AT&T Globalyst 515 restoration - from boring office box to retro 486 gaming PC

hello and welcome today i'd like to take a look at this old atnt office pc and see if i can do a retro gaming machine out of it it came to me with this very dirty cherry keyboard which i also have to take care of so let's start the machine is a tnt globalist 515 a quite normal office pc back in the days as far as i know this must be some weak 486 machine the intel inside sticker tells a little bit about what we should expect inside the case is in pretty good condition the five and quarter inch bay is empty there are some minus creatures on the top and missing screws so the cover is just lying loosely on the case it has an interesting power switch with two buttons which should prevent accidental power switching by the user you have to press the main button once and then the second button on the side of the case to turn off the pc okay what else do we have here is a key lock probably to prevent from unwanted case intrusion and on the back it seems to have a usual psu and here we have a vga port the parallel port and two serial ports ps2 mouse and ps2 keyboard ports the sign for the mouse port is quite funny and should prevent any misunderstanding on the left side there is nothing special just some ventilation holes and we are back at the front now let's take a look inside here is the lock and indeed it looks to be just a mechanical intrusion protection this looks like a hard drive holder the hard drive itself obviously seems to be missing but luckily the previous owner left the holder inside this is the graphics chip cyrus logic clgd 5429 interesting and here is the bioslashrom everything is quite dusty inside but this is a good sign means a good chance that everything here is still in original state there is something about this vga chip the 5429 is actually a vessel local bus chip but i can only see iso slots here i'm curious if the onboard vga adapter is bound over vlb to the cpu this would be great in case of performance also on the back side of the riser card is only one iso slot let's take out the cpu and see what we have here the cpu cooler is sitting very loosely i guess either the cpu or the cooler must be not original anymore okay and the cpu is an intel 486 sx33 if my information is correct this machine should originally have had 486 sx25 cpu so probably there was kind of upgrade in the past this pc has two memory modules with an 8 written on each one i didn't check the ids but i guess this means 8 megabyte each and we have here 16 megabyte altogether i definitely assume this is an upgrade since 16 megabyte is actually too much for the age of this machine and here is the main board itself the first thing i see is that the razer card is proprietary it doesn't have a break between 8 and 16 bits parts like an iso slot would have okay here is the ide connector this is for the floppy drive here we have a normal at power connector the cpu socket and here is something interesting this slot which looks like a part of a vlb slot i guess this must be for the cpu cache extension card there seem to be no cache chips on the board and this slot is not populated i guess unfortunately this main board doesn't have any second level cache installed that's a shame and here again the vgh by saris logic i'm really curious if this is using iso or vlb boss for gaming it would be great if it were to use vlb this whole part here is related to the onboard graphics adapter here are the memory chips i would say each 512k makes one megabyte of medium memory altogether if the graphics adapter is wide through vlb to the cpu would still have enough performance in the games even if second level cache is missing the bus of the graphics adapter is definitely more important to get the power supply unit out of the case we have to remove the pc speaker which is hold on the bottom of the case by a screw underneath unfortunately some standoffs on the front panel are broken [Music] and here another one [Music] and here are the internals of the power switch every time you press the main button to turn off the pc it is hauled back by a spring if you press the button on the side the spring goes back and releases the main power [Music] button [Music] here inside unfortunately i found another broken standoff i have to get all the plastic parts of the case to wash them even the front panel of the floppy drive [Music] fortunately there is no need to retro drive the parts they don't look too bad so washing everything with some breath soap and water should be sufficient the main board goes into soapy bath as well oops forgot to take out the battery [Music] [Music] let's get the hands on this crusty keyboard [Music] the top part is very dirty and disgusting however inside it looks quite clean just a little bit of dust on the membrane so i will not wash it just remove the dust [Music] the buttons were soaking in the soapy water for about an hour after that i washed them with clean water a couple of times and left drying in the sun [Music] i used some silicone grease for supporters under the bigger buttons like [Music] spacebar [Music] and the keyboard is shiny and as good as [Music] new [Music] the power supply unit looks good no blowing capacitors or any damage to see just a bit dusty the fan seems to be okay but a little bit of service and oil will help to run for another 20 years [Music] [Music] let's check the voltages the fan doesn't seem to blow any air the 5 volt rail seem to go crazy as well pending somewhere between 4 and 5 volts this can happen without a load i'll connect the hard drive to get some load on the pcu [Music] [Music] now we have stable 4.9 volts not 5 volts but good enough and the fan is blowing as well other voltages minus 12 volts 12 volt minus 5 volts looks good the floppy drive looks extremely clean inside anyway i'll clean the hats with some alcohol and put some fresh silicone grease on the rails on the front panel there is just slightly yellowing but not worth to do the retrobriting [Music] after washing the main board i took a closer look you can see hard patches everywhere work rounds all over the place this kind of factory made fixes were quite common back in the days [Music] for now i'll install the same cpu as before just for testing and if everything is fine i'll try to install something beefier later pc speaker is an important helper for post errors analysis so always connect it as early as possible i'll also add all the drives now maybe we will be ready to boot into doors already [Music] this is original mitsumi quad speed cd rom drive it looks ugly because the cover had some rust before however it is technically in top condition i refurbished it some time ago i will install the same 16 megabytes of memory which were previously installed in this pc time for the first run and the pc posted instantly that's nice however it shows only 8 megabytes of ram this is odd i expect it to be 16. [Music] okay once in bios you can see here that it also shows only 8 megabytes of extended memory let's take a closer look okay these are the two memory models each with 8 megabytes they are both working i tested them in another machine however i found some documentation for this main work and it seems to be that the used vaio chipset has some limitations you can use only four megabytes memory models in the first two slots eight or 16 megabyte models can be used only in the third slot so these two memory models are recognized only as four megabytes each when used in the first two slots making only eight megabytes altogether one solution would be to put one of the memory models into the third slot instead and leave one model out but then we would only have 8 megabytes of memory this should be sufficient for this machine but i have here one 16 megabyte memory model which i'll use instead because why not another odd issue is that the bios recognizes a three and a half inch floppy drive a as five and quarter inch floppy drive b when connected properly this is strange but when i just connect the floppy drive to the other connector it is detected as 3.5 inch floppy drive a instead anyway it seems to work reliably like that next problem is this western digital hard drive it seems to work on another machine without an issue but these machines seem to have problems with it autodetection doesn't see the hard drive and when i set it manually the machine doesn't want to pause at all so i'll try another hard drive this corner 250 megabytes will hopefully do the job and indeed the machine could now boot into dos and here you can see the system information as it is running now we have the sx33 cpu 16 megabytes of ram 240 megabytes hard drive and a 3.5 inch floppy drive [Music] time to take care of the broken standoffs on the front panel the parts which i found flying in the case i'll glue them back with epoxy glue [Music] on broken off and lost edge of a holder i print it on the 3d printer and glue it to the front panel in the same way this didn't work so well the printed parts seemed to be too small to stick properly so i printed another one with a longer edge this time the front panel remains in place this connector looks like a floppy power connector but it is for the front leds on the back of the case the slot covers are held in place by a metal brace like this one fortunately the other one got lost so i printed a new brace again on the 3d printer [Music] now it is time to get back to my main aim i'd like to make a retro gaming pc out of this atnt office machine the installed 486 sx33 is not ideal for this so i'll replace it by an intel 486 dx266 with active cooler this should give some extra power whenever needed the 486 sx 33 and the dx266 are both running with the same front side boss of 33 megahertz so i had only to switch one jumper from sx to dx and here we go the dx2 is running and properly detected however in the benchmark we can see a small bummer this computer performs at 128 points and i know that a machine with a second level cache and same cpu and chipset performs at around 144 points so we clearly can see the performance impact as a result of missing second level cash anyway on the good side look at the results of the landmark tests in video we are getting almost 12 and half thousands points this is a clear indicator that the video adapter is bound to the cpu by a vessel local bus because due to iso bandwidth limitations we would get maximum 5000 points with a fastest iso graphics adapter for gaming this value is even more important than the level 2 cache however it would be nice to have both but it's almost impossible to find such a proprietary cache extension card for this board here again you can see that the memory io performance test indicates that there is only 8 kilobyte large level 1 cache on this machine the performance falls drastically as soon as eight kilobyte limit is reached a little bit aside of theory let's see how it performs in the games as you can see doom is quite playable even if it would run up to 20 percent faster with level 2 cash however with quake this machine has to struggle a lot and with average frame rate of 5 fps at the lowest resolution it is definitely not playable at all but keep in mind that quake was never made for a 486 anyway and even level 2 cash wouldn't help much here okay we have a good base now let's add some goodies first a network card to simplify the process of copying even more games and stuff into the machine this is a fast and reliable 10 megabit per second intel network adapter and what is a gaming machine without a proper sound right here we go with a creative song blaster 16. it only has the creative cqm fm sound instead of original yamaha opl3 but still it has a good sound and very good compatibility indoors and finally let's have some fun [Music] [Music] talk okay that looks good the machine is back to life and i am pretty satisfied with the result it has some scars of time but it is a nice and clean machine now the keyboard is like new and is not disgusting anymore the main board works stable it accepts our dx2 cpu and 16 megabytes of ram by the way the main board is the same as fic-486 gac2 and was probably made for a tnt as well i made a bios update off-camera and even y2k problem has gone the very fast cyrus logic graphics adapter is wired through vlp and is superb for retro gaming one bomber is missing level 2 cache and unfortunately it is not easy to find an appropriate cache extension card i saw this one on ebay but even if it would fit electrically it is just too high because the height is limited by the floppy drive above the slot so i guess this is something i have to live with still with the proper parts like the network card and the creative sound blaster this machine makes a lot of fun and turned out to be not just grey office box but a very nice retro gaming pc and this is it for me i hope you enjoyed this restoration video please leave your feedback likes or dislikes below and i hope to have you on my channel again thank you and goodbye

Channel: Necroware

Views: 8,797

Keywords: retro, hardware, soldering, repair, review, nerd

Id: ZUt-3Y3vMso

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020