Subject: Re: Looking for a 486 system...

From: Ethan Dicks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun Mar 2 16:13:01 2003

--- James Rice <[email-masked]> wrote:
> As far as finding an older system, except for the 386 that is kind of a 
> museum piece, we scrapped eveything below 1ghz a couple of months ago.

Oy!  I have *one*, count it, ONE, machine in my entire collection
*over* 1GHz, only because the AMD chip was a throbbing $95 (it replaced
an 800MHz chip).  On my day-to-day ops, I spend most of my time on this
P-133 laptop, and on a P-III 350.  If people want to throw sub-GHz hardware
away, I'll gladly take motherboards, CPUs and RAM.  :-)  I'd like to
put together a 600MHz machine together for Daphne/MAME, but not enough
to spend "real" money on it.

As I've written about here before, I have a device programmer that
does not like fast machines.  I think part of it is that ISA speeds
went from 8.00MHz to 8.33MHz when 386s and the like came onto the
scene (to simplify the bus controller design).  I have not done the
experiment of taking a 486-25 and cranking everything down.  It's
been less effort to keep an 8-bit or 16-bit machine around.  I suppose
in the future, when _this_ box dies, I may have to resort to the slowest
ISA machine I can find, and playing with BIOS settings, disabling internal
and external cache, etc.

-ethan

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun Mar 2 16:54:00 2003

> does not like fast machines.  I think part of it is that ISA speeds

Snip!

> ISA machine I can find, and playing with BIOS settings, disabling internal

Ethan & to others,

I once ran into a lunch box b/w LCD portable that once had 286 in 
it (baby AT size, smug fit at that).  I plugged in an 486 or pentium 
board in it and LCD controller (ISA only) spat out crap once cache is 
enabled and shadowing the video bios loads.

With external & internal cache and shadowing disabled, things went 
great.  Try that on yours.

That lunchox was too much trouble and my intention was using it with 
pentium in it but that LCD controller was the problem spot so I 
ditched it.

And I can't use my P75 either because of flickering pixels.  It is 
not the panel itself it is somewhere else in the circuitry or display 
board.

In meantime, informal search for good lunchbox continues.

Cheers,

Wizard

---

From: David Woyciesjes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Mar 3 08:21:00 2003

> to spend "real" money on it.

	Replaced an 800MHz CPU? Was it a P-III? And does it still work? If so,
I'll take it...
	I have 2 boards that can max out with an P-III 800 CPU. One is my main
desktop, currently a P-III 500, and the other is currently not being
used... 

--
---Dave Woyciesjes
---ICQ# 905818