I only have 16 years old and i'm right too xd messing around with this men yeah. The ide and his ( *BEEP* ) 40 pins don't forget the startup beep of the most machines windows errors the bsod and so one
8:05 I think its just fine leaving it yellowed. I prefer retro-bright with iconic hardware that is to be kept more as a show piece; to give us a sense of 'this is what it was like when it was new'. But for projects like this, the yellow gives it a sense of seniority, a look earned from years of service.
I remember the DX4-100 chips were being described as the "poor mans pentium". Impressive chips but they suffered heat problems that made a cpu cooling fan necessary, which made a lot of techies nervous at the time.
DX4-120 133 were slightly;y faster than the P60 and P70 and a lot cheaper, Pentiums did 1.5 instructions per clock cycle, DX 486 1.5 clocks to an instruction. so P90- and 100 were faster. also the first P60 70 pentiums were not upgradable,
In relation to the other person who answered, those of us who went to the DX4 120's didn't have any problems that I know of. With mine I was able to skip the 1st generation Pentium 60/66 to a Pentium II 233mhz without any headaches in between.
I recommend not connecting the LED directly to that power connector. Depending on what that is for, it may not limit the current which will cause your LED to fail quickly. If you put a simple 220 or 470 ohm resistor in series that should work fine Edit: lol just made it to the edit 🤣
The problem is that there are some cases that used a basic LED, while others had a discrete resistor soldered to the LED then covered with heatshrink tubing or an LED with integrated resistor. Like the differences in power switches he pointed out, plenty of variations to keep things "interesting". 😉
These are literally just before my time and I love seeing how they worked. I know of them and have seen them but was too young to know what I was looking at. I love learning about them. My first PC build when I was a kid was a Pentium MMX back in the mid 90s and I was just learning about PCs then.
We have a pair of very old servers at work that use these kind of SBCs with a big backplane that fills the whole back side of the rack mount server chassis. Don't recall the exact specs of what's on them. I'm guessing Pentium something. But these SBCs have both the ISA and PCI connectors on them. We will never be using these again so I could pull one if you are interested. I can get the full specs next week when I stop by the office next. Let me know if you are interested.
@Bob Ross SBC's like this are generally very conservative in their performance. They will fall behind a typical consumer level mainboard by about %20 or so. I have a system with a few different SBC's I can plug in from 386 all the way to Core 2. And its neat to play with and doesn't need much space but don't expect the usual performance from them. Things are timed very slack.
@@wishusknight3009 Designed to run in something like a Cashpoint machine where reliability is far more important than speed, and there is no need for a "Turbo" button.
Thanks, Clint, seeing you work on older hardware always brings back memories for me. Many years ago, roughly late '80s/early '90s, at work I supported VAX minicomputers running the VMS OS. We had lots of people on VT-220 terminals able to access them, as well as VMS graphic workstations. But PCs weren't common. We ended up getting what looked like a desktop XT/AT case, inside of which was a passive backplane and up to eight single board ISA PCs, 386s I think but could have even been 286s. By running a program on the VAX you could connect across the LAN to one of the virtual PCs and run DOS applications. No graphics supported unfortunately, all DOS 3.1. I spent quite a while writing some custom help files for the VMS side, and had to work out licensing tricks for the DOS applications: ChartMaster, SignMaster, DiagramMaster. I think we had IBM DisplayWrite 3 or 4 for word processing, and Lotus 123 for spreadsheets. Lots of fun with mapping PC drive letters to files and directories on the VAX. Of course, after all that effort, it barely got used, as more PCs started showing up!
I walked into a tavern with a sword and the bartender asked 'why do you carry a sword in here?' 'Mimics' I said... the bartender laughed, I laughed, the table laughed, we killed the table... good times
Wouldn't be surprised if it was an old school computer - in the school I used to work at, teachers tended to label everything with their department name (i.e Food Technology) in order to see when another teacher nicked their stuff.
I was really surprised how well I like that black-on-beige look. I thought that would look weird, but I really like it. I don't know if maybe its because the yellowing of the plastic or what.
because it's remind us the beauty of IBM PC/XT but in vertical case. all Floppy is black not beige back then, I even feel a bit strange to see beige floppy on IBM PC, like something didn't right
pretty much like the "7 gamers, 1 system" thing that linus built a couple years ago but without the need for virtual machines - all 7 gamers could play duke 3d "on the metal"
@@KenjiUmino the pi's using eDuke, so it's still running natively on the hardware. I'm not sure how practical having multiple SBCs with this backplane is, because you have multiple CPUs sharing a single ISA bus, though creating a custom backplane that has several separated ISA buses that just share power rails should be feasible. You could also simplify the setup somewhat by finding SBCs that also have integrated audio, video and network, which would allow you to bypass the need for an ISA bus at all. Finding all that with vintage hardware though... I presume you can see why I thought to use the Pi instead :D
@@TheTurnipKing Even though they'd be sharing that backplane, that appears to mostly be for expansion and power, not so much for any data transmission, so that at least should lend itself to being possibly to run several "bare-metal" systems on their own, all sharing nothing but power.
Glad you enjoy Clint! Happy to see a full computer built from one of these. Mine has a cpu fan as they can get hot without air movement in a case and cause an occasional lockup. I have an Aztech card in mine, set on DMA 0 of course. Something on the board uses channel 1. I have a manual for these as well.
That is actually the exact same case of my first PC ! Where I have played Doom II , Duke Nukem 3D , Tomb Raider and many more. If I remember correctly the CPU was Pentium 100 and people were losing their shit after 486 CPUs. Oh man thanks for this unexpected Nostalgia hit Clint.
@@ImpetuouslyInsane Yeah, when I worked in retail in my younger years, at ESCOM in the UK before they went under, we just used one of our own systems to run the POS.
28:22 ah what a bummer I saw a full length VLB styled 486/Pentium SBC like this one at car boot earlier this year! Did'nt buy it as I was not sure what it connected too but now I know! Great video!
That kind of setup is called "PICMG" (I've found out about this because I'm starting an SBC build myself and may have another one down the line as well). On older systems like this it's just a stacked ISA/PCI combo slot but on newer, PCIe-based systems the slot is something unique (I thought it was like a double-stacked PCIe x16 slot but it's more different than that). Also long SBCs like this are a BITCH to fit into a case. I'm actually going to need to mod the case this SBC project is going into (need to cut out a section of the HDD rails) and it's a friggin' full tower EATX-compatible case (which I went with because I have an 8-slot backplane, which is one too many for a conventional mid-tower)!
Man, that Tower case brought back memories, back before someone had the genius idea of detachable side panels. The breakouts for extra COM/LPT ports also reminded me of the good ol' days when it was a rite of passage to get a bloody scratch any time you worked inside the PC.
I was literally digging through some of my old boxes today and found a Sound Blaster 16. Started googling/eBaying for cheap mobos with ISA so I could play with it. Lot of results for these old SCBs. LGR has powers...
@@joetheman74 my right to health surpasses your right to be a douche. We'd be done with this foolishness if you toddlers had thought about others for just one second.
you know, everytime i watch these i feel like my pc knowledge is on par and i'm like "ah yes the bibbledoo plugs into the diplorp" and then i open up a pc and take 20 minute to remove a hard drive
@@vivanecrosis i was messing with this 2006 compaq and the case was full of sharp angles and this dumb protective case for the drive chambers, my hands... my POOR HANDS
Nice, that's the 1st time I heard PhilsComputerLab show up on your channel. Both your channels insight on resurrecting PC's always keep me filled with joy, and of course help with troubleshooting my own retro projects. Thanks Clint!
I think the Disk on Modules are hardwired as cable select internally and the older BIOS dont like cable select. I have the same problems with Jumperless CF card adapters and DOMs.
Back in the day, I was told that putting the HDD and CD-ROM on the same IDE channel was a no-no -- if the CD is master, you're running the hard disk at slower speed than it's capable of, and if the hard disk is master, the CD drive can't keep up. I also never used cable select... That was 25+ years ago, so take that for what it's worth :-)
Cable Select is really just Cable Select. The drive looks at a certain pin on the IDE cable if it's grounded or not and decides to be Master or Slave according to that. There is no difference how the drives look to the BIOS. The cable simply replaces the jumpers.
@@AndrewAMartin "Master" and "Slave" are misleading words, there isn't any priority at all, except for special cases during initialization (older drives sequenced their spinup to reduce load on the PSU for example). The main reason is that only one device can use the bus at the same time, so for fast (DMA) copy from one device to the other they have to be on different channels.
I've had a horrible, stressful...soul crushing!day... I have never been Soo happy to see a notification pop up. Seriously, began crying and had a huge weight lifted off my chest. Thank you
@@Shotblur naw, I appreciate it tho. I'm a caregiver, work in end of life care. Just had my hours cut, losing my heath insurance. And a global pandemic has killed 12 people I know. And it was thanksgiving
Nice job Clint 👍 I like the two tone beige/black combination on this classic Hong Kong case. The 32-bit Cirrus cl-gd5430 chip on this SBC is actually very capable and not just some marginal integrated graphics solution. It was used a lot on PCI cards and It's newer and faster than the Cirrus cl-gd5428 chip on the Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB in your woodgrain (I own the same card). The 30 is an enhanced version of the 28 and it was the first in their newer "Alpine" series of chips. It supports a higher memory clock speed and has memory-mapped I/O. I also have a cirrus logic cl-gd5434 (also an Alpine series) card with 2 megs running in 64-bit mode and it's definitely the fastest card I own from the era. Always liked those Cirrus graphics chips. Very compatible and pretty darn quick for the era 👍
Loved your video. I miss working on computers like this in days gone by. Really I think the mid to late 90's were the heyday of the PC. I still have some old ISA cards and such laying around. I remember buying components at Best Buy and having them escorted to the cash registers so nobody could steal them.
I was thinking the food label may be referring to the computer being in a kitchen of a restaurant, food prep area of some kind, or commissary. I wish I had the space to have an old DOS machine. Always like watching these videos.
Thanks. I knew it reminded me of some sort of old computer, but I couldn't exactly figure out what it specifically reminded me off till I saw your comment.
Weirdest (vintage) motherboard I ever had was a PC Partner 35-8831-02. The reason why it was weird was it's a SLOT1 Baby-AT board...it only had a 5 pin din connector for keyboard on the backplane, all of the rest of the ports required to go into expansion slots. It had power connectors for BOTH AT and ATX power supplies, three 16bit ISA, three PCI, an AGP slot, and two slots for DIMMs. I had an adapter to use the full Pentium II with it, rather than a Celeron. Reason why I got this one was it allowed me to use the newer peripherals and CPU, with my 2ft tall AT full tower case I loved (I was doing desktop video back then with a Pinnacle Miro DC30, so I needed the room for multiple hard drives and cooling fans). Funny thing was I wasn't looking for this motherboard...I was in a small town buying something for my boss' computer when I saw that motherboard on display...it was a gamble since I lived hundreds of miles away from that store, and I didn't know if I could find it in the big city where I lived, so I bought it then and there!
I work in an Industrial/Embedded hardware distributor as a Sales Develop Engineer. This is a great video, I've always wanted to see these boards used for commercial use. Our SBC's range with temp resistance of -20c - 80c Fanless.
I love your trips in the (not-so) Way Back machine. My first computer was a 486-DX33 with 8 MB of RAM and a 250 MB hard drive. It was about $2,300 and I still had to buy a 14.4 modem and a CD-ROM drive. The price DID include a roomy (for the day) 15" monitor. Now, I'm shopping for a laptop with a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB drive and QHD display for around $1,500. It's crazy. Keep up the good work.
To save more space the power supply could probably be designed into the mini-backplane in the space between the two slots. However, it still won't be the smallest 486 PC. The IBM PC110 is 158x116x36mm and that's a whole laptop with 4.7" screen.
@@eDoc2020 Search what a Pico PSU looks like... it's not much bigger than the connector itself. The size could be cut down further by skipping the backplane entirely, and soldering power directly to the contacts. But then you lose the sound card... I suppose an OPL3LPT adapter connected to the internal parellel pin header could fit inside. The IBM PC 110 is about the same comparable size as two stacked expansion cards anyway... With a slower SX CPU.
@@KomradeMikhail I know PicoPSU is small but if you want your system to be as small as possible every little bit matters. If you ditch the sound card you can probably eliminate this PSU entirely. I'm guessing the SBC only uses the 5v rail which can be provided from a phone charger. One of the connectors might even be a 5v input for this purpose. I'll certainly consider this as the smallest _desktop_ 486 PC. While the PC110 is a bit smaller, it's a completely different class of device. And side note, I think the PC110's CPU might be upgradeable with the right tools. I know the ThinkPad with the butterfly keyboard can be upgraded to 125MHz just by soldering in a different chip but this might be harder with the variant in the PC110.
@@eDoc2020 If you ditch the connectors off the PicoPSU and solder wires directly, the little board can sandwich in and fit within the given footprint of the single slot expansion card. Same with the OPL3LPT adapter... lose the connectors and solder it in. Could probably even squeeze in a modern LiPo battery pack and an adafruit charging circuit. A keyboard and a screen would fit within the size of a second expansion card. And now this is a homemade PC 110, of exactly the same size, but cheaper. CNC mill a case instead of just 3D printing it... and now suddenly I am turning into Ben Heck.
FOOD. As a 39 y/o that grew up with an Apple SE then a Packard Bell 486 DX, then a 300MHz Gateway, then a Compaq Presario 5000, I really appreciate this channel
about 20 years ago i always used to go to the recycling center and there were tons of this single board computers like all types from 8088 to 486 and tons of back planes and other stuff but at that time i did not know what to make of it
You generally wouldn’t. They’re industrial, so they didn’t usually make their way into the normal waste stream for home computers. Some of them are probably still in active industrial use, running old CNC or other manufacturing hardware that is otherwise very very expensive to replace.
So cool to see a 486 running some classic FPS games in 2020. My dad had a 486 he ran Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D and the expansion and some other games on it in the 90s. I played those games on it and Golden Axe on an arcade emulator. Seeing this video takes me back. I believe the graphics card he had in that pc was the 3D Voodo FX card.
Pine Technology still exists and owns the corporate division XFX (yes, the manufacturer of graphics cards). My very first dedicated graphics card was a Pine/XFX GeForce 2 MX 400.
Ah, the good old 48bits PCSA slots! ;) Thanks for the upload, that was a great one! I thought about those from time to time, never got around to getting one, now they've probably been out of my price range for a couple hours by now :P
The ISA/PCI slots you mention are PICMG. I used to build industrial computers and many systems had these, plus the full-length SBC like in your diagram. Your 486 SBC was manufactured by IEI who are headquartered in Taiwan. We used a lot of their stuff, as well as others such as Advantech and Portwell. When you had an ATX PSU with an SBC, you needed an ATX link cable going from the SBC to the backplane otherwise it wouldn't power on properly. Good times!
20:00 You could put the disk module on the motherboard's IDE channel and possibly add in an expansion card giving you more IDE channels for the drive if you wanted?
Ihan mielenkiintoinen projekti. Mietin vain kun on saatavilla nyky-koneisiin dosbox tai graafinen F-Fend jossa on dosbox sisäänrakennettuna en ehkä alkaisi tuollaiseen projektiin että meike on miettinyt aina silloin tällöin jotain sellaista juttua kuin joku Win 98 usb-tuella se olisi vähän monipuolisempi voisi pelata vanhoja Dos ja Win pelejä että olisi enemmän tarjontaa molemmille järjestelmille sekä käyttää myös jotain vanhempia hyöty-ohjelmia Win-ympäristössä silloin ei tosin välttämättä riittäisi 500Mt kiintolevy alkuunkaan.
(32:41) You're supposed to do the Doom benchmark with the screen showing the status bar and a tiny green border around the scene. The difference depends on the respective machine, but as a rule of thumb, you should get around 20-25% better results. I get 22% higher fps (18% lower realtics) in DOSbox set to 50k cycles.
Hi Clint. As far as I can remember Cirrus Logic GD5430 is a VLB chip, so direct connection between the 486 and the vga chip. It explains it can run pretty well Descent, Duke3d, and so on. With a pure ISA chip like for example Trident 9000, it would just have been impossible
My hometown is right next to marlborough! Never heard of the company but a little googling revealed that they are some sort of software company that appears to still be in business but in a different town. Still I love any references to my state and Its cool that something that simple made it all the way to you! Thanks for making my day!
IBM had a PC on a board product that was meant to be added to a power system so you could have a small linux system in you IBM power system to use as a management server
Linux for PowerPC exists. It was often installed in Macintosh computers, but also came in variants for the professional PowerPC systems and some game consoles.
@@PlastiGomi huh? I probably would have left the same comment if the video was 4 minutes. Main point was this content is more important to me than whatever I’m supposed to actually be doing.
Golden era for computers The era that every new piece of hardware has its own taste Nowadays we are more than used with large ram numbers and extremely fast evolution
Hi, Neighbor! I also live in Greensboro. I remember the day that I went to COMP USA to get more blank CD's, and found that the store had closed. Then Circuit City and then Radio Shack. It is a conspiracy. I'm not as knowledgeable as you on computers of the past. I helped my son build his first "Gaming Computer" . Now I'm working on a 486DX running Dos6.22 at work. The SB computer runs a cnc lathe. The Battery in the RTClock went dead after 20 years of service. At the time I had never heard of a RTC chip. I found a New Dallas RTC (made in Taiwan) but the computer will not post. I want to get it running before I retire!
Modern PCs haven't really evolved much, I think. Older 3rd gen Core i series CPUs still run modern software competently enough so getting older software to run on whatever's current is no longer a hurdle like it was for stuff that ran on Windows 95 and immediately crapped out trying to get it to run on XP. They make SBCs that take more current processors (I have one but I never did anything with it -- and also maybe bent some pins on the socket before I could... >_>) but it's the mid/late 90s and before that generally see the most benefit from running on period-accurate hardware. The concept of modern SBCs generally seems to take the form of things like the Latte Panda that are meant to be standalone devices instead of being attached to a backplane and provide more conventional connectivity (kind of in the vein of the RasPi but with standard x86-64 compatibility of your run-of-the-mill PCs).
Man i really saw that issue with the DOM coming, it didn't look designed to share. glad you had something else to use, fascinating project, great content
OMG... Im 39 years old, My mom was an accountent had them early, paid around 15.000 dollars for that system, 20 mb harddrive 4mb ram an olivetti, so had a pc in 1986, i went on to work on pc's and thus im familier, could do this in my sleep, was building pc's at the age off 14, had a sparetime job at a company, build a scsi tower, (an adaptec 2940 card) so expensive... cd Rom burner with seven drives in, had connected all the drives, but scsi was a bit more complicated... I made a cdrom tower they came and complained two of the drives wasen't working, hehe 3 Guys in suit's was looking at me while i fixed it, the most pressure ever, they all where in awe when i fixed it... Love this video, really wished you tweaked the autoexex.bat and config.sys😅
Good video! We used quite a few passive back plane systems for factory automation "back in the day" where I work. You need to put this in a 4U rack mount chassis to make it more "authentic".
At 1:51... those are VESA expansion slots. They are 32 bit, and allow for direct memory access of the device. They were used for high performance graphics cards before PCI. Throw in a Promise IDE controller card for the hard disk you wanted to use.
Love it. How much did it cost you to build this humble beast? I want to build a vintage DOS PC too some day! Although here in Israel it could prove quite a challenge to acquire the components.
@@highpath4776 My point was that I expected the loose wires that we plug into motherboards to be designed for raw 5V TTL signals with the ability to fully tolerate getting fed from a 5V or 3V3 power rail as an on signal, especially for the power and turbo LEDs, but potentially all of them. I would also expect them to draw extra current if they are the fancy numbers LEDs that can be configured to show "100" in DX4 turbo mode and "_25" in base clock mode.
@@MrDuncl The placement of the resistor is an arbitrary matter of convention. My assumption that the resistor is part of the front panel was based on the practical benefits I mentioned.
I started my career in IT with a Computerland brand 286 back in the mid 80s. It was passive backplane with an ISA single board computer. I upgraded it to 2 meg of RAM so I could run Lotus Symphony, QModem, and Symantec Q&A. Used Quarterdeck DESQView so I could run all 3 at once! Also had an IRMA 3270 terminal card I could access by pressing both shift keys at once, same to switch back to PC. That gave me mainframe access. So I was able to do 4 things at once on a 286!
ah 486 DX2 66 mhz, was my first Windows PC back in 1994, I remember hearing the Lion King game in DOS with SOUND BLASTER PRO, goddamn my ears just melted such crisp sound and music.
The DX2 66 was also my first PC, though mine ran DOS with Windows 3.11 and OS/2 in a multi-boot setup. I loved that computer, and damn near cried when the AT PSU failed and took the board with it.
