Wondering about an old computer I have

I have a Old Northgate Computer (My first old computer to mess around with). Its not running right now as I don't have another monitor for it. When I got it both the floppies drives were broken from all the dust on the front and back of the computer. But The inside of the computer is nice and clean.

I looking for advice/info on this computer and what to do to it.

Specs:
It has a 386 VLSI motherboard
Power Tonic Switching Power Supply (PTA-4200CF 220 Watts)
A Video Seven Video Card
A SIIG Controller (it is used to hook up my harddrive and other stuff like that).
And A Western Digital Caviar 1210 Harddrive.

Pics:
Overview (it a bit dark)
Motherboard Overview
Motherboard chip
Video Card Chip
Controller Chip
Sticker on Back

Oldschool gaming rig for anything released in 1993 and before. It will just be too slow/inconvenient for most DOS games released after 1993, including Doom.

Think more along the lines of Commander Keen, Apogee games, some Epic Megagames titles etc.

Edit: heh, the motherboard is not even using SIMMs but discrete memory chips. Now that's something I never saw in 386s. Last computer I saw that was like that was an 8088 XT or an Amstrad CPC. Is it a 386 SX?

Edit2: Seems so. The VLSI VL82C100-QC is a sort of all-in-one 386SX/Cache/Controller contraption. 16 bit bus....ugh. It's more like a beefed up 286 than a real 386.

Thanks for the info maes.

stupid motherboard but I can't complain too much since I got it free.


2 more questions

What would be a good cheaper sound card to use? (as the one spare one I have is from around 2000)

Anyone have any info on the video card?

I think this could be your video card, haven't yet found a match for the motherboard.

If I've read the chip numbers correctly, what you have on the motherboard is 1Meg of parity RAM, which isn't enough to play Doom though the double sockets suggest that upgrading to 4Meg is possible if you can lay your hands on suitable RAM chips.

Malinku said:

I looking for advice/info on this computer and what to do to it.

I can hear Maes shouting "noooooo!" all the way from Eastern Europe.

EDIT: Except yours wouldn't even make a good barbeque because of that weird case design PCs used to have.

DoomUK said:

EDIT: Except yours wouldn't even make a good barbeque because of that weird case design PCs used to have.

Well, he can do what he wants to the case as long as the contents are safe somewhere else ;-)

Now....the graphics are with all likelyhood some generic VGA implementation, especially if you see a VGA connector at the back (don't expect it to be blue, though, it will just be a black 3-row 15-pin D-sub connector). Don't expect SVGA or any exotic/unique features out of it. You'll be lucky if it even has the full 256K of VRAM a VGA can use.

For sound, and pretty much for any and all expansions, you'll need an ISA sound card. Stuff from 2000 will be PCI bus, which didn't even exist as a conceptual design when your computer was designed. An original Sound Blaster/AdLib or a decent clone will do. Don't bother with Gravis Ultrasound and the such, any games/software that will be able to make good use of it will be too demanding to even run on this bitty box.

Such old boxes are ideal if you are a sort of "combo" PC/electronics tinkerer as it allows you to experiment with you own DIY digital elecronics and direct probing of output ports even through QBasic. Making a parallel port DAC was a popular project at the time ;-)

Other uses would be turning it into a dedicated MOD player. Using a reasonably optimized player + a decent sound card, you could get some oldschool goodness out of it.

I've decided to just keep the two extra cards and scrap the case (the case was just too annoying to work with).

A picture of the full mother board (After I took it out). I'm just going to get rid of it.
http://imageshack.us/f/403/blah003.jpg/

Edit: The Motherboard is just the price of shipping.

Well I'm sure a version of minix or whatever would work.

Csonicgo said:

Well I'm sure a version of minix or whatever would work.

Only that you could do next to nothing with it -much less if you don't have any ISA network cards to play the "I'll use it as a router" card-. Any flavour of DOS would be preferable to the crippling bloat of any UNIX-like OS.

Hell, most commercial UNIX distros of the day were FAR too heavy to run on such a machine. They had specs comparable to modern-day DSL which simply means they were humonguous -who in their right mind would burn $10000 on an early 486 or 386 with super-expensive 4 or 8 Megs of RAM just to display a login prompt?

Malinku said:

A picture of the full mother board (After I took it out). I'm just going to get rid of it.
http://imageshack.us/f/403/blah003.jpg/

Should have guessed the CPU was hiding under the drive bays - a 386DX-20. I have an Olivetti board of similar vintage but that at least takes SIMMs modules.

Minix 3 is probably too bloated, but that machine could easily handle the old 2.04 release:
http://minix1.woodhull.com/hints.html

Only useful if you plan to study Tanenbaum's books on OS design. For games, DOS is the best choice.

IMHO computers like this are basically good for nothing unless you have something they can do that your other machines can't. This usually amounts to using some weird peripheral for lab work. Or do like Maes said and use it to fiddle with electronics. That's pretty close to the same thing, really.

Computers like this are, however, awesome if you like fiddling with computers. They're almost never the best way to get anything done, and these days not even usually the best way to play DOS games, but they are fun.

They are also awesome if you want to teach yourself to write smooth scrollers in assembly and VGA Mode X or learn programming the oldschool way, without using ridiculous CPU "educational boards" ;-)

Some of those old DOS text-mode IDEs esp. those by Borland were simply awesome.

A project I'd like to see done on one such machine would be a "below requirements" version of Doom: using the same engine mechanics but loading quarter-resolution textures and sprites (e.g. 32x32 flats) nnd Mode X pixel quadrupling, to see if it can be made playable at a speed that doesn't suck.

Maes said:

Some of those old DOS text-mode IDEs esp. those by Borland were simply awesome.

Still around:
http://tvision.sourceforge.net/
http://setedit.sourceforge.net/