So, about a year ago, i received a donation of a 486 PC (tower, monitor, speakers, optical drive, sound card, network card all boxed)
On first glance, couple of issues identified, the CPU had not been clocked right (set to 33mhz, when the CPU is a DX50, something I have never actually had the pleasure of running. SX25, 33 and DX2/66 before graduating to a Pentium 75 in my younger days, but a nice solid machine). The typical barrel battery issues, where its begun to leak, but not much in the way of damage which is a saving grace.
The spec as it stands at present:
- Intel 486 DX50
- 8 megabytes of RAM (1meg 30 pin SIMMs)
- Unknown Motherboard mix of 8bit and 16bit ISA slots
- Goldstar I/O Card
- Cirrus Logic Video Card (model escapes me right now)
- 127meg IDE HDD
Items that came with it:
- Aztech Sound Card
- Aztech FX20 Speakers
- 2x Optical CDRom
- Trust NE2000 Compatible Network Card
Interesting to see bodge wires on 486 motherboards of the 90’s, I honestly thought this ended with the 286/386 era. It looks factory rather than a repair, but I could be wrong.
In addition to the above I have also taken my first dive into working with a GOTEK drive, and making a couple of mods to that, including flashing the flashfloppy firmware onto it, and swapping out the display. I’ll provide more details on that shortly.