486dx2 System Question

[koaftder]

I found the box of SIMMs. I don't remember much about them. Some are 32 pin, others 72. I only remember seeing the 32 pin ones on 386 machines. Do you have 72 pin SIMM sockets? I'm guessing the EDO variety doesn't work on most 486's? I snapped a picture of them. Is there an easy way to identify them?

Picture of old ram modules

[Jiffy]

koaftder wrote:
I only remember seeing the 32 pin ones on 386 machines. Do you have 72 pin SIMM sockets? I'm guessing the EDO variety doesn't work on most 486's?

Many of the earlier 486s used 30 pins (not 32 pins) simms, and  mostly had 8 slots (divided in two banks) for them, although I also owned and old 486 which could handle 12 of them. Later 486s were built for 72 pins simms, in which case you only need 1 simm per bank and could use (much) larger simms. Although some 486 mobos would work well with EDO (I owned one such board), it would not take advantage of it, as it would work as if it was fastpage memory.

I owned one of the last incarnations of a 486 motherboard, which therefor was pretty advanced: it could handle 128 MB of ram (two 64 MB simms), had three PCI-slots (and two or three ISA), two IDE-connectors and could handle 8 GB harddrives. It has served me well over the years with a P24T/83 as its cpu, running Windows NT4 very reliably.

[CLS2086]

don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's

[whabang]

CLS2086 wrote:
don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's

True. Intel was the FPU king back then. The extra MHz should compensate for that, and add some extra integer performance, compared to the Intel 66 MHz.

[Invisix]

@koaftder

You have a PM.  8-)

[DamageX]

Cyrix didn't use the "PR" for socket 3 CPUs, that nonsense began with the 6x86 (socket 5). The performance of their 486 CPUs is pretty close to the other manufacturers', while their 5x86 easily beats the intel DX4 and AMD 5x86

I could part with an SB16 and 4 SIMMs for $20 shipped (perhaps an ethernet card too if you want)

[Invisix]

@DamageX

How many megs are the SIMM's?

[DamageX]

4MB per stick = 16MBytes total

[BlackMonk]

Invisix:

I wouldn't worry about the CPU speed, honestly.  50 MHz is decently fast for DOS games of the time.

You might be able to find a cheap ISA video card, but it may not be worth messing with.  And upgrading the onboard RAM, again, might not be worth the effort.

For DOS-based games, you may only care about getting VESA compatibility.  VESA BIOS Extensions TSR, basically a program that runs in the background and makes your video card more compatible with games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE

I don't know where offhand to snag that, but you may be able to find a source.  If you do run into VESA games, it might make sense to upgrade to 1 MB of video RAM, but most games won't care.  Doom certainly won't!

If you get some 30-pin SIMMs, remember to make sure you get all the same type.  Parity versus non-parity.  Basically, if there are 8 chips on the SIMM, it's non-parity.  If there are 9 chips, it's parity.  You won't want to mix them up.

[BlackMonk]

Belial6 wrote:
To make things more difficult, you need to keep in mind that Cyrix was using a PR-rating.  It was an unrealistic hope as to how fast the chip was in comparison to an Intel chip.  So, if the chip is labeled as an PR-80, it is likely not an 80Mhz chip.

DamageX wrote:
Cyrix didn't use the "PR" for socket 3 CPUs, that nonsense began with the 6x86 (socket 5). The performance of their 486 CPUs is pretty close to the other manufacturers', while their 5x86 easily beats the intel DX4 and AMD 5x86

whabang wrote:

CLS2086 wrote:
don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's

True. Intel was the FPU king back then. The extra MHz should compensate for that, and add some extra integer performance, compared to the Intel 66 MHz.

To that, I wish to add that up until the end of the 486 days, AMD and Cyrix actually licensed the designs straight from Intel.  It was after Intel moved to the Pentium line (so named instead of 586 because they couldn't trademark a number, which is why the offical name of the 486/80486 turned into the i80486--the addition of a letter made it trademarkable) that they stopped licensing some of their CPU tech, though the CPU bus was still licensed (and still is) to other companies to make compatible CPUs, I believe.

I know that AMD and Cyrix FPU's were weaker than Intel but I believe that happened post-486.  The AMD/Cyrix 586's were basically tweaked 486's and going against Intel's new Pentium line which had excellent FPU for the time.  When Cyrix rolled its own with the 6x86 (I had one of these!) and AMD popped out the K5/K6, is when the two companies really got the reputation for having weak FPUs.  But the 486s?  I think they are ok.

I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586.  Just for the novelty value.  

[bloodline]

BlackMonk wrote:

I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586.  Just for the novelty value.  

Then get an Athlon, they are a direct descendant of this design... Via the K6...

[BlackMonk]

I like old hardware!  Sorry for bumping the topic.

You may wish to look for some old demos, too:

http://scene.org/

I do not know if you will find old DOS ones there, but stuff from Future Crew should work.  That's how I got into the mod/demo scene, through my ol' DOS machine.  The BEST sound card for mods and demos is probably the old Gravis UltraSound (GUS).  But for games, the SB16 is golden.

I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS).  It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based.  You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.

SB16+WaveBlaster (or WaveBlaster 2 or that Yamaha one) was pretty hawt back in the day, too.

My preferred audio setup was SB16ASP + WB2 and a GUS ACE (later a GUS PnP Pro with 8 MB of RAM).  Ah the SB16ASP.  Back before Creative Labs got sued for the ASP part of the name and had to call it CSP instead.  Plus, mine had a crappy proprietary CD-ROM interface!  

Hardware back then was cool.  Hell, ever heard of the 3DOBlaster?  Or that Stacker card, was for hard disk compression with hardware-based compressor?  Or even a hard drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)?  Hardware was esoteric and useful.  Want to get some hardware-assisted audio compression and decompression?  Install an ASP/CSP chip into your SB16!  Want a MIDI synth engine?  Install a WaveBlaster add-on card!  Had some old 30-pin SIMMs that you wanted to use in a 72-pin SIMM system?  Get a crazy converter!

The stuff nowadays is just... boring.  It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster.  On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.

Quad-core CPUs?  Awesome, yeah!  But... I find it cooler to dink around with an old dual-CPU 386 system.  Ya, you know they had those?  Crazy!  Or the old Intel modems, you know they used to make modems?  On their high-end ones, they actually had a 186 CPU doing the work.  A 186!  Or tri-CPU POWER2 systems.  And this was all stuff you could get your hands dirty with, go in and add the stuff, tweak it to your heart's content.  Take 5 hours to load drivers in DOS and try to get everything working.  Now it's install the card and install the driver; it either works or it doesn't.  No tweaking, really.  It's just not exciting.

Ah well, I'll stop ramblin'.

[BlackMonk]

bloodline wrote:

BlackMonk wrote:

I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586.  Just for the novelty value.  

Then get an Athlon, they are a direct descendant of this design... Via the K6...

Not the same!  I'm running on an Athlon 2800+ (gift from AMD, thanks guys!) right now, it just don't have that same old-school not-quite-normal feel that a NexGen would.

[da9000]

BlackMonk wrote:
I like old hardware!  Sorry for bumping the topic.
You may wish to look for some old demos, too:
http://scene.org/

Ah, and old DOS demo-scener! Should have figured it so...

I like old hardware as well, although to be honest I like old non-DOS hardware better (with some exceptions, like GUS, hehe)

BlackMonk wrote:
from Future Crew should work.  That's how I got into the mod/demo scene, through my ol' DOS machine.  The BEST sound card for mods and demos is probably the old Gravis UltraSound (GUS).  But for games, the SB16 is golden.

Future Crew! Ah, good days! (what's going on Trug and PSi ?? BitBoys?)

I've got a couple of those GUSs still, and SoundBastards...

BlackMonk wrote:
I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS).  It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based.  You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.

You mean the "Adlib" cards? :-)
Got a programmer's manual of that somewhere, still... I think...

BlackMonk wrote:
SB16+WaveBlaster (or WaveBlaster 2 or that Yamaha one) was pretty hawt back in the day, too.

My preferred audio setup was SB16ASP + WB2 and a GUS ACE (later a GUS PnP Pro with 8 MB of RAM).  Ah the SB16ASP.  Back before Creative Labs got sued for the ASP part of the name and had to call it CSP instead.  Plus, mine had a crappy proprietary CD-ROM interface!  

Got some of those GUSs and SBs. I think I also have one or two with the propriatery not-quite-IDE CDROM interfaces. Maybe even have such a CDROM. Not sure. Also have a PAS sound card with a SCSI interface on it.

BlackMonk wrote:
Hardware back then was cool.  Hell, ever heard of the 3DOBlaster?  Or that Stacker card, was for hard disk

Yeah, some of it was cool. Never had the Stacker card :-( Just tons of floppies!

BlackMonk wrote:
compression with hardware-based compressor?  Or even a hard
drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)?  Hardware was

Hahaha! Got one, with a 20MB drive on it :-) Anyone want to buy it, it still works!

BlackMonk wrote:
The stuff nowadays is just... boring.  It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster.  On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.

I feel the same way many times... Not sure if it's age though or some hard "fact", meaning: things have changed that even a newbie (as we were then) wouldn't find them as appealing. I dunno. I feel sometimes kids feel the same way about their "old" Pentium4, now that they've upgraded to Core2Duo... but perhaps that isn't so. Perhaps it's just a different "kind" of feeling they get with their old tech. Not sure. Perhaps asking the Homebrew Computer Club guys about their past and their feelings for it might help clarify perspectives... Ah well, gotta wait until next VCF to do that! ( Or during the Trammiel talks on December 5th or 9th is it!??! anyone going? wanna buy a  carton of eggs just in case?? :-D )

Ramlbing over

[BlackMonk]

da9000 wrote:

Future Crew! Ah, good days! (what's going on Trug and PSi ?? BitBoys?)

I've got a couple of those GUSs still, and SoundBastards...

Purple Motion, musician, went to school in Ireland and then went into soundtrack production for some movies, I think.

The guys who formed Bitboys and never released the Glaze3D video card ended up being bought by ATI, I think for their mobile/cellphone 3D tech, and of course AMD owns them now.

I didn't pay too much attention to the rest, I think some ended up at Remedy Entertainment and worked on Max Payne?  And maybe some 3D benchmarks, FutureMark or something?

da9000 wrote:

BlackMonk wrote:
I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS).  It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based.  You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.

You mean the "Adlib" cards? :-)
Got a programmer's manual of that somewhere, still... I think...

Same tech, AM synthesis, but different product.  Um here's a random reference to it:

http://artofhacking.com/IET/AUDIO/live/aoh_gameblst.htm

I believe it did not have any digital output like the later SoundBlaster, so it was pretty much the same as the Adlib.

da9000 wrote:
Got some of those GUSs and SBs. I think I also have one or two with the propriatery not-quite-IDE CDROM interfaces. Maybe even have such a CDROM. Not sure. Also have a PAS sound card with a SCSI interface on it.

Ah yes!  There was also a SB16 SCSI as well.  Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was supposed to have the best digital sound, less noise.  Back then it was PAS16 = clear sound, GUS = best quality, SB16 = worked with everything.  

The proprietary CD-ROM interface was for a Matsushita 2x drive though it had some crazy buffer on it so doing speed tests would alternate between 300KBps (2x) and 1500KBps (10x).  But it'd only do 10x for .01 seconds at a time, every 2 seconds, so... heh.

Same CD-ROM I think was matched up with the 3DOBlaster.

da9000 wrote:

BlackMonk wrote:
compression with hardware-based compressor?  Or even a hard
drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)?  Hardware was

Hahaha! Got one, with a 20MB drive on it :-) Anyone want to buy it, it still works!

Don't ask me how, but on a 486 system I used to have just to mess around with, I actually got Win98SE installed on the HardCard AND it booted!  It is a 120 MB HardCard (I still have it) and my GOD was it slow to boot up Windows.  I'm still not sure how the BIOS figured out to boot the system from an ISA slot, but hey, whatever works...  Oh, I do remember that Windows told me that the hard drive was working in 16-bit compatibility mode instead of the high-performance normal 32-bit mode, but when you're booting from an ISA slot, just be happy it's workin'!

da9000 wrote:

BlackMonk wrote:
The stuff nowadays is just... boring.  It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster.  On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.

I feel the same way many times... Not sure if it's age though or some hard "fact", meaning: things have changed that even a newbie (as we were then) wouldn't find them as appealing. I dunno. I feel sometimes kids feel the same way about their "old" Pentium4, now that they've upgraded to Core2Duo... but perhaps that isn't so. Perhaps it's just a different "kind" of feeling they get with their old tech. Not sure. Perhaps asking the Homebrew Computer Club guys about their past and their feelings for it might help clarify perspectives... Ah well, gotta wait until next VCF to do that! ( Or during the Trammiel talks on December 5th or 9th is it!??! anyone going? wanna buy a  carton of eggs just in case?? :-D )

Ramlbing over

Yeah, but then you'd have to hear them bellyaching about vacuum tubes and punchcards...

[DamageX]

I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS)

You mean the "Adlib" cards?

The Adlib uses an FM synthesizer, the YM3812 (OPL2), which is also used on SBs, and early SB Pro cards which had two. The Game Blaster on the other hand, is just a bunch of sine wave and white noise channels (4x YM2149 IIRC, think Atari ST sound chip).

I'm still not sure how the BIOS figured out to boot the system from an ISA slot

The Hardcard has its own ROM on it which is called by the BIOS after POST. Just like an Amiga SCSI zorro card or modern PCI RAID card.