resurrecting a dying 486 66 PC

Ive managed to get old of my 1994 era PC (well similar one to my second PC actually), in all its glory ...

486 66mhz
16mb 72pin ram
Opti chipset
TMC PAT48 Vesa local bus motherboard
Socket 3

2x IDE Hdd

conner 348mb
Seagate 3?? mb

creative blaster CD-rom
cirrius logic video cl-gd5426 vga / ide / serial card - vesa
ISA modem
Soundblaster 16 ISA

Dos & Windows95

Pre Windows95 keyboard.

However it was faulty - PC Keyboard locked.

after some time i eventually worked out that this was a motherboard fault and not the key lock or jumper error and yes - the barrel battery had eaten 4 traces on the mobo. I have cleaned and soldered these back up and bingo it works just fine now. After some considerable time on the net , i have found a jumper diagram....


However the Hdd is very loud and I'm half way through setting up a CF card so i can copy some DOS games over but the damn AT power pack has died...

however it will have an ATX in it tomorrow i expect and i'll try to remember how to set DOS up on a CF (nope fuse had gone , AT PSU back in service)

i can't wait to try and find the drivers for this thing....(found on vogan drivers)

mike...

Excellent stuff mate.
I've been very tempted to do something similar for a while, my first PC was a LocalVesa 66DX2

:)

The battery almost killed it , just need an AT power pack now buddy.

actually my first PC was an Apricot XT & a Zenith 386 for £100 , hideous but i loved them. However the 486 played Doom and Dark forces :-)

Danny.

The 486 is a nice computer. Did a project a couple of years ago where I pimped up a 486DX2-66 I have. A real pain to configure, as I went for a setup with two sound cards etc. I'd recommend setting up a startup menu with different settings for the DOS enviroment. Some games can be picky, especially demoscene stuff. Games also sound much nicer with Gravis Ultrasound, if they support it. Fun to see someone want to resurrect these computers, that trace corrosion looks nasty. If you're having trouble with the configuration, I'd recommend heading over to www.vogons.org. They also have a driver archive (www.vogonsdrivers.com), which is very helpful!

Nice, my first PC was a 386/40 upgraded to a dx2/66 after a year, before that it gained some ram and a soundcard, then a full tower case just like the mikronik Amiga towers.

excellent, another retroPC build :)

Thanks, all working now.

booting from cf , sb16 drives from vogons and dark forces & crazy cars 3 playing ...

im amazed how many hours vanish with computers....

needed a boot disk, couldn't find a floppy that worked - found one
my new pc doesn't have a floppy or floppy power... So I hot wired the floppy
then , the cf would not boot
changed that , the psu packed in...

all in all about 5 hours to play dark forces ...

excellent :)

The amount of time just to get it to work is kind of half the fun. ;) Getting a USB floppy drive is a must when dealing with old PCs. Also a zip drive is very handy, one with LPT for the old PC and one with USB for the new one. But since you use a CF card, I guess it isn't needed.

Changed the VGA lead too, it has a broken wire - everything has a green tint....but now its nice and crisp.



true , a USB floppy and a working floppy disk is handy. I had hoped to format a CF on a windows7 PC and set it all up and then just plug it in and away you go but that didn't happen.

all i got was Insert boot media error.

i spent about an hour trying to get DOS 6.22 on a 720k Amiga floppy , that didn't work either.

In the end i found a good 1.44mb floppy and ran a 6.22 boot disk program that formats and copies the contents over to it.

I have a USB floppy somewhere....an IDE zip drive too.....packed away somewhere , quicker to buy another.

Good work mike... That LED 66 display on the tower brings back some memories :-)

Ive been tinkering with the x86 cards in my Risk PC and went through the same trauma to get Dos 6.2 installed followed by two hours reminding myself of the config.sys torment, loading mouse drivers into himem to get the extra 4k needed lol, for some reason Tie Fighter runs better on the i486 cpu card than the i586 o_0