Love the video and how you describe how you got the system to work again. I do not have the patience to explain every step I take to repair machines here, let alone try and make a video of it as I fix the machine. Thanks for yet another enjoyable video.
Bill, I recently got a computer with a PC Chips M919 motherboard (my second one; I got my first M919-based machine around the same time you posted this video), and it's the version with both 30 and 72-pin SIMM slots. I don't know how, but both types of RAM work simultaneously. Mine has four 1 MB 30-pin SIMMs and two 16 MB 72-pin SIMMs, and it recognizes all 36 MB of RAM. To be honest, I really like the M919. Sure, it's a PC Chips product, and it was cheap, and it was the subject of unorthodox business practices, but I've found with both of my machines that they simply work well, and they're not terribly slow even without the L2 cache. Mine are rock stable; I've never had a crash. Plus the M919 is extremely versatile, supporting every Socket 3 processor ever made, and being able to use ISA, PCI, and VESA cards.
Oh man I loved those mobos back in the 90's. I had a amd 486-133 with 64 meg. I ran RedHat Linux on it. Dual monitors. One VGA one Hercules graphics, and yes that's right a VT100 text terminal. I had a VESA multi IO card with 16 MB of cache for disk and CD-ROM read and write. I also served a X login to my old Sun 3/60, and used a dial up to the university modem bank. I learned as much on that machine as I did on my Commie-64!
Hey man, I like some of your vids so I'm subscribing. When you talked about WinBIOS, I know Supermicro were still using it in 1999 on the P6DGU, a Dual Slot 1 (P3 Katmai) serverboard, this was the last motherboard I knew of using it, thought that trivia may interest you, nice to see someone else keeping these things ticking. I also have a 486 with this CPU, it's ex-army and it's based on an MSI MS-4144, it is indeed a fun DOS gaming system, especially with WFW3.11 and the TCP stack installed.
Bill- back when I worked for a camera repair shop, we had a special pen for cleaning contacts. It was essentially a pen with a tip made of fiberglass bristles. If I can find one online I will shoot you a link. They are made for cleaning contacts on electronics like this and work awesome for getting anything up to and including corrosion from leaking batteries.
Great video! I built a dx4 100 a couple of months ago and when I was partitioning the hdd I thought it was odd that 8gb was only being reported as 504mb... I just thought it was old hardware and probably a faulty hdd or ide controller so just left at that. Has actually been working fine and even installed some games and programs on it with no issue. Totally forgot about LBA so keen to set it up right next time I play with it! Thanks :)
That looks like a PC Chips (a.k.a. Hsing Tech) motherboard to me. "Write Back" labels are usually a dead giveaway that the onboard L2 cache is fake, with a patched BIOS to lie about it (usually soldered to the board, so you can't swap it out for an authentic BIOS). Cache testing utilities like CACHECHK will tell you for sure if the cache is real or fake.
Yup, "Write Back Cache On" is the patched fake BIOS message. If it had real L2 cache installed, it would report the actual amount of cache present, typically 256KB. I have a PC Chips M919 which has fake onboard cache but gives you a slot to install a proprietary SIMM-like stick containing 256K of real L2 cache. Later versions of the board don't have the fake chips installed, but you can still see the fake solder traces which go in circles and don't connect to anything else on the board!
It amazes me that mouse support in the BIOS/System Setup was available all that time ago, and yet it took until very recently with UEFI to make it a standard thing on computers.
I have a question, is the -5v rail on the PSU (white wire on AT, and ATX) really needed for ALL ISA cards? I recall being told that only serial controllers and some very early 8-bit ISA sound cards used -5v, but I may be wrong. I found an old, but not really vintage, Socket 7 ATX motherboard from around 1996-1998, it accepts an ATX connector, but none of my spare atx psus have -5v, and I want to use a couple ISA cards, a sound card & a network card. I could use a pci network card if I have to.
OMG, Now that I've looked at that board for a bit, I think it is pretty much the same one that I had years ago. I ran an AMD 5x86-133 CPU at 160 Mhz on that board. The BIOS was also identical. Maybe I'll have to email you that pic. There is also a slight chance that I might still have the owner's manual, though I'm pretty sure I tossed it some years back. How ironic.
I've always loved those PCs back in the day that had the Turbo button on them + the LCD read-out for CPU speed. I wish I could find one, but haven't had any luck. I prefer the towers over the desktop models, though. My father had one when I Was a kid that had to been nothing short of 3feet tall, Turbo button, I think maybe a 100mhz CPU and was loud as hell.
That motherboard is so very familiar, my old Am486 DX/4 100 is sat "rotting" at my parents house. Unused since about 1997. This video has made me decide to go fetch it and fire it up. The first PC I ever built (well, me and my Dad built) - DX/4 100, 16MB RAM, 2MB C&T graphics, 540MB HDD, an "awesome" Aztec Galaxy sound card with SCSI adapter built in to run the 1x speed SCSI CD-ROM! We ran 3.11 for awhile then Win95. It must have cost my Dad a fortune, I must ask if he remembers how much lol
I remember having an IntelDX4 100 MHz, with 8MB of RAM and a 850MB HDD with this kind of BIOS, now I'm sorry I didn't keep it, it would be nice to have it around just for the nostalgia.
Wolvenstein 3D, DOOM, Commander Keen, Rise Of The Triad, Hocus Pocus, Jazz Jackrabbit, Ken's Labyrinth, Destruction Derby, Need For Speed, Lemmings, Sim City 2000, Jill Of The Jungle, Duke Nukem, Mystic Towers, Whacky Wheels, Skunny Kart, need I go on? I see that the CPU has the old style Windows Logo on it, was it common for CPU manufacturers to do that kind of thing back then? I just love your narrative description of the problems this computer had.
If the cd-rom drive has the creative labs logo on it, does it have a sound blaster? I am getting a pentium pro and it has a creative logo on the cd drive. The monitor did not work, but I heard the windows 3.1 startup sound. Does this pentium pro probably have a sound blaster 16?
I discovered that on a Sony Vaio that I recently put an 80GB hard drive in, fdisk thought that the hard drive was 10GB. However, Windows 98 setup had absolutely no issue with dealing with the full 80GB capacity. I'm not sure why fdisk got confused; I've seen it work fine with 160GB drives in the past, and the Vaio shipped new with a 20GB drive (and Windows XP), so it's not like the motherboard doesn't know what it is doing with a "large" drive.
hey, there is an IBM IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX, 0,033 computer over here for sale, but theres some errors in the floppy drive, and serial ports, what could that be?.
Love AMI BIOS. If the person that set up that computer had read the one or two page manual that came with the motherboard they would have known that using both types of RAM was not allowed. Still lookng for 8 MB 30 pin SIMMs. I've told they were manufactured but I've not been able to find them. First Linux distro I ran on this board (described in your video) was Red Hat 4.2. Very archaic when compared to today's Linux distro's. Wasn't everything in those days?
I was misinformed about the 30 pin SIMMs. The memory guy I frequented at the computer fairs some 30 years may have given me the misinformation or I misunderstood him. Yes, I can attest to what was available then and what prices were compared to today's technology. I have a $35 Raspberry Pi that is more powerful and has more memory than my first PC... Radio Shack Model I Level II or the mainframe computer at college where I ran my punch card batch programming on time share. Have a nice day :)
More memorys refreshed bill :-) Ive enjoyed 486's like yours, After testing the psu i would pull out all the cards/interfaces and power the mobo to see if it beeps, then put a display card in and with two cleaned memory strips i try again. I would leave all mobo fixing screws loose and plug in two cards into the slots with max distance apart and after putting the two card screws in then tighten the mobo screws. Worked for me:-) Sorry bill i was a bit of a nerd in my 486 days :-)
Different types of memory at the same time: I have had a motherboard, a Siemens-Nixdorf-Motherboard with a P1 in it that had Slots for SD-RAM and 72-pin-type memory and it actually accepted both populated at the same time. It summed up the amount of memory but only ran at the speed of the 72pin sockets. That was pretty cool
+AlmightyMaria PvB I have an IBM PC350 that has DIMM-168 PC100 and 72-Pin SIMM slots in it that can work in junction with no problems. It's really just a Pentium version of this computer, to be honest, it has a multitude of problems I'm really not willing to fix or even look into, but maybe I will one day...
+MinecraftMarcus1 It's illegal, as in, not supported by the standards. Neither is on the fly processor overclocking, but that didn't stop them either. Its very possible it could be done, but however it is done, the speed of the ram will always be that of the slowest ram. This is more of a physical law :P
+Richard Smith: True. But it is a law of physics only if the slow and the fast RAM must be accessed simultaneously, as in the lower/upper halves of a full bus width (like with a Pentium). If they sit in different banks it must be up to the design of the memory controller whether the fast one can be used at its full speed or not, at least in older systems, without tight interleaving of memory acesses.
Sven Ekeberg That is too complicated, because when a programs need memory, and it gets assigned available memory address pointers. If some gets allocated on a slower data bus, then accessing the bus will be unpredictable and inconsistent. We have a seperate data bus for overflow, the page file, and that is expected to be slower(I'll get back to this) Today's memory is built around parallel processing, which demands consistency in performance, which is a higher priority than speed, and programs are optimized to take advantage of that. So in this, the memory allocation would be too bloated dealing with data speed consistency, slowing everything down, or the program would have to be made in order to expect an inconsistent data rate... again, slowing it down. The only solution here so that everything still actually functions is to clamp the data rate to the lowest common denominator, it is the simplest solution to a complex problem. Imagine this, lets say you have a program which saves its state, and simultaneously loads new data. The save state requires less data to be processed than the loading of new data, and it is also started first, so it is perfectly logical the save state will complete before new data is processed, unless the new data is actually on a faster data bus, and now shit is happening out of order and stepping on each other, causing all kinds of unpredictable behavior. What one could do is use the slower memory as a separate partition for (part of) the pagefile/cache, as the page file is expected to have inconsistent performance. You can currently do this by making a ram disk, and telling windows to use it for its pagefile, if you were unaware :) This obviously is a bad idea most of the time, cause it would be better off just being extra ram, but back in the 32-bit days, programs only had access to 4GB of ram(sometimes this turned out to be closer to 2.5GB), and it had to cache the rest, which is where this came in handy.
I'm not sure if a Sound Blaster 16 card will work for this computer, but it drives me nuts when I don't have the sound for some of the games I had on other older computers.
I had one of these, it was our/my first homebuilt PC. We were fools and shopped for the cheapest motherboard. Our variant had a socketed BIOS and cache chips (unknown if real). It had a PCChips sticker on the "8DY" chipset, some had fake Intel stickers. It was quite an epiphany when I stumbled into an article about these boards a few years ago on a site called "Red Hill". I was a newb back then, knowing what I know now I wish I still had that POS and finally conquer it's utter instability.
Quite possibly so, especially considering how popular soundcard/CD-ROM bundles were back in the day. A PPro would seem to be a little too new for that sort of thing, but then again it might be one from the early days (in which case I'd expect pretty dreadful PCI bus performance, a major issue on early PPro chipsets).
When it comes to vintage PCs like this, do you prefer systems from big name vendors such as Dell, Compaq and Gateway, or custom-build systems from small shops like this one? The reason I ask is because a lot of systems like this were built by mom and pop computer shops with motherboards that only have a 5 pin AT keyboard port on them, and for the rest of your ports are broken out by headers either on the motherboard or by a multi I/O card. Compare that to computers from companies like Dell, Compaq and IBM from the same era where the motherboard typically has a full card of serial, parallel and PS/2 ports.
I prefer the big name vendors. One never knows to what stresses a self built system was subjected during its assembly. Sometimes people would use the cheapest and most awful cases, expansion cards, power supplies or even motherboards. Big name manufacturers have had their share of foibles, but in general, they used good quality parts and usually got them put together properly.
@@uxwbill I would say I agree with you. I like systems where all of the I/O ports are just integrated onto the motherboard and I don't have to worry about breaking out headers or using super I/O cards.
I have an IBM PC 330 (Pentium 166 machine) with a motherboard on which you can apparently use all four 72-pin SIMM slots along with the 168-pin DIMM slot at the same time. All slots are for EDO DRAM though, so maybe that's why.
My first thought was maybe someone had installed a larger drive, but I guess i would have eventually stumbled around in the Bios settings and found the problem. I have some old computers running windows 2000, we use them to print invoices.
Also if i'm not mistaken newer Asus motherboards have graphical setup, while Gigabyte's implementation on select boards called "Touch BIOS" which is just a software run from within windows...
I'm likely repeating someone here, but if I remember right both 30 and 72 pin can work together. My first beige box had all populated when I brought it home. The SIMM + DIMM pentium motherboards are a completely different story though.
No, they're "Fast page mode". EDO didn't come into use until a bit later, and all EDO modules are at least 72pin as far as I know, later ones were 168-pin.
10:15 I've seen some old thinkpads have a graphical setup called easy setup and most of those that have it have a clock error because the clock battery is hard to replace
My first computer had a bios and 100 Mhz processor just like that one, and the turbo button wasn't hooked up. I wish i had known about having to configure LBA or the drive parameters back then, because I recall trying to install Windows 95 and failing miserably, then giving up and smashing the computer with a sledge hammer.
Some memory modules had gold plated connectors, some were tin. Same with memory sockets on motherboards. People used to say you shouldn't put tin in a gold plated socket, or vice versa, because the metals would react and corrode. I don't know if that was a real issue or just people being eccentric.
I wish I still had a computer similiar to that. The best thing I have is a Dell Dimension XPS M200s with an intel pentium 200 MHz processor in it. Everything is on board with it except for the video card. The system currently runs Windows 98 SE, but I use it to play old DOS and windows games. While the computer is good and all, what I do not like about it is that I can't get sound and music on some DOS games even though the on board sound is sound blaster.
That motherboard looks like it's one of the old PC Chips fake cache motherboard... To quote Red Hill Technology, the onboard cache is nothing more than "black plastic things with metal legs on." Sometimes they not only put fake cache on the board, but also a fake COAST slot that wasn't compatible with COAST sticks. I have one such board with the fake cache and fake COAST slot, the PC Chips M919. PC Chips just loved to cheap out wherever possible...
+Steve W They were actually very common in the 90s, however you probably can already guess that the drive isn't actually made by Creative, it's probably made by Panasonic or Sony or Toshiba or something. I suspect the CD-ROM drive and sound card were sold as a bundle, possibly with a microphone, some speakers and some software.
i have a PTZ dome security camera i got very cheap i found out why it did nothing just a slight buzz hours later i got angry and harshly pushed it to one side and it came to life and did a auto config about a month later its on a old lamp post we have in our garden its still working strange??
That's a PC-Chips motherboard. I don't remember the exact model, but I can say that those write-back chips are only dummy plastic. Google "486 pcchips board" and you will see.
I always wanted one of those lighting fast 486DX4-100 back in the day, but they were so damn expensive :( So I worked the whole summer and got a used compaq 386SX instead. (With a C= 1407 monitor if I remember correctly)
I gotta fix me an old computer some time in the future with Windows 3.1 and 98 for old games. Guess only Win 98 is needed, but Win 3.1 would be for the extra retro touch.
I had a system that indeed used and the same time (and I cant remember weather it was the 30 or the 72 pin SIMs)it was that and SDRAM. I can't remember the exact specs for the system. I know it had an Intel 486DX4 inside or that's what I remember what was but other then that I don't remember. what I do remember is that if you had both type installed you would incur a performance penalty on the higher speed SDRAM. I do remember never really wanting to have both types installed for that reason.
While it looks nice, I prefer the Award BIOS over the AMI "WinBIOS", simply because I had a great deal of issue trying to populate the PCI card slots on an old 486DX2/66 system, which is because of an issue with the BIOS not distributing IRQ signals correctly and to every expansion slot.
I do have a Biostar Socket 3 board that lets you mix and match both memory types at once. You just can't go over 64MB. It just occurred to me, there's an easy way to tell the L2 cache chips are fake. First, they're soldered in. Check the traces. I bet you they don't go anywhere. :3
If you still have this and suddenly realise you don't want it I'm looking for a 486 computer pretty cheap. To give you a better deal you can keep the sound card, I don't really need it.
For some reason, it reminds me of the mobo I just got in the mail. They are not identical yet the way it is booting are the exact same way. Same bios interface too.
uxwbill True that. For some reason, it was just not that widely used on the boards that I used and my friends used back then. Though globally it is true. The only four 486's that I remember had it, is four identically 486dx2-80 systems. Then I remember one QDI board with a P-133 that my parents used to have.
3:55 The biostar u8668 pro motherboard in my P4 rig has slots for both PC133 and DDR1 ram... So I used the pc133 and decided to be stuck with 512mb ram and windows 2000, although it also works perfectly with XP but I like 2000 more.
Its a PC Chips board, they loved WinBIOS and advertising fake write back cache. Check Total Hardware 99. SuperMicro did WinBIOS too as my 440BX board got it. The turbo button and LED work independent of the motherboard, you have to check for any slowdown (a dir /s usually works). I wish I had a late 94 BIOS on my Soyo VLB board, non-PCI 486s with LBA BIOS aren't common. The Promise EIDEMax II ROM runs all my HDs in that machine. Now if I could only find a nice EISA/VLB 486 board...
+Harrison Rose I've one of them ... I was pretty happy the first time I saw it in a computer because it has PCI + ISA + VLB Then I discovered that it had fake cache and very thin PCB ...
Apparently the graphical BIOS was unpopular and cost AMI a huge loss, hence the reason that it was discontinued. You can read about it half way down the page here : //redhill.net.au/b/b-95.html#bios
No way we can find informations about old machines ! I just messing arround with old 486 dx old laptop.. I have nothing mthere is nothing about there on board
you can get away with the 30 and 72 pin slots populated at the same time, hell, you could do the same with sdram and 72pin on some of the boards that had it as long as you either filled the 72pin or used pairs in the 72pin. but it is still a nono, and it never works for long if at all if the sticks are high density in comparison to the contemporary sticks for the board. in the 30/72 pin configuration it treats the 72pin like two 32pin sticks and the chipset can handle 8 30 pin sticks. can really make it act stupid. btw, you can slow down that memory speed check to normal speed, that is a setting in the bios, it just checks that the sticks are there and reporting, it doesn't actually test the memory for all intents and purposes. i think it used to be called fast memory check or some crap like that in the bios. btw, that system has what is called an overlay, that is why fdisk looks funky. the disk is too large for the hardware so the addressing has to be done using software, but the software appears to be fucked. the hardware itself cannot see or use a 1gb drive, but the drive is probably a 1gb hdd. keep in mind that the bios is on the motherboard, the multi io controller is an add in card. (EDIT: more than likely someone formated that drive without reinstalling the overlay after, that is why it gave them such a headache, in truth if you want to wipe a drive with an overlay you might as well wipe the partition table and start from scratch with a fresh overlay unless you like nightmares)
***** you had already replaced the bios batery, and my first step would have been loading bios defaults, not to mention the system had been jimmied around with in the first place before you got it, i wouldn't take the bios settings you ran into as representative of the initial issue. but hell, you had/have the computer in hand, to put it bluntly i'm just firing shots in the dark and you got to see and feel it for yourself =P. i just remember having a board back in the late 90s (was years old when i got it) with one of those amd dx4 133 "p90" chips on it with pretty much the same bios and for drives at a bit under 1gb and over i always had to use an overlay. i'm guessing yours must just be a newer version of the chipset and bios than the one i had with a less powerful cpu on it. anyway sorry to bug ya, have a good one, it is nostalgic for me to look at these old systems i haven't dealt with in a decade and a half and i enjoy seeing someone put up videos about them, although i cringe every time you talk about some proprietary crap as being "good" =P
+uxwbill I once saw a Pentium system that had 30 pin SIMM slots on it and IIRC 16 of them. You had to put them in matched sets of 8 to fill the 64 bit wide bus. Of course if you really wanted to save those old SIMMS you could pick up one of those SIMM stackers as long as you got the right direction. You couldn't put two leftward facing sim stackers together because they wouldn't fit, so you had to get a left and a right, but then that blocked your other slots. So they came up with the Left short and Left tall, so the tall one would rise above the short one and you'd have 8 30 pin SIMMs floating in the air on the left and then you could repeat with the right as well.
On my other UA-cam channel. i took a old hard drive form a computer similar to this one and slapped it into my newer computer. low and behold it booted right into Windows 3.1. i was shocked manly because the machine i put this older hard into was 10 fold faster than the older computer i took it out of. Windows 3.1 was running at 2.20GHz and with 1GB or RAM. i don't even think Windows 3.1 could run on a 2.20 GHz CPU or handle 1GB of ram? let me tell you it was fast!!
2-8: GPU not detected That's all I know. It took me a while to figure that one out, and BOY did I feel dumb when I noticed that the only thing in there was an ISA Sound Blaster 16... EDIT: Sounds like my Pentium Pro may have been some kind of fancier model of that thing. That's the exact same BIOS, and I swear that I heard a Conner hard disk in there. I'll keep watching and find out how big it is... EDIT 2: 8:53 All of those problems were on my machine, along with a BSoD saying "Unable to write to physical disk C". They were caused by a faulty controller board on the Conner hard drive that was causing it to report itself as 3.6 PB (3,600 TB or 3,600,000 GB)! EDIT 3: Ignore this one. I'm stupid sometimes. Please note that I'm only editing so many times because I don't want to just spam the comment section with my comments.
If I remember right is one of those memories a 16bit and the other a 32 bit ? I may be wrong I just got out of the hospital was in for 4 days . I had bad news I have diabetes damage to my stomach and possible bad appendix and bladder. I was in CT vfisting inlaws for Easter and lost 15 pounds in 3 days . I hope to catch up on watching your videos. I have a gi doctor apt lucky I made it back home using a bucket for you know what. NOw if I go back in its local so wife can visit
that bios brings back memories of my child hood. I love the winbios. it was simple to get around in. Wish bios for modern mainboards were like that.
Love the video and how you describe how you got the system to work again. I do not have the patience to explain every step I take to repair machines here, let alone try and make a video of it as I fix the machine.
Thanks for yet another enjoyable video.
Bill, I recently got a computer with a PC Chips M919 motherboard (my second one; I got my first M919-based machine around the same time you posted this video), and it's the version with both 30 and 72-pin SIMM slots. I don't know how, but both types of RAM work simultaneously. Mine has four 1 MB 30-pin SIMMs and two 16 MB 72-pin SIMMs, and it recognizes all 36 MB of RAM.
To be honest, I really like the M919. Sure, it's a PC Chips product, and it was cheap, and it was the subject of unorthodox business practices, but I've found with both of my machines that they simply work well, and they're not terribly slow even without the L2 cache. Mine are rock stable; I've never had a crash. Plus the M919 is extremely versatile, supporting every Socket 3 processor ever made, and being able to use ISA, PCI, and VESA cards.
Step 1- Get some pizza
Step 2- Watch a uxwbill video
= Best thing ever :P
Heh, but theres one thing i need to try, Pizzafries!
Here we are talking about pizzas
We need more troubleshooting videos with uxwbill like this!
Oh man I loved those mobos back in the 90's. I had a amd 486-133 with 64 meg. I ran RedHat Linux on it. Dual monitors. One VGA one Hercules graphics, and yes that's right a VT100 text terminal. I had a VESA multi IO card with 16 MB of cache for disk and CD-ROM read and write. I also served a X login to my old Sun 3/60, and used a dial up to the university modem bank. I learned as much on that machine as I did on my Commie-64!
Hey man, I like some of your vids so I'm subscribing.
When you talked about WinBIOS, I know Supermicro were still using it in 1999 on the P6DGU, a Dual Slot 1 (P3 Katmai) serverboard, this was the last motherboard I knew of using it, thought that trivia may interest you, nice to see someone else keeping these things ticking. I also have a 486 with this CPU, it's ex-army and it's based on an MSI MS-4144, it is indeed a fun DOS gaming system, especially with WFW3.11 and the TCP stack installed.
Bill- back when I worked for a camera repair shop, we had a special pen for cleaning contacts. It was essentially a pen with a tip made of fiberglass bristles. If I can find one online I will shoot you a link. They are made for cleaning contacts on electronics like this and work awesome for getting anything up to and including corrosion from leaking batteries.
Great video! I built a dx4 100 a couple of months ago and when I was partitioning the hdd I thought it was odd that 8gb was only being reported as 504mb... I just thought it was old hardware and probably a faulty hdd or ide controller so just left at that. Has actually been working fine and even installed some games and programs on it with no issue. Totally forgot about LBA so keen to set it up right next time I play with it! Thanks :)
Was the bios purposely modeled after Windows 3.1?
I can't say for sure, but quite possibly so.
The motherboard is made by PcChips. You can tell by the famous gold plating on the ram locks and the board rev by the keyboard connector.
That looks like a PC Chips (a.k.a. Hsing Tech) motherboard to me. "Write Back" labels are usually a dead giveaway that the onboard L2 cache is fake, with a patched BIOS to lie about it (usually soldered to the board, so you can't swap it out for an authentic BIOS). Cache testing utilities like CACHECHK will tell you for sure if the cache is real or fake.
Yup, "Write Back Cache On" is the patched fake BIOS message. If it had real L2 cache installed, it would report the actual amount of cache present, typically 256KB. I have a PC Chips M919 which has fake onboard cache but gives you a slot to install a proprietary SIMM-like stick containing 256K of real L2 cache. Later versions of the board don't have the fake chips installed, but you can still see the fake solder traces which go in circles and don't connect to anything else on the board!
It amazes me that mouse support in the BIOS/System Setup was available all that time ago, and yet it took until very recently with UEFI to make it a standard thing on computers.
I have a question, is the -5v rail on the PSU (white wire on AT, and ATX) really needed for ALL ISA cards? I recall being told that only serial controllers and some very early 8-bit ISA sound cards used -5v, but I may be wrong. I found an old, but not really vintage, Socket 7 ATX motherboard from around 1996-1998, it accepts an ATX connector, but none of my spare atx psus have -5v, and I want to use a couple ISA cards, a sound card & a network card. I could use a pci network card if I have to.
Awesome old tech and very much a labor of love for me these machines... :)
OMG, Now that I've looked at that board for a bit, I think it is pretty much the same one that I had years ago. I ran an AMD 5x86-133 CPU at 160 Mhz on that board. The BIOS was also identical. Maybe I'll have to email you that pic. There is also a slight chance that I might still have the owner's manual, though I'm pretty sure I tossed it some years back. How ironic.
I've always loved those PCs back in the day that had the Turbo button on them + the LCD read-out for CPU speed. I wish I could find one, but haven't had any luck.
I prefer the towers over the desktop models, though. My father had one when I Was a kid that had to been nothing short of 3feet tall, Turbo button, I think maybe a 100mhz CPU and was loud as hell.
Hi, friend! I got an AMIBIOS but I'm not able to install any OS in it. I think it's not recognizing my diskette drive... Tks
I missed my old packard bell it ran good old windows 95. I played good games on there too. Sigh i wish this was around longer. It's a 1996 model.
That motherboard is so very familiar, my old Am486 DX/4 100 is sat "rotting" at my parents house. Unused since about 1997. This video has made me decide to go fetch it and fire it up. The first PC I ever built (well, me and my Dad built) - DX/4 100, 16MB RAM, 2MB C&T graphics, 540MB HDD, an "awesome" Aztec Galaxy sound card with SCSI adapter built in to run the 1x speed SCSI CD-ROM! We ran 3.11 for awhile then Win95. It must have cost my Dad a fortune, I must ask if he remembers how much lol
Both the case and motherboard layout look extremely familiar to me. I had a desktop similar to this one in the very late 90's (99 I believe)
I remember having an IntelDX4 100 MHz, with 8MB of RAM and a 850MB HDD with this kind of BIOS, now I'm sorry I didn't keep it, it would be nice to have it around just for the nostalgia.
Merece mais likes e views, foi o pioneiro!
The floppy seems particularly Packard-Bell-ish. Where I've only ever seen that face plate used in on older Packard Bell Legend series systems.
Wolvenstein 3D, DOOM, Commander Keen, Rise Of The Triad, Hocus Pocus, Jazz Jackrabbit, Ken's Labyrinth, Destruction Derby, Need For Speed, Lemmings, Sim City 2000, Jill Of The Jungle, Duke Nukem, Mystic Towers, Whacky Wheels, Skunny Kart, need I go on? I see that the CPU has the old style Windows Logo on it, was it common for CPU manufacturers to do that kind of thing back then? I just love your narrative description of the problems this computer had.
If the cd-rom drive has the creative labs logo on it, does it have a sound blaster? I am getting a pentium pro and it has a creative logo on the cd drive. The monitor did not work, but I heard the windows 3.1 startup sound. Does this pentium pro probably have a sound blaster 16?
I discovered that on a Sony Vaio that I recently put an 80GB hard drive in, fdisk thought that the hard drive was 10GB. However, Windows 98 setup had absolutely no issue with dealing with the full 80GB capacity. I'm not sure why fdisk got confused; I've seen it work fine with 160GB drives in the past, and the Vaio shipped new with a 20GB drive (and Windows XP), so it's not like the motherboard doesn't know what it is doing with a "large" drive.
hey, there is an IBM IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX, 0,033 computer over here for sale, but theres some errors in the floppy drive, and serial ports, what could that be?.
Love AMI BIOS. If the person that set up that computer had read the one or two page manual that came with the motherboard they would have known that using both types of RAM was not allowed. Still lookng for 8 MB 30 pin SIMMs. I've told they were manufactured but I've not been able to find them. First Linux distro I ran on this board (described in your video) was Red Hat 4.2. Very archaic when compared to today's Linux distro's. Wasn't everything in those days?
I was misinformed about the 30 pin SIMMs. The memory guy I frequented at the computer fairs some 30 years may have given me the misinformation or I misunderstood him.
Yes, I can attest to what was available then and what prices were compared to today's technology. I have a $35 Raspberry Pi that is more powerful and has more memory than my first PC... Radio Shack Model I Level II or the mainframe computer at college where I ran my punch card batch programming on time share.
Have a nice day :)
There were 16mb 30 pin SIMMs too. Thats how people upgrade Macintosh SE/30s to 128mb.
More memorys refreshed bill :-)
Ive enjoyed 486's like yours, After testing the psu i would pull out all the cards/interfaces and power the mobo to see if it beeps, then put a display card in and with two cleaned memory strips i try again.
I would leave all mobo fixing screws loose and plug in two cards into the slots with max distance apart and after putting the two card screws in then tighten the mobo screws.
Worked for me:-)
Sorry bill i was a bit of a nerd in my 486 days :-)
Different types of memory at the same time:
I have had a motherboard, a Siemens-Nixdorf-Motherboard with a P1 in it that had Slots for SD-RAM and 72-pin-type memory and it actually accepted both populated at the same time. It summed up the amount of memory but only ran at the speed of the 72pin sockets. That was pretty cool
***** You mean like illegal as in law wise or it just wont work?
+AlmightyMaria PvB I have an IBM PC350 that has DIMM-168 PC100 and 72-Pin SIMM slots in it that can work in junction with no problems. It's really just a Pentium version of this computer, to be honest, it has a multitude of problems I'm really not willing to fix or even look into, but maybe I will one day...
+MinecraftMarcus1 It's illegal, as in, not supported by the standards. Neither is on the fly processor overclocking, but that didn't stop them either. Its very possible it could be done, but however it is done, the speed of the ram will always be that of the slowest ram. This is more of a physical law :P
+Richard Smith: True. But it is a law of physics only if the slow and the fast RAM must be accessed simultaneously, as in the lower/upper halves of a full bus width (like with a Pentium). If they sit in different banks it must be up to the design of the memory controller whether the fast one can be used at its full speed or not, at least in older systems, without tight interleaving of memory acesses.
Sven Ekeberg That is too complicated, because when a programs need memory, and it gets assigned available memory address pointers. If some gets allocated on a slower data bus, then accessing the bus will be unpredictable and inconsistent. We have a seperate data bus for overflow, the page file, and that is expected to be slower(I'll get back to this)
Today's memory is built around parallel processing, which demands consistency in performance, which is a higher priority than speed, and programs are optimized to take advantage of that.
So in this, the memory allocation would be too bloated dealing with data speed consistency, slowing everything down, or the program would have to be made in order to expect an inconsistent data rate... again, slowing it down.
The only solution here so that everything still actually functions is to clamp the data rate to the lowest common denominator, it is the simplest solution to a complex problem.
Imagine this, lets say you have a program which saves its state, and simultaneously loads new data. The save state requires less data to be processed than the loading of new data, and it is also started first, so it is perfectly logical the save state will complete before new data is processed, unless the new data is actually on a faster data bus, and now shit is happening out of order and stepping on each other, causing all kinds of unpredictable behavior.
What one could do is use the slower memory as a separate partition for (part of) the pagefile/cache, as the page file is expected to have inconsistent performance.
You can currently do this by making a ram disk, and telling windows to use it for its pagefile, if you were unaware :) This obviously is a bad idea most of the time, cause it would be better off just being extra ram, but back in the 32-bit days, programs only had access to 4GB of ram(sometimes this turned out to be closer to 2.5GB), and it had to cache the rest, which is where this came in handy.
May I ask which video is the one with the radio coming to life ?
Beige boxes should have never gone the way of the dodo.
0:27 Ooh a processor with a Windows 3.1 logo on it!
Those early AMD CPUs were pin compatible with intel 486s right?
I'm not sure if a Sound Blaster 16 card will work for this computer, but it drives me nuts when I don't have the sound for some of the games I had on other older computers.
I had one of these, it was our/my first homebuilt PC. We were fools and shopped for the cheapest motherboard. Our variant had a socketed BIOS and cache chips (unknown if real). It had a PCChips sticker on the "8DY" chipset, some had fake Intel stickers. It was quite an epiphany when I stumbled into an article about these boards a few years ago on a site called "Red Hill". I was a newb back then, knowing what I know now I wish I still had that POS and finally conquer it's utter instability.
Quite possibly so, especially considering how popular soundcard/CD-ROM bundles were back in the day. A PPro would seem to be a little too new for that sort of thing, but then again it might be one from the early days (in which case I'd expect pretty dreadful PCI bus performance, a major issue on early PPro chipsets).
When it comes to vintage PCs like this, do you prefer systems from big name vendors such as Dell, Compaq and Gateway, or custom-build systems from small shops like this one? The reason I ask is because a lot of systems like this were built by mom and pop computer shops with motherboards that only have a 5 pin AT keyboard port on them, and for the rest of your ports are broken out by headers either on the motherboard or by a multi I/O card. Compare that to computers from companies like Dell, Compaq and IBM from the same era where the motherboard typically has a full card of serial, parallel and PS/2 ports.
I prefer the big name vendors. One never knows to what stresses a self built system was subjected during its assembly. Sometimes people would use the cheapest and most awful cases, expansion cards, power supplies or even motherboards. Big name manufacturers have had their share of foibles, but in general, they used good quality parts and usually got them put together properly.
@@uxwbill I would say I agree with you. I like systems where all of the I/O ports are just integrated onto the motherboard and I don't have to worry about breaking out headers or using super I/O cards.
I have an IBM PC 330 (Pentium 166 machine) with a motherboard on which you can apparently use all four 72-pin SIMM slots along with the 168-pin DIMM slot at the same time.
All slots are for EDO DRAM though, so maybe that's why.
What can you use these older computers for I have a
perfect IBM 350MZ AMD Aptiva but what good is it to me.
this bios reminds me of gigabyte's touch bios. this was way ahead of its time.
My first thought was maybe someone had installed a larger drive, but I guess i would have eventually stumbled around in the Bios settings and found the problem. I have some old computers running windows 2000, we use them to print invoices.
Also if i'm not mistaken newer Asus motherboards have graphical setup, while Gigabyte's implementation on select boards called "Touch BIOS" which is just a software run from within windows...
I'm likely repeating someone here, but if I remember right both 30 and 72 pin can work together. My first beige box had all populated when I brought it home.
The SIMM + DIMM pentium motherboards are a completely different story though.
No, they're "Fast page mode". EDO didn't come into use until a bit later, and all EDO modules are at least 72pin as far as I know, later ones were 168-pin.
10:15 I've seen some old thinkpads have a graphical setup called easy setup and most of those that have it have a clock error because the clock battery is hard to replace
My first computer had a bios and 100 Mhz processor just like that one, and the turbo button wasn't hooked up. I wish i had known about having to configure LBA or the drive parameters back then, because I recall trying to install Windows 95 and failing miserably, then giving up and smashing the computer with a sledge hammer.
Some memory modules had gold plated connectors, some were tin. Same with memory sockets on motherboards. People used to say you shouldn't put tin in a gold plated socket, or vice versa, because the metals would react and corrode. I don't know if that was a real issue or just people being eccentric.
Where do you even find all of these computers?
I wish I still had a computer similiar to that. The best thing I have is a Dell Dimension XPS M200s with an intel pentium 200 MHz processor in it. Everything is on board with it except for the video card. The system currently runs Windows 98 SE, but I use it to play old DOS and windows games. While the computer is good and all, what I do not like about it is that I can't get sound and music on some DOS games even though the on board sound is sound blaster.
how many megabytes of video memory is there?
That motherboard looks like it's one of the old PC Chips fake cache motherboard... To quote Red Hill Technology, the onboard cache is nothing more than "black plastic things with metal legs on." Sometimes they not only put fake cache on the board, but also a fake COAST slot that wasn't compatible with COAST sticks. I have one such board with the fake cache and fake COAST slot, the PC Chips M919.
PC Chips just loved to cheap out wherever possible...
That's the first time I've seen a Creative optical drive.
+Steve W They were actually very common in the 90s, however you probably can already guess that the drive isn't actually made by Creative, it's probably made by Panasonic or Sony or Toshiba or something. I suspect the CD-ROM drive and sound card were sold as a bundle, possibly with a microphone, some speakers and some software.
Plenty of tips there for repairing systems :o)
i have a PTZ dome security camera i got very cheap i found out why it did nothing just a slight buzz hours later i got angry and harshly pushed it to one side and it came to life and did a auto config
about a month later its on a old lamp post we have in our garden its still working strange??
this is exactly like my parents' first computer, am486dx4 100 and very generic board/case
That's a PC-Chips motherboard. I don't remember the exact model, but I can say that those write-back chips are only dummy plastic. Google "486 pcchips board" and you will see.
Yet another old pc saved by Uxwbill.
Question
Why didn't Windows 95 setup alert the previous owners that LBA mode was disabled?
What does the "Anti-Virus" function in the BIOS do?
True. And it is just fine for DOS stuff regardless.
What a nice machine.
I always wanted one of those lighting fast 486DX4-100 back in the day, but they were so damn expensive :(
So I worked the whole summer and got a used compaq 386SX instead. (With a C= 1407 monitor if I remember correctly)
what is that other video of the radio starting working?
Yes thank you
I gotta fix me an old computer some time in the future with Windows 3.1 and 98 for old games. Guess only Win 98 is needed, but Win 3.1 would be for the extra retro touch.
I had a system that indeed used and the same time (and I cant remember weather it was the 30 or the 72 pin SIMs)it was that and SDRAM. I can't remember the exact specs for the system. I know it had an Intel 486DX4 inside or that's what I remember what was but other then that I don't remember. what I do remember is that if you had both type installed you would incur a performance penalty on the higher speed SDRAM. I do remember never really wanting to have both types installed for that reason.
My first computer was a Packard Bell 486. Didn't really look like that if memory serves, though...
You know what's outrageous? I saw an M919 for sale on eBay for like $200!
those FDD drives don't look unlike the ones packard bell used on their 486's.
(i have one, and it's got the exact same drives)
While it looks nice, I prefer the Award BIOS over the AMI "WinBIOS", simply because I had a great deal of issue trying to populate the PCI card slots on an old 486DX2/66 system, which is because of an issue with the BIOS not distributing IRQ signals correctly and to every expansion slot.
I do have a Biostar Socket 3 board that lets you mix and match both memory types at once. You just can't go over 64MB.
It just occurred to me, there's an easy way to tell the L2 cache chips are fake. First, they're soldered in. Check the traces. I bet you they don't go anywhere. :3
If you still have this and suddenly realise you don't want it I'm looking for a 486 computer pretty cheap. To give you a better deal you can keep the sound card, I don't really need it.
Only now am i seeing a return of BIOS's that work with a mouse.
Biggest issue with some of these boards is actually trying to find the manual and/or jumper settings lol
For some reason, it reminds me of the mobo I just got in the mail. They are not identical yet the way it is booting are the exact same way. Same bios interface too.
AMI's WinBIOS was extremely common in the 486 era.
uxwbill True that. For some reason, it was just not that widely used on the boards that I used and my friends used back then. Though globally it is true. The only four 486's that I remember had it, is four identically 486dx2-80 systems. Then I remember one QDI board with a P-133 that my parents used to have.
3:55 The biostar u8668 pro motherboard in my P4 rig has slots for both PC133 and DDR1 ram... So I used the pc133 and decided to be stuck with 512mb ram and windows 2000, although it also works perfectly with XP but I like 2000 more.
Nice! Now i know what LBA stands for! Thanks! ^^'
I have Pentium 1 motherboard in ATX format and the BIOS user interface looks exactly the same.
Its a PC Chips board, they loved WinBIOS and advertising fake write back cache. Check Total Hardware 99. SuperMicro did WinBIOS too as my 440BX board got it. The turbo button and LED work independent of the motherboard, you have to check for any slowdown (a dir /s usually works). I wish I had a late 94 BIOS on my Soyo VLB board, non-PCI 486s with LBA BIOS aren't common. The Promise EIDEMax II ROM runs all my HDs in that machine. Now if I could only find a nice EISA/VLB 486 board...
Model number in the top right corner,
fancy cache ... uhh I know where this is going .. PC CHIPS.
I have a Pentium Pro with that EXACT Cool Tech fan on the CPU!
pcchips motherboard ahh get it away!
+Harrison Rose I've one of them ... I was pretty happy the first time I saw it in a computer because it has PCI + ISA + VLB
Then I discovered that it had fake cache and very thin PCB ...
Another awesome and informative video! uxwbill is the best!
Thank you for posting!
SBF
Apparently the graphical BIOS was unpopular and cost AMI a huge loss, hence the reason that it was discontinued. You can read about it half way down the page here : //redhill.net.au/b/b-95.html#bios
seeing the bios os or whatever is like uefi isn't such a new concept
UEFI is a relatively new concept, but graphical BIOS setup utilities are not. (And not all UEFI capable systems have a graphical setup utility.
Owwwhh!! I have same bios on my first PC 486dx2 66Mhz!!! :)
After watching the rest of the video, you may have just hit a memory upper limit given that the SIMM is 32MB. Hard to say.
I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try, after all, it won't kill the card or the motherboard.
I have a supermicro server motherboard with two pentium 3's which also uses the win bios
To confirm, its a PC Chips M912 1.7 with Fake Cache.
No way we can find informations about old machines ! I just messing arround with old 486 dx old laptop.. I have nothing mthere is nothing about there on board
you can get away with the 30 and 72 pin slots populated at the same time, hell, you could do the same with sdram and 72pin on some of the boards that had it as long as you either filled the 72pin or used pairs in the 72pin. but it is still a nono, and it never works for long if at all if the sticks are high density in comparison to the contemporary sticks for the board. in the 30/72 pin configuration it treats the 72pin like two 32pin sticks and the chipset can handle 8 30 pin sticks. can really make it act stupid. btw, you can slow down that memory speed check to normal speed, that is a setting in the bios, it just checks that the sticks are there and reporting, it doesn't actually test the memory for all intents and purposes. i think it used to be called fast memory check or some crap like that in the bios.
btw, that system has what is called an overlay, that is why fdisk looks funky. the disk is too large for the hardware so the addressing has to be done using software, but the software appears to be fucked. the hardware itself cannot see or use a 1gb drive, but the drive is probably a 1gb hdd. keep in mind that the bios is on the motherboard, the multi io controller is an add in card.
(EDIT: more than likely someone formated that drive without reinstalling the overlay after, that is why it gave them such a headache, in truth if you want to wipe a drive with an overlay you might as well wipe the partition table and start from scratch with a fresh overlay unless you like nightmares)
***** you had already replaced the bios batery, and my first step would have been loading bios defaults, not to mention the system had been jimmied around with in the first place before you got it, i wouldn't take the bios settings you ran into as representative of the initial issue. but hell, you had/have the computer in hand, to put it bluntly i'm just firing shots in the dark and you got to see and feel it for yourself =P.
i just remember having a board back in the late 90s (was years old when i got it) with one of those amd dx4 133 "p90" chips on it with pretty much the same bios and for drives at a bit under 1gb and over i always had to use an overlay.
i'm guessing yours must just be a newer version of the chipset and bios than the one i had with a less powerful cpu on it.
anyway sorry to bug ya, have a good one, it is nostalgic for me to look at these old systems i haven't dealt with in a decade and a half and i enjoy seeing someone put up videos about them, although i cringe every time you talk about some proprietary crap as being "good" =P
+uxwbill I once saw a Pentium system that had 30 pin SIMM slots on it and IIRC 16 of them. You had to put them in matched sets of 8 to fill the 64 bit wide bus. Of course if you really wanted to save those old SIMMS you could pick up one of those SIMM stackers as long as you got the right direction. You couldn't put two leftward facing sim stackers together because they wouldn't fit, so you had to get a left and a right, but then that blocked your other slots. So they came up with the Left short and Left tall, so the tall one would rise above the short one and you'd have 8 30 pin SIMMs floating in the air on the left and then you could repeat with the right as well.
On my other UA-cam channel. i took a old hard drive form a computer similar to this one and slapped it into my newer computer. low and behold it booted right into Windows 3.1. i was shocked manly because the machine i put this older hard into was 10 fold faster than the older computer i took it out of. Windows 3.1 was running at 2.20GHz and with 1GB or RAM. i don't even think Windows 3.1 could run on a 2.20 GHz CPU or handle 1GB of ram? let me tell you it was fast!!
2-8: GPU not detected
That's all I know. It took me a while to figure that one out, and BOY did I feel dumb when I noticed that the only thing in there was an ISA Sound Blaster 16...
EDIT: Sounds like my Pentium Pro may have been some kind of fancier model of that thing. That's the exact same BIOS, and I swear that I heard a Conner hard disk in there. I'll keep watching and find out how big it is...
EDIT 2: 8:53 All of those problems were on my machine, along with a BSoD saying "Unable to write to physical disk C". They were caused by a faulty controller board on the Conner hard drive that was causing it to report itself as 3.6 PB (3,600 TB or 3,600,000 GB)!
EDIT 3: Ignore this one. I'm stupid sometimes.
Please note that I'm only editing so many times because I don't want to just spam the comment section with my comments.
yay DOS games! break out the Duke Nukem 3D
Whenever I toss a old pc out, I always scavenge it for working parts :)
If I remember right is one of those memories a 16bit and the other a 32 bit ? I may be wrong I just got out of the hospital was in for 4 days . I had bad news I have diabetes damage to my stomach and possible bad appendix and bladder. I was in CT vfisting inlaws for Easter and lost 15 pounds in 3 days . I hope to catch up on watching your videos.
I have a gi doctor apt lucky I made it back home using a bucket for you know what. NOw if I go back in its local so wife can visit
I doubt it's necessary. Just give it a go. Worst that will happen is that the card won't work.
hi there...I Have An olivetti P100S model M That has the same bios ...PS:if you have a mouse you can actualy use it in the bios setup...