486DX/2 machine revived.

[neubejiita]

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=37693

A very interesting and in-depth thread about a man who brought a very old 486 machine back to life. I had forgotten what MS-DOS 6.22 setup looked like and setting up the drivers using autoexec.bat and config.sys was a nightmare.

What do you think?

[Maes]

It's been there, done that for me. Still it's amazing how longeve that old hardware is, including consumables like hard disks (anything sub-1 GB seems to be near-immortal) and AT-connector PSUs, which would be hard to replace anyway.

[GreyGhost]

Nice build. I have the parts but currently lack the motivation to assemble something similar.

[Bucket]

Yeah, I've got a few old machines, but I just don't have the time to play around with them. I've got a Pentium 150 laptop running Win95 that would be great for later DOS games.

My dad has an 8088 with 640k of RAM and Hercules graphics. I'd like to get my hands on that. I'd planned on loading it up with some ancient games I missed out on back then.

[Whoo]

I revived an old 486 machine too. Although to be honest all it needed was a new CD-ROM drive. At the moment I'm still hunting around at garage sales for some RAM for it though. It runs Wolf3d perfectly, but Doom has a lot of performance issues.

[SaladBadger]

I revived a 386 one time, but I really want to get my hands on a 486 or perhaps even something running the first Pentiums, really just for the extra performance.

[Quasar]

InsanityBringer said:

I revived a 386 one time, but I really want to get my hands on a 486 or perhaps even something running the first Pentiums, really just for the extra performance.

Some people across the street from me threw out a computer (sat it on the curbside) and I grabbed it not knowing a thing about it. It turned out to be an AT socket 7 mobo with a Pentium 75 processor in it.

I decided to jazz it up and added the max 128 MB of EDO RAM, wireless adapter, ethernet adapter, USB adapter, one 36x and one 56x CD-ROM drive, dual floppy drives (first machine I ever had that could access B: ;), and installed Windows 98 Second Edition on it. It can actually run Firefox fairly decently for such an ancient machine. Hell, I couldn't even hook a keyboard to the thing on account of it being AT til I was able to order an adapter off eBay.

I had initially tried to run it on 16 MB of RAM and this was fine up til I installed the USB card, at which point the large number of drivers installed caused 98 to be unable to boot any longer :P

I christened it "OldBox." Still have it, though it's not been booted up for quite a while. I let my parents use it as a play machine up until I was able to get them a free XP box to use instead.

[CODOR]

I'm sitting next to our bookkeeping machine here at work; a 100MHz 486DX/4. It only has 4MB of RAM and an ATI Graphics Solution video card (which could act as either a CGA or Hercules card with either a colour or monochrome monitor) though, otherwise I'd have Doom installed on it...