Small update

I'm still alive! Not much was done recently, but there were some minor changes in the Inventory. I've added more RAM to the 486 machine, now it has magnificent 64MB of RAM. On the other hand I took 2MB of 386 RAM in order to put it into the Sound Blaster AWE32 card that is fitted now in the 486 machine. Last but not least I've found a bracket to mount the HDD in the case of the 386, so now it has an SCSI drive.

As for the plans - I'm still waiting for another desktop AT case a friend of mine promised me ;-). When it will arrive I will be able to fit the 486 there. After that I will start installing stuff on the PCs - DOS 6.22 OR some linux (probably deli(cate) or some other, suitable for low-end computers). After instaling basic OS there will be time to install hardware goodies in the PCs - I/O card etc. I'll keep you all informed for sure.

In the mean time I have to fix my Amiga to have it 100% usable OR finish the 2MB chip hack I'm working on. Probably this will be the first thing I'll do, as it needs only to solder few wires and to put it back in the original case.

After all that I have an LCD with touchscreen to run, that a friend gave me. It will be fun to have a touchscreen with one of the PCs.

Selling an Golden Image RC-1000

Finally, I've decided to get some free room at my desktop. I'm selling one of the Amiga RAM expansions I have - the Golden Image RC-1000. Good shape, little yellowed, fully working. ~ 50 Euros OVNO.

Here you can see also how my Amiga 500 looks like now.
Bare motherboard, lies proudly on the desk. Nothing fancy,
waiting to go back to the box OR finishing the 1,5MB ChipRAM trick somehow
(probably NOT, because my Agnus is not fat enough).

Building an 386 system

Sooo, finally I've put together 386 system that I've got from a guy that was cleaning his garage and getting rid of this machine. First of all I dismantled the whole computer and cleaned the housing. After that the battery on the motherboard was removed, because it was leaky. Electrolyte fortunately haven't done much damage so I've only had to clean the pcb.

After that I've soldered a new battery and put everything together. Although the motherboard has normal ISA slots this housing uses a riser card. This card is plugged into one of the 16 bit ISA slots and offers two 8 bit and three 16 bit ISA slots.

At the current moment the spec of this machine are: 386DX-40 and 16MB RAM. The graphics card is a Trident TVG9000 with 512k of RAM. In the computer you can also see SCSI controller. It's an AHA1540B with 50pin HDD interface (SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 compatible) and with 34pin FDD controller. Also in one of the 8bit slots I've put an I/O controller with serial, paralel and game ports - what a convienient usage of these ports. I still have to connect the floppies and HDD in order to install anything on this machine. After that I have an Scientific Solutions board ready for that PC. It's an 96 digital I/O card. I hope to run some parallel feed digital-to-analog converters on that.

As you can see I've added an second page for my blog called Inventory (see top). I plan to put there all the stuff that I have at home. At the current moment only some of the computers are fully described, the rest is waiting for the description or to be fixed/completed/put together.