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80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

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Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#101

Post by tambourine_man »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #82
tssva wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little late but you could also have used the Crynwr plip packet driver to run IPX over the parallel cable avoiding the significant overhead of running Windows 95 on a 386 system.

Only about 25 years too late :D, but that would have been cool to know about. It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time. I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable…

It’s really hard for anyone under 25/30 to appreciate how hard it was for information to come by.

I vividly remember loving a song that was playing on a store’s radio and then standing there for half an hour until the spokesman eventually listed all songs he had played. I did my best to identify and memorize the author, so I could later look them up on a music store.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#102

Post by reaperducer »

kn0where wrote: post #96
ido wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I just got lucky in my youth trying to repair a mac classic II (at the time it was about 10 years old), or if the 9" CRT that must have not been turned on for years at that point didn't have enough of a charge? That machine eventually lived and functioned perfectly for quite a few more years (ended up just needing a new HDD) until finally dying.

The Classic II (and others newer than the earliest Macs) had bleeder resistors to discharge the CRT automatically. Older monitors and TVs did not, so manually discharging was more important. The procedure was still to manually discharge the newer machines in case the bleeder resistor failed, but whenever I discharge the CRT of anything newer than a Mac Plus it’s already discharged well before I touch the grounded scr…

The Classic II (and others newer than the earliest Macs) had bleeder resistors to discharge the CRT automatically

Was that why older/cheaper CRTs just turned off, but the more expensive and newer ones made kind of a "thunk" noise after the screen turned off?

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#103

Post by happycube »

slim wrote: post #53
hulitu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Windows 3.1 which has a GUI more advanced than win 10 GUI. But 32 MB RAM ? Is there any Win 3.1 app which can use so much RAM ?

Is there any Win 3.1 app which can use so much RAM ? Maybe someone will start a new software project targeting the platform. That would be the second most interesting project.

There were some 32-bit extenders IIRC, but there's also Win32S.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#104

Post by rasz »

walrus01 wrote: post #94
jonathanlydall wrote: post #67

Although this seems to be a 33MHz CPU, the 386DX40 was the first "decent" processor I had access to when growing up so was quite memorable for me. In my teenage years the PCs my brothers and I had access to were two 386DX40s each with 8MB of RAM and several hundred MBs of hard disk space (can't remember exactly, but pretty sure less than a GB). We really loved Blizzard's Warcraft II, which despite having a minimum re…

If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era when a 486DX/25 and motherboard was a very expensive system, matched or outperformed the 486 in a few benchmarks. It was very popular around 1992-1993 or so. In terms of ratio of price/performance in the budget category, it would probably be analogous to a zen3 b…

386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase.

https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-...

I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor, or one VLB graphic card, or one 14" VGA mono monitor :) 386SX with motherboard was 2/3 of that. I build whole 386 computer at the time spending pizza money on it (386DX40 + bunch of older used components).

If you really wanted to compare it to today it would be more of a $40 board + $50 CPU situation while everyone buys $150 boards for their $200 CPUs.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#105

Post by anyfoo »

joakleaf wrote: post #40
anyfoo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not so much. Most of Win 3.1 is actually still 16bit even in Protected Mode (unless you count win32s which came much later), so everything over 1MB cannot even be addressed directly. While you can probably come up with something that makes use of the 32MB under Win 3.1, that would likely be rather artificial and not very typical of what was happening back in the day, not just because 32MB was considered abso…

Protected mode using 16 bit segment:offset addressing could use more than 1 MB of memory. The segments were 64K, but the base address of each individual segment was defined in a descriptor table and could point to anywhere within 24-bit addressable memory space on the 286 and 32-bit on the 386. So the 286 was limited to 16 MB of ram in 16-bit protected mode. The 386 not so. Incidentally, I had a 286 that was happy to…

I know, hence why I said “addressed directly”, which 16 bit segments (like the major Windows portion living in vm86) couldn’t do, but they could still access it through windows (lowercase w, and no pun intended). EMS and XMS essentially did what you describe for example.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#106

Post by FullyFunctional »

incanus77 wrote: post #16

> Take your time to solder all the components on the board. There are a lot of solder points and if you don't have patience in general, then this project might not be for you. Understatement.

This was painful to read. 14 year old me finally managed to get the NASCOM 2, my first ever computer. It came as a kit with 2,000+ solder points, but patience was never my virtual and certainly not at 14 year old so my work wasn't perfect and worse, wasn't properly checked. The original Z-80 died and I had to get professional help to get it working. (And learn to program: Z-80 in binary hex codes -- didn't get the memory necessary for the Microsoft BASIC until later). Still have this computer.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#107

Post by FullyFunctional »

NoGravitas wrote: post #78
hulitu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Windows 3.1 which has a GUI more advanced than win 10 GUI. But 32 MB RAM ? Is there any Win 3.1 app which can use so much RAM ?

That much RAM on a 33Mhz 386DX would run OS/2 very comfortably, and you could actually use all of it. Or very early Linux distributions, of course. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

Exactly. The requirement for my first personal PC was that it could run True Emacs on Linux (Sun 3 at my University had spoiled me), but I could only afford the absolute minimum: 386SX/25 MHz w/4 MiB. It was a Toshiba T1800 notebook, very nice but monochrome LCD, tiny harddrive, and not expandable.

With 4 MiB I was able to try X11, but not use it in practice. 32 MiB would have been incredible.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#108

Post by FullyFunctional »

timonoko wrote: post #85
NoGravitas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of wish I had my 1990 beige box, even though it was a hunk of junk even for the time.

It was the worst of times. You needed at least 50 Mhz to play MP3-files. Only rich people could afford that. And couple of years later you wanted to play DIVX-files and you needed 300 Mhz.

My recollection doesn't agree with you. It was a stretch for a 300 MHz Celeron to play an MP2 (not even MP3) - I was an early adopter as I hated all the analog degrading.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#109

Post by detaro »

dark-star wrote: post #92

This is awesome, I would totally build this next week (I have most of the components around) but the PCB alone is over 500$, and I'm not sure I could solder that large SMD chip without breaking anything. Awesome project, but a little too expensive for me sadly :(

You can get the PCB a lot cheaper if you don't have it made at OSHPark.

Re: 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer

#110

Post by StillBored »

rasz wrote: post #104
walrus01 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era when a 486DX/25 and motherboard was a very expensive system, matched or outperformed the 486 in a few benchmarks. It was very popular around 1992-1993 or so. In terms of ratio of price/performance in the budget category, it would probably be analogous to a zen3 b…

386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase. https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-... I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor,…

So, I was there and made this purchasing decision too. And if you remove doom from the benchmarks you linked it matches what I remember. Which is that the AMD 386-40's where faster in pretty much all cases than the Intel 486SX-20's. They were also slightly cheaper at the time. And that fact gave me a terrible time deciding which one to buy, but in the end I got the 486 because it had two huge advantages.

The first being that at the time, if one carefully selected the motherboard it was possible to overclock the 486SX-20's to 40Mhz and have a rock solid system. The second was the VLB was starting to be a thing. A 486 with a VLB graphics card was considerably faster than anything I would have been getting on the 386. And of course it was pretty clear that faster 486's could be plugged in, rather than requiring a motherboard upgrade. So IIRC, it was like an extra 15% difference in price to get a machine that was well over 2x faster.

So, I saved my pennies and borrowed some from my parents and got the 486SX. It was rock solid for the next couple years until I managed to get my hands on a DX2. That was also my first overclocking experience and by far the largest increase I've ever managed. That machine is also probably the fastest booting x86, I've ever owned because it was running MRBIOS. The boot time to DOS was entirely limited by the HD spin-up time, and with a much later DX4-100 upgrade was one of my longest running linux firewall/network servers i've ever used until it died in the mid 2000's in a heat event.

(well maybe the abit bp6 counts...)

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