this. Also I remember using outdated units just like this one to “DNC” programs to milling centers where the CAD/CAM generated program was too large for the machine’s internal memory. 7200 baud rate via rs-232 that sometimes required re-soldering the pin-out to get everyone to shake hands. Good times.
Ohh god the old cases, giving me ptsd of slicing open my fingers/hands
Remember him saying in one of his early videos that he normally wasn't one of the retro guys? Now he's making christmas trees out of memory modules xDD
We've corrupted him
@@kaitlyn__L but hopefully we haven't corrupted his memory! lol
You paused the boot sequence the first time, maybe that’s why it said 6mb then 8mb on the reboot?
What a flashback Adrian! Thanks for doing this one, I'm only a couple minutes in and OF COURSE I remember this case, I built MANY system in that style case, and ours had the lcd number box.. We had metal badges for the square on the front.. man the days. I forgot the old red Intel inside sticker.. man it's been SO long..
O, and the logo on the front; to me it looks like Kim. Capital K and 'im' in small print in the leg of the K. Maybe the machine was owned by someone called Kim?
Exactly, take a look here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTL_(company)
I was wondering if I was just imagining that, when he called it "K Inc". It's definitely a personalised "Kim" badge.
Sorry I'm late to this party, lol. I had a 486DX-33 built by a company called Midwest Micro way back in 1994. It was a VESA local bus system. I was impressed by the speed at the time, with the local bus cards running at bus speed. The multi IO card died a couple of years in and I had to replace it with a 16 bit card, it just wasn't the same. My case was almost identical to this one, except it was a full tower and the display read 33. It was a damn fine machine.
I just realised that Doomguy wears gloves! I always thought he just had some weird wrinkly hands... 2020 just keeps getting weirder.
Sweet, enjoyed that. :)
Brings back a lot of memories. I used to work at a small PC manufacturer in the early 90s, and this is very similar to what we made. That case is one of the very common ones, I remember every nook and cranny of it. Sadly I've forgotten who made it, but it was very cheap (around $25) and simple to build in. That motherboard tray was a real god-send and the primary reason we used it. Saves SO much time. We used to unhook the trays from all the cases in storage, and mount them as orders came in. Fun times.
As for the white bar with that Cirrus card.. I've seen that before, but can't for the life of me remember why it's doing that. If you find a fix for it, let us know eh? :)
We used several different Cirrus cards, they were really cheap back then, and mostly did the job. I seem to recall there were driver issues with them, though. Later on we moved to ATI cards, which were much nicer in general.
Happy new year Adrian, looking forwards to whatever you'll come up with in the new year. :)
It’s amazing how much time you can sink in to one retro PC just getting everything working perfectly - driver and irq and config file wise, even after you’ve selected the hardware you want and think will work, cleaned it and built it. And then there’s the software you install which is really what a computer is all about. Different things best or will work for each system, even for systems only a couple years apart. Good thing it’s just a fun hobby, I would go crazy trying to support a 30 year range of hardware and software in a business environment, a uniform modern fleet is enough trouble.
My cousin's family got their first PC one christmas in the early 90s after using their Apple //e for a few years. It was one of the first multimedia PCs we had ever used, and came with an encyclopedia on CD. I later found out it was a 486SX(?) running at 25MHz. Only a few years later I got my own Dell 486DX2/66 as a high school graduation present, although it was probably the last 486 model Dell ever sold since Pentium machines were starting to dominate catalogs.
I too worked in mom and pop computer stores beginning around 92-93 until about 99 building and repairing 100's if not 1000's of computers. This brings back so many memories for me and I'm amazed at how much I'd forgotten. Those plastic standoffs definitely belong on the trash heap of history along with the multi IO cards and their myriad of jumper settings that were never the same from card to card.
@17:49 When working on AT cases, you can use a pair of needle nose plyers to close the clips on the plastic stand offs and push the stand off through the board. Then the system board can be lifted out. That is how I always did it.
The 386 phone server with built-in amber CRT that I picked up at Computer Reset also had one of those barrel batteries that had just barely started leaking, so I'm glad I got it when I did and de-soldered it before any damage was done!
It says 486 in the FCC ID number so that's not a surprise.
Man, I just love mini-towers. They're just such a perfect little squat compact PC, I think literally every school PC I ever used was a mini-tower, so many memories.
There is a dos utility called CLMODE which will allow you to set 1024x768 to run in non-interlaced. It defaults to interlaced, which an LCD of course won't accept
Ah right!! Of course. Completely forgot about interlaced 1024x768
In the 90's (1994) I used to have a 486 SX25 with a generic case with a round shape in the front. I overclocked it to 40 MHz, this was the time before regular OC. I didn't know what I did with jumpers, but it worked and I even installed a cooler with a fan. Now I bought a pentium 100 in an AT case like this one, it will do it until I find a case I used to have.
The RAM tree is freaking awesome! You need an LED star and it would be all set!
Someone else mentioned it needs an "energy star" LOL!!!
@@adriansdigitalbasement Hahahahaha I agree! It does need an Energy Star! :) Awesome!
There's a DOS utility "CLMODE" along with the Cirrus Logic drivers, which lets you set the refresh rates of the various resolutions. Maybe it defaults to 72 Hz which is out of range of your screen.
It defaults to interlaced
That kind of cdrom used to be the Mitsumi brand in my country. Thank you for the video!
Adrian, if you're curious for the mnemonic for AT power connectors that I was taught by my father, it's "Red on Red, you're dead, Fred. Black on Black, you're alright, Jack."
Merry Christmas Adrian! Thanks for all the hard work making videos this year! Looking forward to next year!
25:34 hahaha i burst out laughing! "there is a nice calendar there like if you're going to .. look at the calendar i guess? i always wondered why hat was in there exactly"
We had that exact CD-ROM drive in our 386, with the separate controller card. And the sound card we had in it (a Sound Blaster 2.0, IIRC) didn't have a CD audio connector, so I think we used a dual RCA to 3.5 mm cable to connect it through the line-in. Yes, it is a single-speed Mitsumi drive.
You made me feel old since I was out of college at my first "real job" at a system builder (a PC shop) in central Ohio - I either built, repaired or supervised (I was a build side manager) the build of 1000's of machines with very similar cases.... I do remember that the place I worked for had some case and mobo combos tested by the FCC - they had foil labels printed for those machines - and sometimes they were applied to other machines. We printed system configuration labels on Oki 1080 printers so we'd know if a system was modified after it went out the door.
Very lucky that machine didn't suffer from the dreaded battery leakage! It's a shame about the sound card, I'm sure it would work better with the original drivers.
I wish I had more time off to play with my Pro AudioSpectrum card and 1x CD-ROM drive. Had to get them shipped all the way from the US to Australia because they're the same kind that we had in our family 386 back in the day. The drive uses the LSMI interface, so it would be cool to get it working (if they work!).
Anyway, it's always fun to watch you re-living the experience of using these machines. Even if they're just as temperamental as they were back in the day!
Yessss! Thank you for making a video about this machine! I'm only 26 seconds in and already excited 😁
Ok, at 10:55, I am thinking it is a 486, using that Mitsumi interface for the 'crocodile CDROM drive' ( that's what me and a friend called it!), To a SB16-ish sound card. The rear audio ports suggest it isn't Creative... But I'm not sure.
The VGA will be a VLB card, slightly popped out of the socket.
The IO card will have an IDE and floppy controller, with the usual array of IO on it.
Great video, but I'm commenting solely to say that little ram plushie is pure, distilled adorable.
I remember, sometime in the mid-90's, I discovered the option to format a floppy at 2.88mb. I formatted several disks that way, it worked fine with most of my disks and all of the PCs I used them on. I never found anything that used it by default.
Looking up the FCC ID, it looks like there was also a mid-tower version of this ("CTL486MD"), a full tower ("CTL486FT"), and a desktop ("CTL486DT"), and then they made a Pentium-based one in 1995 ("CTL586PFT" and "CTL586PMID").
Yeah, I think Adrian gets confused with FCC REG at 9:18, because the ID is on nearly every piece of computer equipment.
Anyone who scraps a vintage computer should be ashamed of themselves.
Good job! I worked at a computer store in Yakima back in the 90s. Brought back some memories.
I love the memory tree :D I recall struggling to plug in VESA cards on my 486-33SX (?) machine I had, you really had to push hard and I was always half expecting to hear a "crack!" and have it break in half! My father and I used to haunt computer fairs and picked up lots of cheap sound cards in that era, and always struggled with them to get them to work with all the games. I think in 94 or shortly after Creative came out with a new card (the AWE 32?) and there were a lot of SB 16 cards being sold second hand for very little, so we got a load for all our computers (I had 3, my dad had 4 including the one he "maintained" for my sister) and never had problems. When I bought my new shiny pentium 100 machine in '96 I bought an AWE64 and was blown away by its sound. So I was a big fan of creative... these days I use laptops and so have to use whatever the manufacturer supplies, but then again most game sounds these days are wave based and sythesis is something of a relic now.
Just for reference, the packard bell legend, 486 sx 25mhz we bought in 1994 had a red intel inside sticker.
I also saw an Acer 486DX50 machine from the early Win95 era with a red Intel Inside sticker.
I had that same Puckered Ball machine, and it also had a red sticker.
For some added safety get a portable RCD-trip device and add it to your mains power input for the project/s, that way if you ever become part of the circuit, the breaker will trip and can save your life. They are mandatory on most circuits in Australia in the switchboards these days as they save lives and don't cost the earth.
Your very lucky to have found that PC and gave it a home! Wish I had that luck finding an early 90's pc....
I love those old Mitsumi tray loaders. Far less fiddly than caddy types and there are no belts to break down. Plus if you want the drive to be inert (not spin up or be accessed across multiple reboots, for example), just leave it unclicked. The reason they and other early CDROMs used special interface cards (unless you had SCSI) is that the basic ATA standard doesn't support removable drives, so CDROMs and things wouldn't be usable without rebooting the system every time you wanted to insert or remove a disc. Hence the special cards with their own custom interfaces (some cards had up to 3 different headers for the different drive standards: Mitsumi, Sony, or Panasonic/Creative). It wasn't until the Pentium era that ATAPI was introduced which basically identified a CDROM (or Zip or other removable) as a normal ATA device to BIOS but sent status changes and data over the bus in packets to the OS and its drivers to get around these limitations.
I had a Sound Blaster 16 card that had an integrated scsi adapter. Back in the days of super expensive RAM, we used small (100-200 MB) Apple scsi drives in our windows 95/98 computers for dedicated swap space.
This was a great tour of the seemingly endless compatibility problems that everyone building PC's had in the 90's and why so many people chose to open their wallets to buy Dell or some other brand name computer. Nothing sucked more than getting a new card and finding that your computer wouldn't boot with it plugged in, or getting a new game and finding that your sound card only partially worked with it but didn't have problems with any other games. I wasted hundreds of hours of my life on stuff like this.
That blacks in the middle rule is one of those things that I can't remember where I learned it from, but it's ingrained in my memory like not touching a hot stove.
“No user serviceable parts inside.” 😂 That's just silly. Users routinely opened these machines up to replace cards and drives, and there's nothing above 12V in there (except the PSU, but it has its own case and warning label).
Side note: giving the PSU its own case was an excellent idea. Isolating the only dangerous component of the machine made it safe for an entire generation of young nerdlings like me to tinker with our computers. I'd probably never have touched anything in any of my PCs if I had to worry about getting accidentally killed by touching a high-voltage capacitor. So, thanks to whoever (presumably at IBM) made that design decision.
23:45 See if there is enough space in the PSU to mount that switch in the PSU case itself... You have a Dremel, maybe think of a few projects to create a MOD-a-thon video...
Yep, these cases were everywhere in the 486 days. Remember working on a few. The tray removal was a god-send.
I remember when we used a VLB motherboard with a 486 DX-50 as an ad-hoc Novell server. The server kept abending. Turns out the the Vesa IDE controller couldn't handle a bus speed of 50Mhz. Had to switch to a DX2-66.
Funny to hear, that a Creative Sound Blaster is called a better sound card, then an Audio Spectrum. If it's about quality, the last one is by far more superior, than any Sound Blaster of the same time. The Audio Spectrums are also more expensive and adorable by collectors today. What you found in this PC is a treasure of sound cards. A lot of games supported Pro Audio Spectrum along Sound Blaster, despite that Sound Blaster was a "standard" at that time. This was due to much better quality and stereo 16 bits sampling, at the time where Creative still had only 8.
486s really were the gateway from the "old limited computer freak times" to the more modern "everybody uses PCs now" era :-)
Sooo much happened between the 286s and Pentiums.
I really love my 486-DX4-120 with Cirrus VLB VGA and 24MB EdoRAM. Even Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior (that came out in 1997 !!!) run very decently on it :-)
Only the CD ROM Drive is a single speed and a bit slow, but it came with the SoundBlaster PRO and I would like to keep it original :-)
It is a real FCC ID if you look it up. That is nuts.
that CD drive actually is one of the few drives that actually work with early linux. (If i believe correctly)
Speaking of wire management... Back In The Day, once case airflow became a concern due to the later and hotter running CPUs, I used to make "rounded" IDE and floppy cables by splitting apart the flat ribbon cables and stacking them into little bundles, and then strapping the bundles together with a zip tie. That way they would be out of the way of the air getting blown inside from the front case fan.
Yeah me too! I actually talked about that a bit while recording the video but cut it out for time. The video was already long enough :-)
I have an AT case very similar to this, but slightly different. Super cheap and flimsy case I got in 1996, but at the time they had already sold cases in that design for a few yes. The peculiar thing about my case is that has an air intake in the front with space for a fan in the long card support thingie and an external dust filter that is actually super easy to clean as the lower part of the front panel comes off. I have never seen any other cases from that time with dust filters, or even a functional air intake. To my knowledge only the original Pentium (the P5) ran hot enough that you'd need any extra cooling. But even though the case has an air intake, there is no exhaust fan, there's only the passive ventilation through the PSU
Also those port holes on the back are not just "if you want to use them". Most boards didn't include brackets for the ports, and you are actually only supposed to use the brackets in cases that don't have the dedicated port holes, like cases from before it became standard. Wasting expansion slots unnessecarily on ports shows a lack of professionalism at CTL who apparently built this machine
And a correction: CD drives are not IDE. They're ATAPI and use the ATA bus, which PATA harddrives also use. ATAPI is an extra protocol on top of the ATA standard that allows it to use drives with removable disks. Before the introduction of ATAPI the CD drives had to use proprietary interfaces as there was no other way for them to work. I know we all used to call it all IDE, but it's actually incorrect. The interface standard is ATA, and the problem with calling it IDE is that SCSI and SAS drives are also IDE (and always have been). This is also why the modern standard is SATA - Serial ATA - and why it's so easy to connect a PATA drive to a SATA controller and vice versa; the interface protocol hasn't changed, only the way they connect to the controller
If it weren't for the case badge and the ejecting-drive CD-ROM I'd absolutely swear that this machine was the one I built in 1995. Those are some danged familiar parts in there, right down to the I/O controller and graphics card. Hell, I even had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16. (Although I had a DX4/100)
The PAS16's main claim to fame was that it was a 16-bit stereo sound card that came with some great creation tools. It was only compatible with the original SB (and not even particularly well) but it also predated the SB16. Also it had some fun programmer-friendly features on it which basically nobody used.
The Torque graphics test looks like it was written by Steve Gibson, listen to his podcast on security, and he's still writing awesome utilities to this day!
Any one else remember having bleeding hands when messing about inside cases of this era??
I do remember having spaghetti cable runs as well... :)
Love the video's Adrian - Takes me back in time too to when I used to build my own computers....
Winbond's MIO cards were notorious for handling properly 14 MHz I/O bus without any penalties. Others failed quickly.
Most CDROM drives back in the day were one of a handful of interfaces, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony and a few others. It should be easy enough to tell by looking at the brand on the CDROM itself. Philips was another common one. Each of these interfaces had their own MS-DOS drivers which are still readily available and they would work regardless of the card used provided the drive itself was supported by it (typically sound cards but some used a dedicated add in card).
6MB = 2MB (512KB each) in first 4 slots and 4MB (1MB each) in last 4 slots. Did that a lot back in the day repurposing memory from previous computers.
30-pin SIMM modules were only available in 256 KB, 1 MB, 4 MB, and 16 MB.
No 6 MB setup was possible then.
Watching your videos is like being transporting back in time. You do a great job on the videos, and your knowledge is really vast, which makes watching fun. I kept my first computer which is now 39 years old, when I stored it away it was still working. Now Im going to dig it out and see if it will boot up. Panasonic Senior Partner, it was advertised as the first computer you can carry onto a plane. I remember it ran on DOS 1.0, and all that stuff was lost many many years ago. Hope I can find a copy. I worry about the battery, guess we will see.
Dream machine. I briefly had a DX66 with VESA bus, it was a huge update from my previous 386 DX40. Both VESA I/O card and the video cards felt super fast.
A colour BIOS setup screen? Pure decadence. Back then when I were young we were lucky if we were greeted with a black and white BIOS setup. After a day down the mines, a solid beating from parents and gruel for supper it was a highlight of the day :-D
I love the thought of the memory tree!! So cute... might have to make myself one 😀 ❤💙💜
It's an old concept.
@@Okurka. Seems to be such an old memory 😉😉
Computer Technology Link corp seems to have been a pre-built wholesaler in the 80s-90s (they sell Chromebooks now), they probably registered their standard builds with the FCC and the sticker on the front would probably be from w/e local shop tweaked it and resold it
I've got my first "Fast" PC back in time, from my uncle, It was a 486 DX2 66 2 MB, Trident Graphics, i had 8 MB RAM. I had also VLB Slots But the Special on this System was the Bios, it was a Graphic Interface. A Bios from AMI, It loked Like Windows 3 or so.
Thank you so much for that Video, it brings memorys back.
A friend of mine and I used to build up 486 era systems about 20 years ago. One time he just put something together and his whole family plus me were waiting for him to turn it on. He held the AT power switch in his hand and he sort of vibrated for a split second and threw the switch to the ground, then his brother collapsed to the floor. His brother took a deep breath and started laughing. My friend had inadvertently use his hand to short the switch to earth and tripped the safety switch. His brother fell over because he was laughing so hard.
Cute RAM tree. Although, from the amount you have been sent, I think you need more of them! Interesting video as always.