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Assembly 486 - component selection

In order to combat nostalgia - so that it no longer chews me when seizures occur - I decided to get hold of three retro computers.

I already wrote about the first - this is a Compaq laptop with a Pentium processor. This is a universal compact machine, which, in principle, can solve all dosovskie tasks and the initial under Windows 9x. If you leave one thing, then I would be limited to them. But I still wanted to collect a couple more.



One of them - something from the time of Pentium3 - I kind of started to collect, but stepped aside - a very interesting (for me personally) idea arose and Pentium3 has been shelved for now. You can tinker with it for a long time, the choice of components is quite large.

The second computer was more interesting to me - it was not a repetition of the old, but something new - more precisely, filling in the gaps. I wanted to collect 486. And always with the VLB bus. Because in due time I missed this stage and immediately jumped from ISA to 386 on PCI of older 486 and Pentiums. So it was decided to make efforts in this direction.

486 with a PCI bus, I think is not too different from Pentiums - integrated controllers, the same peripherals, except that the processor is smaller and there may be issues with EDO-memory. Not interested. VLB is another matter. Of course, they say that there were early pentiums and late 386 with VLB, but even if it is true, then this is also not interesting for me.

So 486 computers are going to be around 1993-1995. DOS, Windows 3.xx, possibly Windows 95 and other half shafts, but not in the first place.

I am not fixated on authenticity, because if there is a question of choosing between “exactly as it was” and “how it is more convenient for me today” - I choose the second.

Although, of course, whenever possible, I try to do as it was.

I didn’t chase after any certain pieces of iron, I had a list of priorities and a limited budget, so I looked at what was running past, I was interested in the price and how high it is in the list of priorities. If the price was satisfactory, and the position in the list is high, then he took it. If something did not suit, then let go.

Motherboard


There have been several attempts to get a suitable board. The requirements were 2-3 VLB slots, at least two slots for 72-pin sims, a 2032 battery or at least an unoxidized barrel - the main trouble of the old motherboards. Well, the working cache, they said terrible things about boards with a fake cache. I thought about a board with PCI and VLB - there were such, but these were not very successful monsters, so I refused in favor of pure VLB.

As a result, I settled on the Data Expert EXP4045 board - I arranged it for the price, features and appearance. She has questions with older processors on socket3-5x86, etc., but they didn’t really interest me. There is a voltage of 3.3 volts, you can get 100-120 megahertz - that's enough for me. All memory slots are 72-pin - ok, 30-pin memory interests me only for AWE32.



Instead of a barrel of battery, there was about a similar battery - dead already - I’ll probably replace it with a barrel of battery. Suppose there is a connector for an external battery.

CPU


There was no need to even think. Intel 486DX2-66 - a classic.



But just in case, I also got AMD DX4-100.



RAM


"We had with us." I didn’t really look for anything here, I dug up a bag of sims in my deposits - there turned out to be two FPM memory modules of 32 megabytes each (far not all 486 supported EDO). Another eight then got lost. As a result, I began to think that I would put at least 2 * 32, and if possible 2 * 32 + 8 and get huge RAM for 486 72 megabytes.



Video card


The favorite under VLB is ET4000 from Tseng Labs, but it is worth it accordingly. I did not consider. All sorts of Cirrus Logic follow it in speed, but here I wanted a strange thing - so that when you turn on the computer, colorful letters about Trident shine. Tribute to the first 386 and Trident 9000.



First I got Trident 9000 itself, which works on 486 and shows color letters, but later I found Trident 9440 in good performance - a megabyte of memory and two cots for the second megabyte SOJ'ikami, not DIP ' ami. This was a very convenient option for me - I was able to cannibalize S3 Trio64V + and rearrange the memory from there to the trident.


The remains of S3, who gave her memory to her ancestors. By the way, it is clear that the PCI-boards began to put microcircuits on the reverse side relative to ISA'shnyh - if you put the microcircuits up, then the connector on the other hand is obtained.



Controllers


Massively integrate port controllers and disk devices began only in the days of PCI, before that they were isolated cases. Therefore, a multicard with port, disk, and hard disk controllers was mandatory in every system unit.

The choice here was between ISA and VLB, as well as between IDE and SCSI. ISA IDE is slow, VLB SCSI is expensive.

Because I stopped at the VLB IDE. Moreover, for the sake of this, everything was conceived - devices on VLB. At the same time, I compare the performance of ISA and VLB controllers.



I will also add a network card to this point - the relatively modern 3Com Etherlink III, even without a BNC connector.



Disk drives


Floppy drives - of course, the correct 486 must have “oblique flops” - have 5.25 "and 3.5" on board. But 5.25 "I don’t have yet, and I’m lazy to mess with floppy disks, because the USB-emulator will become the main drive. Hardware 3.5" will still live as a drive Q:
I don’t want a hard drive either - an old, noisy, 500 megabytes.



Although I will start from it, but then I will take a memory card through an adapter - I will bring it to the face of the case, so that it would be more convenient to exchange files with my big brother.



CD drive - for authenticity, you need something in the region of 2-6 speeds, while not available. So for now I’ll put 24, but more or less similar to the earlier CD-ROMs - with headphone output and volume control.



Sound card


Here I did not have to choose - I have a Sound Blaster AWE32. Of course, besides him there is still ess1868 and some kind of Mozart, but look at them with such a handsome man?



Housing


I went through several options, I found it was beautiful in appearance, but it turned out to be scary internally, and the muzzle also did not look very close upon closer examination. Therefore, I looked at what is proposed according to the parameters “tower, turbo button, frequency indicator, key” and chose this one:



But I took the ATX power supply. Because the condition of the available AT power supplies did not please me. ATX is connected to the old motherboard using a penny adapter.



In general, something like that. It remains to take off with all this.



The second part will be about the assembly, glitches, tests, software installation and likely development prospects.

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