[jazz music, keyboard sounds] - Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! It's just gonna be kind of a laid back, hopefully relaxed kind
of build video today 'cause that's what I'm in the mood for. And in particular, I've
just been really wanting to mess with this lovely board here. This is a 486 SBC or
single board computer. It was recently donated to the channel. Thank you very much once again for this. I've had a number of SBCs sent in recently but this is the one that
intrigues me the most at this moment in particular right now because it's a 486 and it is very densely packed with things. I don't know precisely
when this was manufactured but typically these were made after a lot of the components were already kind of past their shelf life and often used in business and industrial situations where
they needed legacy support for whatever kind of hardware
or software they were using but you can get it in a
much more compact package. This is newly manufactured
-- well it was at the time. So a lot of these seem to be from like the late nineties, early 2000s. Here's the model number for this one, if anybody's curious,
wants to look that up. I haven't done a ton of research
on this particular board but I have tested it
just real quick to see if it powers on and works. And it does. And that's really the,
kind of the cool part about this is it's
effectively a 486 computer all on one board, but you
do need an ISA backplane which is something like this right here. And the board just plugs into this and it gives you things
like power, keyboard port, if it didn't already have one and a bunch of expansion slots. So in this case, we've
got four 16 bit ISA slots and four PCI and then another
couple of PCI over here, kind of looks like VLB, but it's not. I'm not sure if this
is the exact backplane I'm gonna go with but
I did run across this in a listing of other
things I was getting, I'm like, okay, cool I'll grab this one to see what it's like, I already said I do have
a number of backplanes to choose from but we're
gonna try this one first. And really the whole idea is
that you just take the SBC, plug it in right there. And then you got your single
board computer solution with a bunch of expansion slots and you can stick this into
the case of your choosing. But yeah, I just love the
whole idea behind these, it's just, it's so much
nineties computing power packed into such a small little area. And this one in particular has a lot of great options already installed so we got VGA output right there, 9-pin serial, keyboard
and mouse PS/2 ports, RAM of course this one has
16 megs installed already. Of course the CPU is under there. And then, there's chipsets
for all kinds of things just integrated into the board so the Cirrus Logic
graphics, the CL-GD54M30. I'm not super familiar
with its capabilities but there it is, we'll see. And it's got a buncha
controllers built in as well, so we don't need to
install expansion cards like you do on a lot of other 486 boards like my Woodgrain PC, for instance. And so you have IDE, floppy and got a little parallel
thingy right there so if you wanna plug in a break-out deal and put that in the back of your case, get parallel, that can do that. You even get a little
PC speaker right there. It does have a Dallas clock chip but it's socketed so that's
easily replaceable if it's bad, I don't know. I don't think it is, it didn't seem to be when I tested this earlier, but yeah I mean all kinds
of other little headers and a ton of jumpers for a
lot of different options, I mean even a little place
for a key lock right there if you've got a key lock in your case and this right here as well,
this is pretty fun I think, you see it says "disk on chip." So that is for one of these
little things right here, a Disk On Chip module. This is a 64 meg one. They do come much larger, smaller too but there's just a little chip here and it gives you a hard
disk that you can boot from. And so if you wanted to
install the operating system just directly on here,
you just insert that and you don't need to
mess with a hard drive. On the other hand, another
thing that was really kind of made for these
setups is this right here. And this is a disk on module or industrial flash disk module. It's got a 4-pin Molex for power and that just plugs directly
into the IDE on there. And that's another version of storage for really any kind of
computer of a compatible type but especially made for these SBCs. And this one's a 512 meg module. So yeah, we're gonna go ahead
and assemble this in a case that I've had lying around
for a very long time time and decided to finally clean it up. And this is the case, which like I said I've had it for a very long time, so long in fact that I don't even remember how or where I got it but it's just something I've kept on hand, you know, it's a little bit dirty and aged like a fine yellow wine, but
I like the simplicity of it. It's just a basic mid-nineties
beige box clone PC case with a pair of five and a quarter inch and three and a half inch drive bays, three LEDs, a reset button
and a turbo and power switch. One of these big plastic
rectangular buttons here that sort of push inward. It's a little different
than any other case I have. And it is indeed a baby AT-style case which means that it takes a
smaller Baby AT motherboard which should be pretty much perfect for the ISA backplane we have, it's about the same size anyway and it has a spot for eight
expansion cards round back, a couple of metal breakout areas for things like parallel and serial port and of course AT-style keyboard connector. So they have pretty much
just a blank slate style case which is exactly what I'm going for here because I don't know exactly
what I'm building yet. Another thing that I
find kind of endearing about this case is the system builder, whoever had this back in the day, which is ECM systems, a nice blue and white kind of clear
plastic, crystal-looking badge. I like it. I might even keep it on there. In fact, there's a sticker
around back as well ECM INC in Marlborough, Connecticut, so shout out to them, don't
know how it ended up down here in North Carolina, but here
it is another slight mystery is that around front, you have, it just has food written on
the front drive bay cover. I don't know why, but it's
been there ever since I got it along with some, it looks
like masking tape residue. And I also like this, it's just something else I don't have in any other case, is this
teeny little energy star badge. And it looks like it
was made for this case or the case was designed with that in mind because it's kind of a
peculiar size in terms of being long and rectangular. And just a couple of M3 screws around back holding the case lid on is one of those where it's sort of an enclosure going all the way around the case, not my favorite, but hey,
inside it's pretty clean. There is a power supply in here, a bunch of cables for the
front stuff on the case as well as an instruction manual for what I assume was the motherboard that used to be in here, a
Pine PT-430, 486 VLB board which looks like it would have been a pretty nice little
thing to have in there, but yeah, it was long
gone by the time I got it. Mm, check out that centerfold. Love a good line art diagram layout. And lastly, inside this case,
there is the power supply that was just hanging around
from whenever I got it. It's a 230 watt power
supply and it does work. I haven't actually tested
any of the rails to see if it's putting out proper
voltage or anything. I don't know if I'll use it. I have another new old
stock AT power supply, I'll probably use that instead. But yeah, since I had it all taken apart recording this footage, I just went ahead and started scrubbing it down although there's not a whole lot to really scrub away on here. It wasn't particularly dirty. The enclosure is all painted
metal so there were some gouges and bits there that I
can't really get rid of by scrubbing away. It's just metal and
paint that's worn away, so I don't know. Maybe I'll cover this in
some kind of a vinyl wrap, I haven't decided yet at this point. In the end it cleaned up nicely, and so did the front of the case, although it is rather yellowed and I don't currently
have any solution left for retrobrighting purposes. So I'm just cleaning this
up as best as I can for now and leaving it as is, simply giving it a well-earned
scrubbing and wipe down that I don't think it's ever had, at least not since I've owned it. Really the components that
needed the most cleaning were the drive bay covers with that "food" emblazoned on the plastic and on top of the tape residue. All of that scrubbed off very easily, although not entirely evenly. Eh, it looks all right actually. And then around back, there was some more
tape and papery residue, presumably some kind of
labels that were there as well as some handwritten
labeling of some Sharpie text, just saying where all
the different ports were, whenever things were
installed here in the past. And yeah, just a little bit of scrubbing and then a little bit alcohol and that all came off pretty well. There's still a little bit
left, but yeah, it's fine. Not going for pristine showroom
material here or anything, although I did want to replace all of the expansion slot covers because it was missing
most of them for one thing, and the ones that were in there
were kind of ratty looking so I replaced them with all
brand new, super shiny plates. Another thing I was noticing as I was cleaning is it
just has a little bit of a wobble to it. It's got these rubber feet on the bottom that I don't know if they've worn unevenly or they just weren't ever on there completely properly to begin with, but I just used some
furniture casters with foam and cloth feet and stuck
those on the bottom there to kind of even things out and make sure that it slides around a
little easier on the tabletop, I always like doing this anyway. And at this point I just wanted to prep the motherboard area because this actually
doesn't have a whole lot of standoffs built in already which is not uncommon
for cases of this type. There's only three metal standoffs, the rest are all these plastic ones and they sort of slide in
there and then clip into place where there are some
holes on the motherboard or the backplane in
this case, in this case. It will be in this case soon
once we get it installed which to do that, just get the 3.5-inch drive bay cage out of the way and then we're gonna drop
the mother board in place and yeah, it's ready to
start screwing things in and getting stuff installed. So let's do that. [jazzy tunes fade] All right, so getting
the backplane in here is pretty straightforward with that drive cage out of the way, I'm just gonna drop it
onto the plastic standoffs and then screw it into the
metal ones in the middle there. And that's that, it's secured in place and ready to plug in some
things like the power supply. And yeah, I'd mentioned
that I was thinking about swapping out the power
supply to a new old stock one and well, that was the
plan until I noticed that the way that this case is set up, it's integrated with the
existing power supply. This whole front panel is all
connected and kind of weird and I don't feel like rewiring
it for this little project. It's tested, it does work, it's just not quite what I had planned on. And for that matter, I didn't actually check beforehand to see whether or not
there would be any headers for all the buttons and LEDs
on the front of the case. With the backplane itself
only having headers for the AT and ATX power
supplies as well as some fans, some keyboard connectors and
some other things like that. Probably none of which we're going to use. And on the SBC card itself there are a ton of jumpers and headers but of course it's all crammed
in here and is not labeled so I had to go and seek
out some documentation. And while I wasn't able
to find the exact manual for this particular board,
I did find another one in the range that seems
to be pretty close. And that one mentions
that there are headers for the reset button, the hard disk LED and an external PC speaker. But not any headers for the power LED or for the turbo button. So I can get the other things
plugged into here at least, including the external speaker because I liked the way that
those cones sound better than the little piezo beeper on here. And we'll just get that plugged into the ISA slot at the bottom, it'll live here I suppose. And then we'll get the AT
power connectors plugged in, black wire up against black, of course. And I'm gonna go ahead and
power it on here really quick to make sure we got a
connection and check this out. Neat. Yeah, we've got power, but
we've also got five LEDs or really four LEDs out
of the possible five. And these indicate power
going to the individual rails. And you can see here, it's
got everything powered except for the +3.3 volt rail. And well, this is an AT power supply, the 3.3 volt thing came along
with ATX as far as I know. And in case you're
wondering what it looks like with an ATX power supply
plugged in, here you go. We have 3.3 volts but now the -5 volt rail is not lit up. And yeah that's because ATX
typically doesn't have that. As mentioned though, I'm gonna stick with the AT power supply that
goes in this Baby AT case. And you know how I mentioned
that there was no header for the power LED on here, and that's true but I was able to get
around that pretty easily. I just took some wires and put them between the power connector
on the front of the case and stuck them into this
unused header in the backplane which provides ground and some voltage. Eh, it works and gets me a power LED. Now that we've got power
going to the board, let's go ahead and get
some hard disks installed, or really flash memory. Which the first thing I was considering was this Disk On Chip. It's
64 megs, so it's not huge, but I was gonna try it anyway
just have the operating system and some basic programs on there but unfortunately I
couldn't get it to work and I don't know why exactly
it just wasn't detecting it. I've never tested this in another system, I don't have any other
system to test is on, so I had to skip it for now, and I'm gonna use that
disk on module over IDE. And since I wanted to
install a CD-ROM alongside it I just plugged in an IDE cable so we can get a couple
devices on the one bus. And then plug in the disk on module as kind of a secondary device here. But unfortunately the connection
is not quite what I need and the only IDE cable adapter thing I have is really just an extension. What I need is a gender changing cable and I don't have one of those
on hand so I ordered one. I'm gonna do that later when it shows up and in the meantime, I'm just gonna plug in the disk on module directly into the IDE interface which is really what it's
supposed to be anyway and also gonna get the floppy
disk cable connected in here to the controller interface
on board and there we go, system's starting up
performing its RAM check and everything is perfectly fine. Hopping into the BIOS here and yeah, it's one of these pretty basic
ones from Award Software, not my favorite BIOS
but whatever, it works. And it detects the disk on
module just fine, 500-ish megs. And now for the floppy drives, the first one we're gonna install in here is of course at 1.44 meg high density three and a half inch floppy disk drive, and yep floppy drive is working perfectly, detected straight away and we can boot from an MS-DOS boot disk here and get that disk on module formatted in all 500-whatever megs of glory. Pretty much exactly 500 megs, 499.53 usable is what it's
finding, so that's cool. And with that installed on there we got an extremely basic
DOS 6.22 setup going, so yeah, let's go ahead and
continue installing some things. Like the five and a quarter
inch floppy disk drive. I'm gonna go with this one from Toshiba, a 360K
double-sided disk drive. None of that 1.2 meg nonsense here. And for the CD-ROM I got
another black facing unit, of course, but it's
also a little bit newer. This is a Compaq OEM thing manufactured by Lite-On in 2003. So I think it's a 48 speed. We'll get to the CD-ROM here in a moment 'cause that turned out
to be a whole thing, but MS-DOS 6.22, eh, just gonna go ahead and get that properly installed on there, nice full configuration
of DOS and look at that. How exciting, clean DOS. This feels like a good time to go ahead and install a sound card in here, and for that, it's gotta
be a Sound Blaster 16, in particular the CT1750
model known as the MCD. And yeah, this is one of those with multiple CD-ROM interfaces on there, all those proprietary ones
on the left-hand side, I'm not gonna be using those because I don't have one of those drives, but another reason I picked
this one in particular is because the DSP is version 4.05 which means it won't
have the hanging note bug that plagues certain
Sound Blaster 16 models. So I'm gonna go ahead
and get that plugged in, and since we're in here dropping stuff in, figured why not get the parallel and serial situation sorted? Or really, the second serial because there's one already on the SBC, got these little breakout cables here and they're gonna go into these slots up above the normal I/O and they screw into place right there with the cables hanging
out and dangling around, which I'll just string down into the bottom of the
case where the SBC is and those are gonna plug
into the headers down there so it gives us two nice ports
around back looking awesome. Now to slide in the drives, got the five and a
quarter inch floppy disk that's gonna go in here
first, kind of in the middle, and then the three and a
half inch goes below that but it's gotta go in that
annoying little cage. I mean, it's kind of convenient,
but kind of not convenient because you can just install the screws and everything in the drive externally, you don't have to do it inside the case but inconvenient because it's got these weird little sliding mechanisms that don't line up exactly quite right, it bends a little bit. So I had to actually unscrew it and then screw it back
in once it was in there, but whatever it doesn't
matter, I cut all that out. That's in here now and it's starting to look
more like a computer, looking pretty good and get the little beige three
and a half inch face plate over here, I guess it won't be using the other ones since I'm gonna be populating both of the five and a
quarter inch drive bays meaning that I kind of cleaned
them for nothing, oh man! I wiped away "food" for no
good reason, but it's okay, it makes me feel better. And got the CD-ROM drive, just ready to go plop
it in place right here. Yeah, it's time to start
getting some things plugged in down here. We're gonna start with these
serial and parallel cables which go into these
headers on the SBC itself which are fully populated with
all the pins on each of them. And unfortunately the
cables have a pin plugged on each of the cable. I guess 'cause this is a little bit newer of a set of ports that I'm
using for the headers anyway. So yeah, you just drill those out. It doesn't matter. It's not using those pins anyway, so yeah, just drill
those out, plug them in, everything's fine. Now we'll go ahead and
get the DOM unplugged here and the IDE cable plugged in it's place which is connected to
the CD-ROM up at the top and we'll use the little
male to male adapter that showed up finally. And we can plug in the disk on module to the secondary connection
on the IDE cable. And well, unfortunately
this is where things got really annoying for a couple of hours. The CD-ROM drive will not detect with the disk on module plugged into the same IDE connection. They'll work individually, but never both at once
on the same channel. And in order to try and narrow down which device was causing
the conflict, like I said, I spent a couple hours
switching things around. I changed between the primary and secondary connections on the cable, which device is plugged in were, switched the Cable Select master and slave pins on the CD-ROM, anyway, the disk on module
doesn't have any of those. I adjusted the IDE settings in the BIOS, I swapped the IDE cables themselves and then I swapped out the
CD-ROM for another one, that didn't work. Then I swapped out the
flash disk on module for a CF Card Adapter and that worked. Then I went back to the other
CD-ROM and it was working with the CF card adapter, but
not with the disk on module, no matter what configuration I was using. So I'm assuming that
somehow that only likes to be on its own as the master device, which kind of makes sense, it was meant to be plugged
directly into the SBC or something like this, just right there on the IDE channel doing its own thing solo,
but anyway, totally works with the Compact Flash thing, so I'm gonna use that for now or just go without the CD-ROM for now until I find another solution. Alrighty, finally time to power it up and see what it can do with some games and benchmarks and whatnot, so let's go. And the power LED is no longer working. It's always something. Hey, a note from future LGR here I probably should have used a resistor when plugging in that power LED because I think it blew, likely because I was giving
it five volts directly. I probably should have used
another source of power or a resistor. Anyway, that'll be a quick fix
at some point in the future but yeah, back to the video. But anyway, at the moment I
do at least have the CD-ROM and the hard disk replacement going, you can see them both
right there detected, as well as our second serial port with the mouse plugged into PS/2 here and yeah at the moment, I just, am still using a compact flash solution in there and not the disk on module. I'd like to use this, but
yeah, it's just not cooperating with the CD-ROM it takes precedence and won't let anything
else be on that channel. For now though, we have
a working DOS 6.22 system with CD-ROM and all that. And with the drivers loaded, I have it set as the D drive, and we can just insert a disc
with games and things on it. Or whatever! CDs and DOS, there's still
something oddly special about it in my opinion. But yeah, works great. Just again, doesn't like
it when this is connected, so, eh, I'll go ahead and
run Xargon here as a test. And it has detected all the things, however, it does play
music, but only the music. For some reason, it doesn't
play the sound effects. And I don't know why. I've set it up several different ways, I've tried different DMA channels with the jumpers on the sound card, different drivers, settings,
and all that kind of stuff from the startup files, just doesn't seem to play
sound effects on Xargon at all. I don't know, perhaps it's a quirk of this particular sound card. I've actually never used
it in another system so I don't know. Maybe it's just busted. Jill of the Jungle is a similar situation, where we get music but
no Sound Blaster sounds. I don't know. However other games like
Duke 3D, perfectly fine. [bowling pin sound effects] So we got Sound Blaster sound effects, Sound Blaster music or AdLib-compatible. Alright so I've been fooling
around with this thing, just trying to figure
out a little bit more about what might be going
on with the sound card and then screwing around with 8-bit DMA, because that is what
Jill and Xargon would use as far as I know, and the
way I had this configured on the board itself with the jumpers was having it set to
DMA 1, which is default. However, whenever I set it that way, there is a conflict of some kind. So I've tried it on DMA
0, tried it on DMA 3 and I get the same results with both Jill of the Jungle and Xargon. And we can test it now. So it does work, I mean, all the channels
work, everything works. [AdLib music plays pleasantly] How pleasant. The thing is, it seems that Xargon and Jill only like it if it's on DMA 1 and yeah I am using the fan patched version of Jill and I also tried older versions, then tried the shareware version, I tried a later registered version. None of them work on any of the DMA
settings that I have here. Something on the SBC is
conflicting with DMA 1, I don't see anything in the BIOS though, but whatever, it plays Duke
3D and that's all I need. So here we go. And again, we are running with
just the built-in graphics, so there's no dedicated
video card or anything. It does pretty good considering, I don't really know the capabilities of whatever that Cirrus Logic thing is. But I can't imagine it's
like, optimized for games. Anyway yeah with the 486 that's in here which is a 100 megahertz 486 DX4, yeah, it's not bad. [guns blazing, aliens dying] I do get the expected slowdown when things get a little
intense here and there. And this is just at 320 x 200, we're not doing like 640 x
480 or anything like that 'cause it doesn't do
terribly great with that. See real quick. So yeah, I mean just lower
frame rate all around at 640 x 480 which is
really to be expected considering we're not running any particularly great graphics here. It could definitely benefit from a nice dedicated graphics card slotted in there somewhere. However that DX4 and everything else does take it a little ways. So we can run things like
Quake halfway decently. I did say halfway decently,
not terribly decently. Whatever, I'm not going up there. Oh man! Definitely need some
better dedicated graphics to do something like
this or even a Voodoo 1. That's if the PCI slots were supported. And unfortunately they are not, even though we have them on the backplane the SBC that we're using is an ISA only because I mean it
connects via the ISA bus, It's not gonna do anything with PCI even though I think the
chipset the Award BIOS and everything would
technically support it but it doesn't actually connect to the PCI slots that are on there, and that's what those
are for on the backplane, where you saw those
ISA lots with PCI slots off to their right, or
just kind of behind them, that looks like it might
be VLB, but it isn't, that's what that's for is
connecting an SBC with ISA and PCI on the same card. I don't have a picture of one,
but here is an illustration from a manual for one that I came across and yeah, I'd love to find one of these just to take advantage of
this backplane more properly. Even then though I think
we would be rather limited on the PCI cards that we could use because we don't have the
full voltage in everything of an ATX power supply unless we were to connect one to it. So anyway, not gonna be
plugging in any Voodoo cards into this unfortunately, 'cause we just can't use those PCI slots, which means that this SBC
is not taking advantage of half of the stuff on the backplane. Really, I should have used one like this. This has eight ISA slots, so six 16-bit ones and two 8-bit there. So this would be a little more suitable for this particular SBC because
it at least would be able to use all the slots and
it only has AT power, doesn't even bother with ATX cuz honestly you don't need it, but yeah. Anyway, if I were to redo this, I would use this particular backplane. I don't know, maybe I will. [antistatic sleeve crackling] I might just take it all
apart and do it all over again because I'm a masochist. Let's give Descent a shot real quick, because, eh, it's always a
good one to test on a 486. If I were thinking I
would have run Descent 2 because that has a built in
FPS thingy that you can use. I don't think the original Descent does, but anyway, even without exact numbers, you can see that it runs quite well all things considered. [Descent gameplay sounds] Here we go. Hostage rescued! I just noticed the music sounds
a little odd, doesn't it? So I'm messing around with the setup program for Descent here and I had it on Sound
Blaster 16 OPL3 mode, which is what this card is and listen. [OPL3 music plays] I don't know about you, but
that sounds very wrong to me. Sounds slow and the
instruments are a little odd, if I switch it back over to just OPL2, classic Sound Blaster FM. [OPL2 music plays, slightly faster Yeah, that sounds as it should, so I don't think it's
actually anything wrong with it necessarily. It's just, I'm definitely
used to how it sounds with the OPL2 instead of the OPL3 like Sound Blaster 16 mode, so I'm gonna keep it on
OPL2, at least for Descent. And lastly, at least for now, just gonna run some Commander
Keen in Goodbye Galaxy. Episode four is always a
great little thing to run because it is. [AdLib game sounds, music] Yeah good old OPL2
sounds, classic FM synth. So these slight sound
irregularities that I'm running into on the other games there, really makes me want to put this particular sound card through some other additional paces but that's outside of
the scope of this video. Let's go ahead and run
some of these benchmarks from the PhilsComputerLab
DOS Benchmark Pack. And I'm gonna run 3DBENCH
just to see what this does because I just don't know. It's got those integrated graphics but pretty decent CPU. So let's see what it does
here in the Woodgrain 486 I believe was around like, okay that's faster than the Woodgrain. I don't remember what it was with the Pentium OverDrive installed but 62.5 is certainly quicker than that. Let's see if it runs
any of these time demos, let's put the DOOM Demo, watch that go through. Yeah, looking pretty good. No sound of course,
none in this benchmark. All right, so that 3D benchmark
that we ran just before this it was 55.7 on the Woodgrain PC with the Pentium OverDrive going. So this is running quicker than that which is no terribly big surprise that Woodgrain computer has
just got some other things slowing it down, I think
with the motherboard itself, but the DOOM Demo, we got a 2245 realtics. That one was 2134 gametics and 2664 realtics, an
intriguing comparison. Of course that one would not
even run the Quake timedemo. Let's see if it does here. Yeah, it's running it. I don't know why this
would not even boot up, it just wouldn't start at
all on the Woodgrain PC. This is already a step above that and with a non-dedicated graphics card, I mean I've got a VLB thing
going in the 486 and everything. This just has whatever's on board with that Cirrus Logic GD thing. So we've got 969 frames,
99.6 seconds, 9.7 FPS. That is a lot of nines. We can also check CHKCPU
to check our CPU and check. And you know, there it
is DX4 WB enhanced 100MHz internal 33.5. You got that 3X multiplier
going on, genuine Intel. And I'll also let CACHECHK do its thing because yeah, I'm sure that
this is gonna be quicker than the Woodgrain thing. And that this is one of the
deals about that motherboard or just I don't know the way
it's set up or something. It's never been as fast as it needs to be. I'm thinking it might
just be the memory too. It always seems to be rather slow. So looking at my 486's specs for this, the L1 and L2 cash are about the same but the main memory speed is like two and a half times
as quick as the Woodgrain PCs. Yeah, maybe I do need to
swap out the main memory on that system and see what it does. And of course I gotta run some TOPBENCH here really quick. It's actually running a little bit faster. It's pretty comparable
to what the Woodgrain PC is with the Pentium OverDrive installed. And this is a 100MHz 486. So I think that one was
around 216 or something. This is pushing 220. Of course I can't actually
do anything with the turbo because like I said before, as I was putting things together I don't have a turbo
button header on the SBC, that I'm aware of anyway. It's not in the documentation or anything and there's no mention of anything like that in the BIOS either. So it's possible that I could
maybe hook up the button to a clock multiplier jumper or something on there and
rig that up, I don't know, but for now I just don't
have any turbo button option. It does nothing. Maybe there's a keyboard command for that, but again without the exact
documentation for this SBC I don't know, none of the typical commands seem to have done
anything that I've tried. So yeah, that's what that is. Well, I suppose that is about it for this build and this video anyway. There are a number of things
that I would like to tweak and change and swap out and upgrade, pretty much the entire
backplane on retrospect but hey, it's working
quite well for what it is. And, like I said, I'm kind of impressed by the built-in graphics
that are in there, I really wasn't sure what in
the world kind of capabilities they would put in there
considering it's all integrated on the one single card like
that and isn't really meant for anything other than
business-y, industrial situations but it's more than adequate. Maybe not ideal for every DOS game but definitely good enough
for a majority of things that I like to mess around
with on DOS PC builds anyway, but yeah, I guess about the only thing that I am also really considering is maybe doing like a
woodgrain wrap, I don't know, I've done that before so do I really need to do it again? Do you think that it looks fine in the lovely beige that we have here? Or could it go for a nice
walnut or an oak texture? I kind of like it as it is, it's just a classic beige box and it looks pretty neat, I think. With the black faceplate drives and everything up front,
which I did in order to try and match the buttons down below. So yeah, overall I quite like it, but anyway let me know your thoughts, what you would like to
see done with this machine or what you would do with it yourself or if you've done any
similar builds on your own, SBCs or otherwise as it is
something that I've never messed with before in terms
of the whole SBC thing. So it's been a fun learning experience but that's it for this episode of LGR and as always thank you
very much for watching.
Food
I have a very similar card, and it's working just from a single Molex, no motherboard or full-scale PSU needed. Could be a great solution for all-in-one PC embedded into a monitor.
This made me go googling for an ISA video accelerator. I failed.
The only thing it’s missing is the LGR case badge!
Where on earth did you find a black face plate for the 5.25 drive??
I get the 3.5, since there was overlap... but the 5.25 was long gone by the time the black computer style had started. (Or at least I had thought it was)
It does look good offsetting the buttons though. I agree with your aesthetic as far as that goes.