My dad bought this exact computer in the early 80s via DAK mail order. I recently found this in my garage. I cant believe someone actually made a video about it! This was our family computer into the mid 90s. Original had EGA and the 1.2 floppy and 40meg HDD 1meg memory. He Later upgraded to a CompuAdd VGA card and monitor because our EGA monitor died. He also added a 3.5 1.44 drive and the original sound blaster card. It had DOS and Gem desktop installed. I have yet to power it on because its been sitting in my garage for 10+ years.

Intel stands for intelligence, you can activate it by reading, plain text games, or Monkey Island text game. It turns on an autopilot, so if you shoot or drive, it corrects your mistakes. Stunts also turns it on hen you choose menus, select cars, colours, etc. AMD stands for Agility, Magic, Dexterity. Better chance for finding rare websites.

If it helps to explain the 32bit/16bit nature of the 386SX vs DX: the 386SX is a fully 32bit microprocessor internally but uses a 16bit data bus. This means that to fill a 32bit CPU register, two bus cycles must occur, which seriously hampered the overall performance of the 386 chip. Also, the 386SX has the same 20bit address bus as the 286, meaning that the maximum amount of memory it can handle is 16MB of RAM. Fully 32bit 386DX chips can theoretically handle the full 4GB address space but were limited by the chipsets available at the time. To confuse matters, there was a bug in very early 386 designs that prevented them from running 32bit software. Intel had to test each CPU and those that had the bug were stamped with "16BIT SW ONLY" on the chip.

Very nice build. I love your representation of all performance specs hardware.

I like it because in some ways its 16 bit so its in the same family as amiga and snes/megadrive and its interesting how each has its strength. The gameblaster sounds like its missing half the channels in the test near the end though.

Kings quest had some amazing graphics at the time.

I had a 386 sx 25 mhz amd cpu. Also it had the famous creative labs upgrade kit with cd rom 2 or 4x and sb16. 8 mb ram. It could run most fmv games at the time well but it irritated me trying to doom on it. No cigar.

google the ibm pc junior error code

A 386 sx 12 was my first computer. It had Dos 6.22

The Algorithm pushed this to me just now. This is the content I mess with.

Test Drive 3 was such a horrible execution of a great idea. You can see the speed of the 'game time' by following the clock in the top left. The more stuff that is going on, the slower the game runs. It is worse even than Geoff Crammond's F1GP / world circuit game, where the game would at least never run faster than real time, only slower if you set details too high.

No 386 SX case badges kind of makes sense. If you were a system integrator back then, you'd want your customers to know that they're definitely getting a real 386. No need to complicate matters with extra letters. 😆 I remember basically everybody around here had the SX, except for a few CAD and business power users with elaborate DX setups. Only really changed when people started upgrading to 386 DX-40s, 486 DLC and the like, years later.

Awesome

the motherboard needs a good washing warm water and soap

i had the tower version of this gx110 and i gave it a custom pci card slot cooling fan... and it worked

fyi necroware reverse engineered the cms chips so if you have some gal chips and programmer we can program them ourselves.

Did a fully specced super deluxe 486 DX-2 66 build last year and am now in the process of collecting/buying parts, building and testing a Pentium 233 MMX with 3DFX Voodoo and all the bells and whistles. Maby next year I'll go further back in time to do a 386 or maby even a 286 build. We'll see 😅

He doesn't like empty sockets...

That board could probably take a DX 386, also you should have turned the board over to see if the empty sockets has traces that even go anywhere. I have a similar board with cache sockets that are not wired to anything. Fake cache so to say, hence 'Cheap'. I wonder if you have to have a separate oscillator for the FPU, I can't really remember right now, I plan to dig my board up as the last time I tested it was in 1998/1999. I am sure the sticker is still on it. I really need to start photographing my stuff, and upload them somewhere. Rather than having go and look for it. Nice job on this one, really entertaining.

Lovely PC case

Very interesting, just a question: by looking at the photos on your site the graphics card doesn't look like a PCI model, it has three "prongs" instead of the usual 2, and I can't seem to find any GeForce 2 with PCI online. Am i missing something here? I've been looking for a graphics card for the exact same machine so I'm referencing to you material a lot

12:17 Smaller RAM sockets are for parity bit chip. 1 bit memory chip plus two 4 bits chips, and you get something simmilar to 30 pin SIMM. 50:27 Laser engraved SAA1099? Obvious fake. You need to look one with printed Philips logo.

13:30 When the monitor shows blurring, it suffers from Altersschwäche (weakness in old age). Possibly exchange capacitors? I had this with this monitor as well in the past, but now replaced with an IIGS-to-VGA-adaptor: "Apple IIGS VGA adapter by Manila Gear" studio.kzfaq.infoqUYHgiIQ8zA/edit

every time you post a video I'm gonna leave a comment wishing you and the doggos well. Anyway a 386 huh? I guess it's kinda nice although perhaps a little slow for my personal desires. It'd be good for Wing Commander and Wolfenstein 3D. I'm sure plenty more but it's kinda a niche build in 2024. I guess the whole hobby revolves around nostalgia so build whatever makes you happy and takes you back to a better time.

I've never used or built or 386 sx or dx so i do enjoy seeing them sometimes in vids like yours. I have a Cyrix 5x86 as an all round dos based rig. Some speed sensitive games run just right on a 386 and that's the only reason I think someone would want one, other than nostaliga. The 16bit data bus reminds me of the Apple Mac Classic II that has a 68030 but a slower 16bit bus.

Oh nice build!! And mix of parts...almost like it was a 286 that was just board swapped to 386 but left the expansion cards for cost savings. Ironically...I was about to start recording my 386sx build this week lol 😆

"without combo" probably means w/o integrated floppy / ide controller? btw. yes, dip, dual in-line package.

Great video

I am building a very similar system, 386SX-33, 8Mb ram, some soundblaster clone with midi, 5.25 and 3.5 floppy, cdrom, with the same goal, for some special games like WC, the early Testdrives, Indiana Jones games that run way to fast on my main DOS machine. On the subject of period correct, it is my opinion that everyone does what he/she likes to do. Yes, period correct is nice, but I am not using a spinning HDD, I am using a CF card, a multispeed cdrom (8x I think), a ET4000 (as this is what I have and know it works), a 15 inch CRT monitor. It's part of the fun to get this mix of new and old working!

28:30 yeah in the 90s id get a new case and spray paint colors in wanted. Inclhding the drives. It took masking and time but it was a unique build. Besides the plastic of the drives will yellow over time unmodified.

Ah, I think you have the "Trang Bow/Trangg Bow 80386SX SCAMP". JP11 is 2-3 to run NPU sync to CPU speed, 1-2 to run it from OSC2 - and looks like the DIP sockets are for chip RAM and parity

I love the 386 sx ! great memory ! 😎

The issue you mention around 35:30 can be from a floppy drive with a bad change detection line. That can result from a bad switch in the drive, a bad cable, or a bad controller card. It can also be the result of a caching issue in DOS.

i had one of these with 2 celeron 366's overclocked to 550mhz running windows 2000 workstation - happy days

My first build was a 423. Now I have an amd am4 5700x with a 4070 super. Holy shit we’ve come along way! And yes I drive a manual 97 Miata. Lmao!!!

gateways and puppies ? definitely hit sub . give puppy scratches

nice video ,,,, very cool dell,,,,,,, the fan in the back that covers the cpu blows air out the back of the computer

Literally the only review on KZfaq for this game. If you're thinking of talking video games nobody else having talked about it should be some inspiration

so i have an ibm aptivia 2171 that has an slot 1 socket, i am useing an pentium 3 750 mhz right now, i bought a pentium 3 tualatin 1.4 ghz 100fsb with a MSI MS-6905 MS6905 V2/2.3 Slot 1 Socket 370 converter board. it boots up fine, i have tested it with 3dmark 2000 and got a nice score, but it is very unstable, opeing programs or some random freezes, and it dont like deamon tools at all, cant open any games from deamon tools, or sometimes it can but if i try again it wont open and program freezes makeing the pc freezes after some time. when i go back to my pentium 3 750 cpu problems go away. win 98 2 stick 128mb ram 256 total 1 agp gpu nvidia mx 440 64mb 1 pci voodoo 2 monster mb psu Spire SFX-300-PEC-PSU 300watt when it ran 3dmark 2000 i did try to see if the cooler was hot but it was not, so the cooler seams fine. motherboard Acer V66M-2Z Chipset Intel 440BX (Seattle) i am wondering if this is normal, since the cpu is not supported or mishmatch.

Apparently it was made by Hyosung Computer

hmmm i don't see the value to this i owned plenty of these machines have no wish to own another i just love making or edit a floppy config and auto files even than others i/o port serial etc. even win 95 plug and play was hit and miss at least stuff was standardized, i didn't have to worry about if this or that part working together, unless i was pushing the limits at the time

So you are testing only one execution unit of every processor and call it a comparison. Well done mate.

I've never seen an FV310, but I did pick up a free 27 inch FS12 and the image quality has blown me away! It's quite possibly the nicest looking CRT I've ever seen (I suspect it's the same picture tube used in the FV310). The colors pop, it's razor sharp and has excellent black level. It's not perfect, but it is very close to PVM quality. In fact, I've hooked up an vintage 80's Apple IIGS computer using an RGB to component transcoder and it looks as good as VGA displays that sync down to 15 KHz!

Liking for the intro, haven’t even seen the video yet! 😂

The 64K internal memory card sits inside an RFI shield to help meet FCC emissions. The smaller power supply board is an earlier one from IBM, but also one that puts out less power than the long board. I'd suggest replacing it with the long version. The plastic dividers were an add-on from IBM to help keep pins from getting bent from not putting the plugs in straight. On the Jr, the Jr version of River Raid doesn't work with the V20 installed. The Jr. Booster referred to by Microsoft was their 128K sidecar expansion that had the first rev green-eyed mouse with it and also had a clock/calendar in it. It can be expanded to 512K with some moderate reworking.

Your footage of Wing Commander definitely illustrates a major advantage of DOSBox...being able to control the number of CPU cycles available at any time to dial in the right speed.

i wonder if in 30 years, people could criticize my own build as "not period correct" with all these peacemeal old parts.

Greetings! Great video! How is the 386 dog doing? :D

To each their own, dude I share a first name with. :D The only reason I have a PiStorm in the 2000 a friend's repairing, isn't really so much games. With the more creative-focused apps I want to use (that isn't ProTracker, AHX, or HivelyTracker), I want to have as much CPU oomph as I can for stuff like DPaint and 3D modeling programs.

Amiga is way more advanced than either IIgs or ST.