Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
neubejiita

286 build.

Recommended Posts

The relative rarity of the hardware is the most impressive thing. Most people went straight from XTs to 386/486 or even Pentiums without stopping in the middle range like 286 or 386 SX, so there are relatively fewer of them around (the performance difference between a 286 and a decently configured XT using e.g. a 16 MHz V30 surely was not worth the disproportionate price difference).

For the rest, I built/restored a couple of XT systems in the last 2 years myself (including cool stuff like hooking up an old VGA card and a 3.5" floppy and a SB 2.0 and running 8088 Corruption on them).

The bottom line: not so impressive. People (well...CERTAIN people) do it all the time :-p

If anything, when going so back, the main issue is finding monitors that will work with anything that is not VGA. Even more hard is to find color CGA or EGA monitors, as those used to cost a fortune.

It was a really bad time for PC hardware: you could end up paying several thousands of $$$$ to have the graphics cababilities of a NES and nowhere near as good sound, and even the raw CPU performance was nothing to write home about compared to a contemporary Amiga or ATARI-ST.

Share this post


Link to post
neubejiita said:

How cool is this?

As cool as the ones I've had sitting here for a decade or so.

Share this post


Link to post

Depends how you define cool. It's pretty damn cool to me. I just don't buy more old computer stuff because my apartment is too small. I already have 5 computers and two monitors lying around.

When I get rich, my castle's north wing will be dedicated to this kind of stuff exclusively.

Share this post


Link to post
Mithran Denizen said:

I cobbled together a working 8080 machine from cannibalized parts not that long ago, but it's not cool at all.


This 8080? Now that shit would be the motherfucking ass.

Share this post


Link to post

I know it's amazing to fathom, but there once was a time when computer parts were designed and built to last more than 4 years. This is one of those things.

Share this post


Link to post

I have a somewhat more contemporary looking Samsung Sensor SP-286 down in the garage. It's a neat little system in a slimline case with an integrated everything motherboard that includes VGA video (256k RAM), PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse plus an external floppy drive connector - which is something I haven't encountered before or since. All it currently lacks is a sound card (if the CPU can handle one) and a maths co-processor.

If it's still working I'll post some pictures later.

Share this post


Link to post

Heh, I just had a 286 of mine (actually one my dad used at work) out a week or so ago because I was curious to see which chipset it used. Funny to see a motherboard without surface-mount components. It should still work; there was nothing wrong with it the last time it was used. I'm not sure what I'd do with it, though...

Share this post


Link to post
Lüt said:

As cool as the ones I've had sitting here for a decade or so.

Cool you say? As cool as a nice room temp of 68 degrees Fahrenheit? Perhaps mellowed down to a perfected 20 degrees Celsius? Or did you justify villainy by amounting their controlled temp to a chilly 286 Kelvin?

By God man! The levels of cool are simply too much to comprehend! :P

Share this post


Link to post

Had a 286 once. It had been sitting in the corner of dad's office for a few years. He brought it home eventually so he could make us do our homework in Word 1.1 (scary shit) on Windows 3.1 (ran like molasses). (This was in the Pentium-II days).

That thing died a terrible death after dad found a stand for it. It didn't fit in the stand properly, fell over one day, and toasted the HDD. I wasn't complaining. That thing sucked. I don't miss it. I do miss the olde 486.

Share this post


Link to post

Did anyone else here think that the thread title was about someone making a 286/8086 compatible Doom build? Now I would buy that for a dollar.

Share this post


Link to post

Hell yeah! I would totally play Doom with EGA graphics and Adlib sound. I often wonder what Wolf3D would've looked like if they went through with the EGA mode.

Share this post


Link to post

I always wondered what it would take to make Doom work without the benefits of a 32-bit CPU and considerably less RAM to play with (typically within the limits of DOS's conventional memory, at most with the benefit of XMS/EMS without protected mode).

The actual doom.exe even has a hardcoding somewhere that kicks you out if you have less than 3.7MB free.

Now, assuming that they threw out all or most digital sounds, that graphics could be packed in half the space (storing them as 4-bit versions of patches/sprites/graphics etc. would be counterproductive because of the need to bit shift them before writing out a single pixel, so I'd rather have half or quarter-resolution textures and flats), cutting some sprite rotations down etc. it just might be possible to cobble something together that can still use the original IWAD data (and maybe some PWADs) and be sorta of playable/executable while vaguely passing for a 3D...well, something :-p

The display would still have to be primarily 8-bit, with 16-color EGA mode achieved through colormap/palette trickery rather than actually doing 4-bit writes (I can't imagine how writing to a single pixel via pure CPU manipulation could've ever been efficient, in sub-8 bit modes). In fact, having an EGA/CGA display that cannot be accelerated by scrolling/bit block transfers/pseudo-sprites would have been pretty damn inefficient, no matter what, and if I recall was one of the main reasons why the Wolf3D EGA mode was finally scrapped: there simply was no way to draw several non-scrolling, pixel-per-pixel updated frame buffers each second with EGA without ridiculous CPU overhead.

Alternatively, a fully -or mostly- shaded polygon environment with 2D sprites but with the Doom gameplay and mapping features intact would be just as badass as the real deal, especially if it was relased in lieu of Wolfenstein 3D.

Share this post


Link to post
Maes said:

Did anyone else here think that the thread title was about someone making a 286/8086 compatible Doom build?

If it was in the Source Ports forum - maybe.

Looks like the hard drive's died in my Sensor SP-286, so I'll have to rummage around for the setup utility and see if it'll accept a small capacity Compact Flash drive.

Share this post


Link to post
GreyGhost said:

Looks like the hard drive's died in my Sensor SP-286, so I'll have to rummage around for the setup utility and see if it'll accept a small capacity Compact Flash drive.


That's something I always wanted to try -does it have an IDE interface and a compatibility mode that presents it to the BIOS as a regular hard disk?

In theory, one could run a retro box virtually forever on such a contraption and a relatively small compact flash card. Imagine having a shit-old box blessed with a "hard drive" orders of magnitude faster than it could even be equipped with in its heyday ;-)

The only possible problems will be the old IDE controller (DMA mode? What is that?) and its brain-dead disk limits (on a 286 nonetheless...were there any limits BELOW the -already pretty dumb- 512 MB one?)

Share this post


Link to post

There's an IDE interface on the motherboard which worked fine several years ago with a 40MB Western Digital drive. I'm not sure what's being used for a controller, it's an old Chips & Technologies chipset for which I've only managed to find a couple of datasheets. Whatever it is I'm hoping it'll accept CHS settings, otherwise I'll just be wasting my time.

Share this post


Link to post
GreyGhost said:

There's an IDE interface on the motherboard which worked fine several years ago with a 40MB Western Digital drive.


Heh the smallest working IDE HD I have stashed somewhere must be 120 MB or so. I also have an oddball 200 MB IDE HD from 1989. A half height 3.5" unit, which still works. Must have cost a fortune back then.

Share this post


Link to post

Maes said:
That's something I always wanted to try -does it have an IDE interface and a compatibility mode that presents it to the BIOS as a regular hard disk?

In theory, one could run a retro box virtually forever on such a contraption and a relatively small compact flash card. Imagine having a shit-old box blessed with a "hard drive" orders of magnitude faster than it could even be equipped with in its heyday ;-)

You need one of these or something similar. From what I understand, CF and IDE are nearly identical on an electrical level, so circuits to convert are relatively simple. They show up as regular ATA hard drives and can understand a few SMART commands, too. Not as fast as a real SSD, but also not as expensive...

I got one for pretty much exactly what you describe but haven't actually tried it in an old PC yet. (I already had a handful of 2GB and 4GB CF cards lying around since only one of my cameras uses them anymore. It also works with SD cards and the cheap SD->CF adapter I got off eBay.)

Share this post


Link to post

Hmm those are really dirty cheap. If there was a version working with SD cards (I've got tons of them literally sitting around doing nothing) I'd get half a dozen of those. They'd make a terrific eBooster cache or a convenient retro-box swap-in module, without having to use 15 yo hard disks.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×