loved the walkthrough. its crazy how back in the late 90s early 2000s my dad used to pick these old 286 and 386 computers with monitors off the sides of the roads, bring them home and let me work on them, swap parts, build "better" family computers.. and it was almost instincts to just put them together and have dos/win3.1 running.. fast forward to the 2020's and we've gotten so spoiled with plug and literally play that going back to the 80s, 90s era of AT motherboard building can give you anxiety hahah, but i loved it at the time, and i still do. Loved the vid, classic stuff, im parting together win98 build now.. i hate i threw away, sold, or destroyed all the old hardware ive owned and bought.. i regret it big time.
Also, 😍🐶 at 58:22. I believe a 20mhz sx386 was the minimum required cpu to run the 7th guest, so one could guess that this machine could run some of the earlier FMV titles quite well
There's a difference between running the 7th guest, and running it well 😅 A 25mhz 486 SX is still a bit choppy to play it, but given the nature of the game its still perfectly playable of course
@Viczarratt yes I know, but if you're saying a 20mhz 386sx meets the minimum spec for 7th guest therefore this machine could run early FMV games quite well, then a 25mhz 486sx which is roughly equivalent to a 40mhz 386dx should be even better, but will still noticeably stutter playing 7th guest.
Good stuff. Your motherboard looks like a Soyo, possibly an SY-018. Other than layout, pretty much all boards using that chipset will function the same anyway, with very little difference between them. As there are so few jumpers, they're usually not too bad to figure out blindly when you're certain something _is_ a jumper and not a header. As for the 32-Bit expansion bus, it _was_ for memory, but in theory if you wanted to develop your own card for it, you could totally use it for something else. The top of full AT motherboards were often held by slot-like standoffs that hooked over the top edge. I'm not sure how many people bothered installing them, given I've seen enough machines on their original hardware that didn't have them in place. They're kinda like an upside down J shape, usually made of nylon. XCMOS refers to "eXtended CMOS". Up until the late 80s, the CMOS setup was basically just a software version of the dipswitch from the 8088 era - sometimes not even in ROM and run from inside the OS like GSETUP. Being able to tamper with anything more than video type, number of floppies and base RAM size would be classified as machine specific "extended" options. When you think about it, the convention continued into the 90s, where everything that wasn't in the Standard menu being the extended setup, much as how it's a separate screen entirely on yours. This is actually a divergent point where the clones began rapidly breaking away from being simple copies of other hardware and began doing their own things, spurring on the rapid advancement of PC technology in the 90s. With period correct I like to factor in the idea of a "feasible upgrade", whereby someone might have bought a part a couple of years into owning the machine. Sound cards would be such an example, as they often didn't come with the PC and people added them later on, along with optical drives.
Thanks for the info. didn't know that about the standoffs. never saw them before. I sort of suspected the slot was for memory. I had another old 386 motherboard once that had a similar slot but I had a model for the board so I knew it was for a memory card so I suspected it was the same here. Glad to see your back, looking forward to any future videos.
Yep, the smaller mid-tower version of our first, too! It was a 386DX/33. That case design is my absolute favorite. I have a mini-tower version (486DX2/66), a mid-tower (386DX/40) and a full tower that I'll be building as a DX/33 in honor of our family computer circa 1992. Classic.
Very neat. I'm hoping to set up a franken-puter with some stuff I found in a bin yesterday. (in the garage). I think I'm going to document the project on here, even in its strewn state; people's input would be super helpful
I dabble on the edge of retro-computing. And I have sometimes wondered about one box with all drives to do it all that I could just switch on to get jobs those jobs done. Props for 5.25 drive.
@@clangerbasher outside of using things like Dobox theres really no one retro computer you can build that going to run everything from the 80s to early 2000s well. Best you could probably do is a socket 7 PC with a K6-III and something like setmul to adjust the cpu speed. That at least would play most win 9x and late DOS stuff competently with not to much trouble.
I remember that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, sometimes people would try to connect that old CD-ROM drive they had to their new computer, and it wouldn't work. Of course, it would often turn out that the drive was fine, they were just trying to connect it to the IDE interface on their new computer, but the drives were made to use the Panasonic or the Mitsumi interface. Both of those used 40 pin connectors so look like IDE drives, but required a suitable interface card. It was fairly common for sound cards to have interfaces for connecting such drives. If I recall correctly, IDE ATAPI drives became common around 1995 or so.
It's definitely a very early 386 board. That's a first-run 386 chip. You can tell by the double sigma marking. That means it's ok to run 32-bit software. Defective first-run chips were marked "16-BIT S/W ONLY"
Nice video, man. I am a fan of 386 systems. My first pc was a 386 SX16 mhz. I didnt knew the SX, were also 20mhz.. And that video card is pretty fast. You get very high score in 3dbench, compared to my my 486 sx 25mhz with a trident isa video card, that gets 17 score in 3dbench. I wonder if your 386sx20mhz can run Test Drive 3 the proper way.
Great work on another nice looking build! As a late 80s system, I wonder how it would benchmark against the Amiga A2000 and the Atari mega ST4 as gaming systems?
My 386sx case was even bigger than this one .. i used to hide my illegal fireworks in it on top of the 5 1/4 drive. And the fpu actually did make a difference for games if i recall correctly. I had one in my 286 and at some point I added one to that 386sx and it made for more go fast.
Your freezing issue with Wolfenstein 3D is something I encounter semi-regularly with long play sessions on all of my 386 and 486 PCs, usually running for about 2-3 hours before a crash. On very rare occasions it actually prints out "Divide error" before dropping me back to DOS, but you could see a still shot of the game underneath the text. I meant to dig into this myself but ultimately put it aside. Very interesting to see someone else ran into this same problem, I'll have to dig into this again soon.
I just figured it was a fluke or maybe some issue with the RAM that triggered now and then. You'll have to let us know if you figure out anything definitive.
Hey, I have a near identical model of that board! Soyo SY-011. Just looked up my photos, and it matches, other than having all DIP RAM, with additional sockets. Labeled version 5.2, and matches the listing on theretroweb. Keep it around as it's ridiculous, and a perfect example of what early motherboards were. It's populated with a huge 8MB of DIP RAM, and an i387. Takes forever to POST with 8MB of RAM, which theretroweb says is its max. Either way 8MB was a lot - my very late 386 I had in the mid 90s came with 4x256KB simms, and I was later given my dad's old 4x1MB to get me up to a whole 5MB. Those 4x1MB came with me to my 486DX4, with an additional 8MB, to get that 486 up to a whopping 12MB. I only had higher after I upgraded from the 486 to a K6-300 with 32MB of RAM. Lifechanging upgrade for sure.
oh this is the build youve been mentioning? I love the use of non...'normal' hardware. Like every 386 uses "this" video card, or "that" sound card/cards...plus yea thats such an oddball board. I dont think i was even aware 386s had dip/zip ram, I thought 286 AT and clones were the last to use dip type ram, so yea that has to be a super early board. I think that io controller might be the reason for the cd rom...I came across an issue liek that with my 5170, and the 386 I'm working on, ide wouldnt work or floppy wouldn't, something about later type ones not liking 286/386 based machines even tho they worked on 486/pentiums. Amazing build regardless....and if i didnt already jsut get done with that XP i just built, Id be rocking on the low-ish end 386 pc, got me itching to get going on it lol
sometimes it gets boring always going with the ET4000 or the Voodoo 3 and it's just nice to try something off the beaten path even if it's not fast. I really wanted to go with something a little different sound wise but everything else in my collection was too new or in another build.
I'm wondering if the 80287 support was for compatibility with a 386 "SX" (SuX!) processor? That way, you'd maintain a 16-Bit Bus across the mainboard. Edit: I meant to say that, yes this is almost guaranteed an OEM board, I saw a few very much like this, in the flesh. Mainly because you could interchange between the SX and DX variants pretty easily, although I remember some complaints that the switch added unnecessary wait states and so a true DX board was faster.... Hope that helps! it's sure going back like 33 years! Oh man, the 386DX was my first true love, prior to that, I only ever had an 8-Bit Amstrad CPC-464! My Dad had a C64, but that was his toy and wouldn't let me use it! My first PC was an AMD 386-DX40, with a not too shabby Trident VGA, 4mb 30pin Simms, 180Mb HDD (WOW!!!) and a Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 which I'd managed to get 2Mb of Wavetable RAM (it also used Simms). The AWE also had a Creative CD-ROM interface! I got this machine in '94 and yeah, compared to the 486 which had been out a while by then, it was a little long in the tooth, but I was lucky as it was a relatively high-spec 386 (when I maxed it out at 16Mb of very low-WS ram). I know the CPU supported more, but the motherboard on that machine didn't. Still, 16Mb in those does was still godlike! My old friend had sadly dropped out of his Computer Science degree, which is why he had such a potent 386 in the first place. I remember when I first saw it (with a 14" Goldstar display RAWR!) and he was showing me the first Terry Pratchett Discworld game and I fell in love and had to have it or something very close, lol I lost days on that game! Anyay, ex-student and flat broke, he sold the whole thing to me for £200 which I still think was a steal! Nice thing way, as he'd been in the CompSci programme, they'd been given beta access to Chicago, the Windows 95 Beta! I know a lot of people diss on the 386, but I can confidently assert that a true 32Bit bus 386 (so a DX) with at least 4Mb of RAM was more than powerful enough to run Windows 95. In fact, on my machine, apart from the boot process which was a little slow, largely because Multimedia was just this new incredible adventure and I'd fille the machines to its Gills with sound effects and startup effects from the Johnny Mnemonic film, it booted with the "I want to get Online ... I Need a Computer!" for example ... Sad but true ... IDC though, I loved that Film, even if I'm the only one! I dreamt of the Day when the Interface looked like the Opening sequence they'd done in 3D Studio that purported to show the Internet in 2021! You can search on RUclips for user Tom Rath, his video "The Internet in the Year 2021" for that segment of that CGI, it was Awesome!! Anyway, best of luck with your new toy, I'm rather jealous! But my plan is to try and make a Handheld 386-DX, so true 32Bit palm-PC and running Linux, so I can have a pocket sized mobile C/C++ development environment ... because I am that *sad" 😀
No, it was not removed. Technically all ISA slots on 386 are 16 bits and allow installation of both 8 and 16 bit extension cards but there were huge PC/XT 8 bit cards that could not be installed into 16 bit slot due to shape. That's quite common to see place on bord for 16 bit extension part that is not installed for that reason. Seems like you could decide what to change when order big batch on factory for some vendors.
On the simple advanced, shadow the system BIOS and video BIOS, on the plus, the RAM is already set to interleave... wonder if you could get away with 0ws
For 25 MHz CPU it requires very fast memory (or probably some cooling for memory chips). That's why some 286s with 0ws on lower frequency were similar or faster than 386 with 1ws and slower memory (especially 386sx w/o cache). Cache on 386s and especially on 486 allowed better performance without requirement of such a fast memory.
@@AncientElectronics I was thinking one of these might be a variant, particularly the Soyo Board. Yours might be V6.0 and the image of 5.0 (Or some such). That said, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure how this information would be helpful to you (Or anyone else), unless you plan to use the same board for something else.
loved the walkthrough. its crazy how back in the late 90s early 2000s my dad used to pick these old 286 and 386 computers with monitors off the sides of the roads, bring them home and let me work on them, swap parts, build "better" family computers.. and it was almost instincts to just put them together and have dos/win3.1 running.. fast forward to the 2020's and we've gotten so spoiled with plug and literally play that going back to the 80s, 90s era of AT motherboard building can give you anxiety hahah, but i loved it at the time, and i still do. Loved the vid, classic stuff, im parting together win98 build now.. i hate i threw away, sold, or destroyed all the old hardware ive owned and bought.. i regret it big time.
AT cases are the coolest, clunky switches, turbo buttons, keylocks... freaking cool
Also, 😍🐶 at 58:22.
I believe a 20mhz sx386 was the minimum required cpu to run the 7th guest, so one could guess that this machine could run some of the earlier FMV titles quite well
There's a difference between running the 7th guest, and running it well 😅 A 25mhz 486 SX is still a bit choppy to play it, but given the nature of the game its still perfectly playable of course
@arlobubble3748 nobody is talking about a 486 here 🤨
@Viczarratt yes I know, but if you're saying a 20mhz 386sx meets the minimum spec for 7th guest therefore this machine could run early FMV games quite well, then a 25mhz 486sx which is roughly equivalent to a 40mhz 386dx should be even better, but will still noticeably stutter playing 7th guest.
Good stuff. Your motherboard looks like a Soyo, possibly an SY-018. Other than layout, pretty much all boards using that chipset will function the same anyway, with very little difference between them. As there are so few jumpers, they're usually not too bad to figure out blindly when you're certain something _is_ a jumper and not a header. As for the 32-Bit expansion bus, it _was_ for memory, but in theory if you wanted to develop your own card for it, you could totally use it for something else.
The top of full AT motherboards were often held by slot-like standoffs that hooked over the top edge. I'm not sure how many people bothered installing them, given I've seen enough machines on their original hardware that didn't have them in place. They're kinda like an upside down J shape, usually made of nylon.
XCMOS refers to "eXtended CMOS". Up until the late 80s, the CMOS setup was basically just a software version of the dipswitch from the 8088 era - sometimes not even in ROM and run from inside the OS like GSETUP. Being able to tamper with anything more than video type, number of floppies and base RAM size would be classified as machine specific "extended" options. When you think about it, the convention continued into the 90s, where everything that wasn't in the Standard menu being the extended setup, much as how it's a separate screen entirely on yours. This is actually a divergent point where the clones began rapidly breaking away from being simple copies of other hardware and began doing their own things, spurring on the rapid advancement of PC technology in the 90s.
With period correct I like to factor in the idea of a "feasible upgrade", whereby someone might have bought a part a couple of years into owning the machine. Sound cards would be such an example, as they often didn't come with the PC and people added them later on, along with optical drives.
Thanks for the info. didn't know that about the standoffs. never saw them before. I sort of suspected the slot was for memory. I had another old 386 motherboard once that had a similar slot but I had a model for the board so I knew it was for a memory card so I suspected it was the same here.
Glad to see your back, looking forward to any future videos.
That case looks like the smaller version of my first case. I got it in 1993 with a 386dx40 in it used. Nice build.
yeah goes to show they don't make em like they used to😢😢
Yep, the smaller mid-tower version of our first, too! It was a 386DX/33.
That case design is my absolute favorite. I have a mini-tower version (486DX2/66), a mid-tower (386DX/40) and a full tower that I'll be building as a DX/33 in honor of our family computer circa 1992. Classic.
Very neat. I'm hoping to set up a franken-puter with some stuff I found in a bin yesterday. (in the garage). I think I'm going to document the project on here, even in its strewn state; people's input would be super helpful
I dabble on the edge of retro-computing. And I have sometimes wondered about one box with all drives to do it all that I could just switch on to get jobs those jobs done. Props for 5.25 drive.
@@clangerbasher outside of using things like Dobox theres really no one retro computer you can build that going to run everything from the 80s to early 2000s well. Best you could probably do is a socket 7 PC with a K6-III and something like setmul to adjust the cpu speed. That at least would play most win 9x and late DOS stuff competently with not to much trouble.
@@AncientElectronics Oh. Everything I want to do. I do really give a flying f'ck what you want to do or don't want to do for that matter.............
列祖列宗
So great to collect and still live in 2025
By the way that chipset is the "C&T 8230" and it's circa January 1987, about 14 months younger than the 386 processors themselves.
I remember that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, sometimes people would try to connect that old CD-ROM drive they had to their new computer, and it wouldn't work.
Of course, it would often turn out that the drive was fine, they were just trying to connect it to the IDE interface on their new computer, but the drives were made to use the Panasonic or the Mitsumi interface.
Both of those used 40 pin connectors so look like IDE drives, but required a suitable interface card. It was fairly common for sound cards to have interfaces for connecting such drives.
If I recall correctly, IDE ATAPI drives became common around 1995 or so.
It's definitely a very early 386 board.
That's a first-run 386 chip. You can tell by the double sigma marking. That means it's ok to run 32-bit software. Defective first-run chips were marked "16-BIT S/W ONLY"
Nice video, man. I am a fan of 386 systems. My first pc was a 386 SX16 mhz. I didnt knew the SX, were also 20mhz.. And that video card is pretty fast. You get very high score in 3dbench, compared to my my 486 sx 25mhz with a trident isa video card, that gets 17 score in 3dbench. I wonder if your 386sx20mhz can run Test Drive 3 the proper way.
The fake floppy front cover totally does it for me
Great work on another nice looking build!
As a late 80s system, I wonder how it would benchmark against the Amiga A2000 and the Atari mega ST4 as gaming systems?
My 386sx case was even bigger than this one .. i used to hide my illegal fireworks in it on top of the 5 1/4 drive.
And the fpu actually did make a difference for games if i recall correctly. I had one in my 286 and at some point I added one to that 386sx and it made for more go fast.
Your freezing issue with Wolfenstein 3D is something I encounter semi-regularly with long play sessions on all of my 386 and 486 PCs, usually running for about 2-3 hours before a crash. On very rare occasions it actually prints out "Divide error" before dropping me back to DOS, but you could see a still shot of the game underneath the text. I meant to dig into this myself but ultimately put it aside. Very interesting to see someone else ran into this same problem, I'll have to dig into this again soon.
I just figured it was a fluke or maybe some issue with the RAM that triggered now and then. You'll have to let us know if you figure out anything definitive.
Ohhhhhh, I want that case ;)
I believe that the empty socket on the Tseng graphics card is for a different version of DAC.
Hey, I have a near identical model of that board! Soyo SY-011. Just looked up my photos, and it matches, other than having all DIP RAM, with additional sockets. Labeled version 5.2, and matches the listing on theretroweb.
Keep it around as it's ridiculous, and a perfect example of what early motherboards were. It's populated with a huge 8MB of DIP RAM, and an i387. Takes forever to POST with 8MB of RAM, which theretroweb says is its max. Either way 8MB was a lot - my very late 386 I had in the mid 90s came with 4x256KB simms, and I was later given my dad's old 4x1MB to get me up to a whole 5MB. Those 4x1MB came with me to my 486DX4, with an additional 8MB, to get that 486 up to a whopping 12MB. I only had higher after I upgraded from the 486 to a K6-300 with 32MB of RAM. Lifechanging upgrade for sure.
thanks for the board model and for sharing the memories as well.
oh this is the build youve been mentioning? I love the use of non...'normal' hardware. Like every 386 uses "this" video card, or "that" sound card/cards...plus yea thats such an oddball board. I dont think i was even aware 386s had dip/zip ram, I thought 286 AT and clones were the last to use dip type ram, so yea that has to be a super early board.
I think that io controller might be the reason for the cd rom...I came across an issue liek that with my 5170, and the 386 I'm working on, ide wouldnt work or floppy wouldn't, something about later type ones not liking 286/386 based machines even tho they worked on 486/pentiums.
Amazing build regardless....and if i didnt already jsut get done with that XP i just built, Id be rocking on the low-ish end 386 pc, got me itching to get going on it lol
sometimes it gets boring always going with the ET4000 or the Voodoo 3 and it's just nice to try something off the beaten path even if it's not fast. I really wanted to go with something a little different sound wise but everything else in my collection was too new or in another build.
I'm wondering if the 80287 support was for compatibility with a 386 "SX" (SuX!) processor? That way, you'd maintain a
16-Bit Bus across the mainboard.
Edit: I meant to say that, yes this is almost guaranteed an OEM board, I saw a few very much like this, in the flesh.
Mainly because you could interchange between the SX and DX variants pretty easily, although I remember some complaints
that the switch added unnecessary wait states and so a true DX board was faster....
Hope that helps! it's sure going back like 33 years!
Oh man, the 386DX was my first true love, prior to that, I only ever had an 8-Bit Amstrad CPC-464!
My Dad had a C64, but that was his toy and wouldn't let me use it!
My first PC was an AMD 386-DX40, with a not too shabby Trident VGA, 4mb 30pin Simms, 180Mb HDD (WOW!!!) and a Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 which I'd managed to get 2Mb of Wavetable RAM (it also used Simms). The AWE also had a Creative CD-ROM interface!
I got this machine in '94 and yeah, compared to the 486 which had been out a while by then, it was a little long in the tooth, but I was lucky
as it was a relatively high-spec 386 (when I maxed it out at 16Mb of very low-WS ram). I know the CPU supported more, but the motherboard on that machine didn't. Still, 16Mb in those does was still godlike!
My old friend had sadly dropped out of his Computer Science degree, which is why he had such a potent 386 in the first place.
I remember when I first saw it (with a 14" Goldstar display RAWR!) and he was showing me the first Terry Pratchett Discworld game and
I fell in love and had to have it or something very close, lol I lost days on that game!
Anyay, ex-student and flat broke, he sold the whole thing to me for £200 which I still think was a steal!
Nice thing way, as he'd been in the CompSci programme, they'd been given beta access to Chicago, the Windows 95 Beta!
I know a lot of people diss on the 386, but I can confidently assert that a true 32Bit bus 386 (so a DX) with at least 4Mb of RAM was more than powerful enough to run Windows 95. In fact, on my machine, apart from the boot process which was a little slow, largely because Multimedia was just this new incredible adventure and I'd fille the machines to its Gills with sound effects and startup effects from the Johnny Mnemonic film, it booted with the "I want to get Online ... I Need a Computer!" for example ... Sad but true ... IDC though, I loved that Film, even if I'm the only one! I dreamt of the Day when the Interface looked like the Opening sequence they'd done in 3D Studio that purported to show the Internet in 2021!
You can search on RUclips for user Tom Rath, his video "The Internet in the Year 2021" for that segment of that CGI, it was Awesome!!
Anyway, best of luck with your new toy, I'm rather jealous! But my plan is to try and make a Handheld 386-DX, so true 32Bit palm-PC and running Linux, so I can have a pocket sized mobile C/C++ development environment ... because I am that *sad" 😀
dont sweat the 40x cd-rom the ISA ide card slows it back down
That's funny, I was wondering what happened to High Treason too, and the next day his new video appeared.
Wow, what a crazy motherboard that is.
SIPP memory slots, traditional DIPP chips, and part of an ISA slot that looks like it was ... removed?
No, it was not removed. Technically all ISA slots on 386 are 16 bits and allow installation of both 8 and 16 bit extension cards but there were huge PC/XT 8 bit cards that could not be installed into 16 bit slot due to shape. That's quite common to see place on bord for 16 bit extension part that is not installed for that reason. Seems like you could decide what to change when order big batch on factory for some vendors.
PSU is never comming back. So familiar and so tragic. Finding a new one for semi-standrd old tower is a pain in a wallet ((((
On the simple advanced, shadow the system BIOS and video BIOS, on the plus, the RAM is already set to interleave... wonder if you could get away with 0ws
For 25 MHz CPU it requires very fast memory (or probably some cooling for memory chips). That's why some 286s with 0ws on lower frequency were similar or faster than 386 with 1ws and slower memory (especially 386sx w/o cache). Cache on 386s and especially on 486 allowed better performance without requirement of such a fast memory.
Is this your board?
gigabyte-ga-386l
or maybe this one:
Soyo SY-011 ?
@@andre_venter looks very similar but there's a few things off.
@@AncientElectronics I was thinking one of these might be a variant, particularly the Soyo Board. Yours might be V6.0 and the image of 5.0 (Or some such). That said, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure how this information would be helpful to you (Or anyone else), unless you plan to use the same board for something else.
Don't be a screw up, load DOS 6.22 up! ;)
He just posted one a couple days ago by the way, he had some major hardware issues
heh, maybe thats the real reason I installed DOS 6.22. I was literally in editing with this video when he posted his new one.
ruclips.net/video/RAA1xgTTw9w/видео.htmlsi=Pp5tQHBZQmt7Jx7P
@@rcard23yb ruclips.net/video/LQhX8PbNUWI/видео.htmlsi=UUdkBgMPQZBrDoUF
😂@@AncientElectronics