The Cursed 386 - The Atronics International ATI-386/B2!
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2024
- When I saw the bizarre memory layout on the ATI-386/B2, I just had to give it a try for myself. Join me today as I take an in-depth look into this quirky motherboard and explore the very interesting 386 hardware era.
The Retro Web page for the ATI-386/B2:
theretroweb.com/motherboards/...
SiS Rabbit chipset datasheets and information:
theretroweb.com/chipsets/410
ThisOldTech's Links:
/ thisoldtech2
www.ebay.ca/str/thisoldtech
More info on SRAM and TAG ram:
• Upgrading the Full Yes...
More info on CMOS battery pack construction:
• My Daily Use 486 Build...
David E. Larsson's Sound Blaster 1.5 and GUS clone review:
• Sound Blaster 1.5 and ...
Interesting vogons thread about SimCity Classic and math co-processors:
www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?...
**
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**
00:00 Introduction
02:00 SiS Rabbit Chipset Overview
03:18 The Cursed Memory Layout
06:27 Different Board Revisions
06:43 Hardware Overview Continued
08:38 Other Parts for the Build
10:05 Initial Power Up!
11:15 Troubleshooting Some Instability
12:17 Poor Performance!
13:37 Performance Tweaks
15:20 Some Classic Games
19:04 Conclusion - Věda a technologie
fyi anti-static bags are slightly conductive, so it's probably better not to power on a board sitting on top of one
Its a problem on higher voltage boards (like, power supply or monitor) but even the metallised bags measure many MOhm between 2 pins of an IC. Nothing that would upset TTL. It doesnt even dischagre the battery in a significant way (boards after all come with the battery preinstalled and in a "conductive" bag and sit in it for a long time).
Can confirm - I killed two 286s this way back in the day. They were “fast” 286s, a 12 MHz and a 16 MHz I was hoping to use for my BBS - unfortunately.
@@semifavorableuncircle6952 not sure about these older boards, but I almost threw away raspberry pi, because it wasn't working properly until i realized it was sitting on an antistatic bag (metalised one). so ... don't. it is conductive and it can potentially damage the board
I'm really glad to see this comment.
Yeah this needs to be more well understood.
If you manage to find the RAM expansion board, you should do a follow-up!
Giving someone a 3dfx card in 2024 isn't just kind it's a gesture of true friendship
I'll agree with that! hehe :D
Haha so true! 😁
Totally crazy layout.
When Doom came out, I immediately went to the store to buy a new computer to replace my old 386 machine.
You unlocked an old memory. I had this mobo back in the day, well much later as I got hand-me-downs from family and friends back then, about 92' or 93'. I used this mobo in an old metal case and my CGA monitor sat on top of it. I mostly used it for BBS and downloading MOD files to listen to.
That is a genius setup
Very strange layout indeed, but to be fair, how often would a typical user change memory in the lifetime of their system?
That XCMOS interface is a beast, imagine somebody going, "Hey developer we need a utility for the user, and you need to set these registers." "Sure here is exactly what you asked for.".
Also shoutout to Halloween Harry, this game doesn't get a lot of love, although it deserves it.
Been looking forward to this one! Amazingly archaic BIOS - never seen one like that before. I'm glad this unique board has been saved and is working. Nice selection of games, too. I really like what you've done with the front panel components - would love to do something like that myself when I get back into the hobby. Thanks for sharing, Mike!
I'm thinking of soldering up a set of 'testing' toys like that for my desk. I love the short stubby LEDs and buttons. Kinda jealous of those TBH
Thanks Andrew! Glad you enjoyed it 👍 .. I got those stubby front panel LEDs, switches and speaker from an old “Highspeed tech station” I had many years ago. They’ve come in handy many times. I should construct some more of them.
Halloween Harry! Oh man, I almost completely forgot about that game. You don't really see people mention it or show it off on these kinds of videos. You typically see the same demos of Doom, Duke 2D/3D, Jazz Jackrabbit, etc.
Wow. 15+ years doing retro stuff and this is the first time I've seen this board.
What a bizarre layout!
only a minute in and back in the 90s I had this board. I couldn't find a case for it, so it sat in discombobulated pieces. I loved to modify and overclock this guy.
Wow that's the craziest thing I have seen in a long time.
8mb of ram is rockstar status with this relic. Awesome build.
That Doom demo made the SNES port look smooth. XD
Interesting design. Hindsight says cursed but kinda clever for the chunky chip days.
Love videos like this. They make me want to descend into my vault and build a PC.
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching 👍
This was great Mike, very interesting board. You scored a nice piece of history here.
Good to see Willy Besmish get some attention. I had been locked out of that whole class of Sierra game when I got my 386 running, as it had moved to all VGA about that time, and Willy was one of the first games I played on my new machine.
Thanks very much! Glad you enjoyed the video. When I get some time I’d love to do a play through of Willy Beamish. Been a long time and never did get very far 🙂
Yes low detail and shrinking the display window does make Doom just about playable.
3:59 just like the mini-computers of the previous era, the memory was an extra card plugged into the "backplane" which is the motherboard.
I loved Willy Beamish!
Loved Halloween Harry! I remember it eventually ended up on a magazine coverdisk in the mid 1990s.
Ahhh...that"s why they call them POST-its.
LOL - I see what you did there 😁
That layout is just nuts. Otherwise, I was curious how a SiS Rabbit based board performs (not having one myself), now I had a glimpse.
What a strange board. Would love to see a video testing the chipset's integrated cache!
Very unusual 😊. I imagine this with smaller board 😊
Interesting, didn't know halloween harry... Excellent restoration :)
not just cursed, but fragile too.
Nothing looks cooler than a crazy mobo fully populated. thanks for sharing.. cheers.
Thanks for watching! 🙂
Awesome video, thank you!
Thanks for watching! 😁
Great to see this crazy board running! That 8-bit EPROM socket is probably for an extension ROM, like ROM BASIC. You might be able to run an XT-IDE Universal BIOS image in it.
Thanks for watching! Great point, I didn’t think of that. Only one way to find out 😁
I like that board, but it needs a bios update. Good job.
This is actually a Motherboard I own. I have seen the 128 Byte cache option in the BIOS, I have always wondered if there was some obscure processor with 128Bytes of internal cache. The external cache is limited to 64K as far as I know.
Very cool to hear from someone else who had this board! Hoping to give the internal 128 byte cache a try sometime soon. I tried to enable it earlier but it just hung up the system. Thinking I may need to physically remove the SRAM for it to work properly.
@@vswitchzero I think that setting would be for a Cyrix Cx486DLC CPU. They had a little bit of internal L1 cache
Sometimes we gotta do stuff just because we think it will look cool
An AMIbios straight out of the 80s. Other than XCMOS it looks unmodified from the AMIBios for AT Clones.
I'm not so sure if you should lay down the motherboard on an antistatic bag, because the outer layer of the bag is allegedly partially conductive. Maybe better lay it down on a foam or something?
I would just assume this causes problem with interference.
Thanks for the tip! I had never considered that the outside layer would be different. I noticed this board seems to introduce a lot of noise into the sound card (tried several). I will give it a try without the static bag and see if it changes things at all.
@@vswitchzero Next time you get pizza ask for an unused box from the store, perfect for this kind of application!
I would just find or 3D print a "C" shaped clip to pull the RAM against the back post.
I enjoy your channel. Thanks for sharing
Thanks so much! 👍🙂
I remember Willie Beamish.. forgetting to put antiseptic on your thumb when you cut it would hurt you during the Nintenjoy tournament... Or feeding your frog sugar causes it to fail drug testing in the race
Haha yes! I remember the thumb part well. I never did come close to completing the game. Need to give it a run through one of these days 👍
I know the guy who sent it to you (we're in the same retro computer club). He told me about that board!
Hi, I have a lot of fun , I paused the video (when I realized where the memory slots were) , to wait until I stop laughing, and I have a smile all along the video ...
Who did think it can be a good idea ?
Thank You !!!
Thanks so much, glad you enjoyed it! :)
I owned one of these.. only it also supported a 286/287.
Interesting video and strange motherboard indeed. But what score do you get in 3dbech 1.0 ? I wonder if Test Drive 3 The Passion runs good (ingame clock per real clock) with turbo switched to low.
Thanks! I scored 13.1 in 3D Bench 1.0 (in the performance optimized config covered in the video).
What a bizarre layout. Such a bad idea 😆 Thanks for showing this oddity.
Sorry to be picky: you said a few times "L2 cache" instead of simply cache but... there's no L1 cache in a 386!
Thanks for watching! You’re absolutely right.. force of habit from dealing with so many 486 and Pentium systems 🙂
Nice work. Crazy layout, I've never seen a board like that (for good reason). You mentioned Mr. Bios, I have a board with a Phoenix Bios that refuses to accept anything but the original Harddrive, I found a list of the chipsets that Mr Bios worked with and mine fits, are the Bios Roms available online?
Thanks for watching! I believe there is a pretty large archive available on the Vogonsdrivers site. But I don’t think it’s complete. Would be great to see them all added to the retro web project at some point 👍
@@vswitchzero Good to know, I'll have a look again at Vogons, thanks. I wonder if the Mr Bios material is considered abandonware or if it's being copyright protected still. Totally agree, would love to see it at the world's greatest web site, the Retro web :)
This is a rich people's motherboard as RAM price/MB kept rock solid $40/MB practically till late 90's so in order to get its SIMMs fully packed would cost a fortune. I could barely afford to have 40MB in my 386 machine back in the day taking into account the fact that the US dollar had entirely different value at the time.
You shouldn't use Anti Static/EMF protective plastic bags underneath a motherboard when powered on.
Those black lines printed on the bag, are actually electrically conductive. They are what actually protect the product inside from electrostatic discharges.
And with modern protective bags, it's even a bigger no-no; as the entirety of the bag is electrically conductive.
I honestly didn't know that myself - I've done it a few times assuming it protected things, I've also used a cardboard base :P
@@thisoldtech2: Clean cardboard will usually be safe.
Thanks very much for the tip. I didn’t consider that but makes complete sense! I will be doing a follow up video on this board soon and will definitely mention this 👍
Whaddaya mean "cursed"? It works, doesn't it? (:
hey just stumbled across your video/channel
nice content, but i have a small question
what do you use to capture bios and dos
i now try for over a year to find a suitable solution but allways have problems with capturing "textmode" vga
Solid Q, I'd love to know that myself. He gets a really crisp/clear output on his.
Thanks for watching! I have two capture solutions that I use. The best is the Datapath Vision E1S - amazing quality and works with just about any VGA era signals including 70Hz. Not the most user friendly and sometimes needs some tweaking. The other is the Startech USB3HDCAP. Great all purpose device and easier to use with more inputs and audio-in. Works with *most* signals but not as good as the E1S. If you look up the Datapath Vision cards you’ll find some good resources. You can sometimes find them cheap on eBay. Hope this helps 👍
@@vswitchzero okay a datapath, thats why the capture is so clear.
but this is not cheap, they're traded in germany for over 1000,-€
I feel like it would have been obvious how bad an idea this was when it came time to layout the traces, but where there's a will, there's a way.
Honestly, maybe not. As long as you were willing to run the memory at the same speed as ISA, you could probably rig up something surprisingly coherent, and even use the same data (and maybe address) lines.
On a 386 the external cache is level 1 since there is no internal cache.
You’re absolutely right.. force of habit from dealing with so many 486s and Pentiums 😁
The wizard is here to use his voodoo magic to break the curse.
I'm confused why they made a 386 motherboard in 1990 when the 486 was already on the market.
the PC space didn't move quite so fast before multimedia and the WWW came along; 386 machines were very common until 1993 or so. even Windows 95 only required a 386 to run
(note: i wasn't personally around to witness this era of computing, i'm just going off of what I've heard / read)
386 systems were still being sold well into the mid 1990s, and you also had quirky things like the 486SLC. I bought one of those brand new in 1993.
I think one of the main factors was cost. When the 486 first came out it cost a fortune and just wasn’t within reach for mainstream users until about 1992 or so I’d say. There was a similar story for the original Pentium CPUs. The cost was astronomical so there was a 486 overlap for quite a while until about 1995 or so.
@@vswitchzero I put an AMD X5 system together in 1996, a Pentium system was still too expensive even then for a college student.
13 instead of 3 isn't a 10-fold increase ;-) I'm sure you knew that and just mispoke. Though you do get it there with a bit of tweaking, I see.
Haha yep, that’s embarrassing! I must have had the reference number in my head when I said that 😁 .. thanks for watching and for the comment 👍
Love how they finally figured out how to have a full set of RAM slots in a normal-ish space in the next revision lol. Seems like they rushed this one out the door honestly.
8:46 I am thoroughly amused you are installing an ATI video card in a board named ATI by an unrelated company
LOL - seemed appropriate 😁
Unconventional design for memory slot location. First one I see here.
@17:08 hey! I have a name!
Thanks for watching, I'm really sorry for the name omission! I should have went back to check the thread. There is a link in the description to the vogons thread for anyone interested. Those were some really interesting and surprising results.
@@vswitchzero oh, I'm just having some fun. I don't even remember why I tested out the theory about simcity and math co-pro. It's not a game I bring out often, as my go-to is SC2K if I want to scratch that itch.
Ten fold increase! 3 x 10 = ?? (Clue not 13) 😅
LOL yeah, very embarrassing- I don’t know what I was thinking when I recorded that. I must have been looking at the reference 386 score or something. At least I did get it to a tenfold increase after the tweaking was finished 😁 .. thanks for watching!
if this kind of motherboard were made with 2020 standards, most people would have to choose between a good graphics card or max amount of ram in their configuration ._.U
So true! 😁
Low-profile RAM and a watercooled GPU would be a solution for that. ;)
Set it up running Leisure Suit Larry at a party full of woke-folk, see how offended they get :D
The original 'Indycar Racing' and "Indy500" should run pretty well.
This is a dumb board layout, i know baby at had some weird configs but yeah anyone can immediately see the simm slots might obstruct a card. Could NOT have been fun routing the memory traces next to the ISA slot traces.
EDIT: well colour me surprised, the sticks are those 'half height' or whatever simms so don't even go above the ISA slots.
Another surprise for you: depending on where the address & data lines for the simms are in comparison to the ISA bus, you could have them _share_ lines at the cost of locking memory performance to ISA performance. For those willing to cap performance (or lacking faster RAM, or willing to reject cards for bad high-speed tolerance) it could actually be a genius optimization... if you fully populated the RAM _before_ adding cards.
maybe Atronics = Atrocious Electronics ?
funny
Материнская плата курильщика )))
Complete idiot design...