When a battery leaks, does the motherboard make a sound?

Patron Edmond pointed out the Intel cache controller can only talk to 32k of SRAM. I took a look at the datsheet and I totally agree. It says one bank of 8k x 8 chips or two banks of 4k x 4 chips. Either way that's a total of 32k. It could be that the 8k x 8 chips in there are only half being used -- which means half is wasted!

The phrase "That's not very cache memory of you" came up in my brain during this episode. Not gonna question it lol

According to Wikipedia the 80287 and 80287XL both work with the 80386 and were the only options available when the 386 first came out; the 80387 didn't come until two years after the 386 was released.

It's midnight in the UK and I'm watching Adrian's Digital Basement. I cannot fault my life choices. I had so many chances to collect these old boards, but I always passed them on to people without a computer. Love your channel Adrian.

Having started with a VIC--20 myself, you are the Bob Ross of Computers inasmuch as artistry, and yet the Human Wikipedia of ideas.

We had a 286 with a Phoenix BIOS, and I think it used a CTRL-ALT-ESC combination to access the built-in setup program. That combination would work at any time, even after the system was booted.

That cyrix chip may not actually be bad, the 486dlc was not intended as a direct drop in replacement for just any 386. It was designed for ,often later, cyrix aware or enabled motherboards. Though sometimes you may luck out and it works anyway, but often with cache and other stability issues. For a direct replacement for the 386, they had 486DRu and 486DRx series chips.

Hi Adrian, great video, brings back some memories. Those SIPP pins you are looking for are available from several manufacturers - do a search for "leadframe pins". They are still used quite often in electronics where configurable modules get plugged/soldered into the main board. Power supply modules, hybrid circuits, and double-sided modules on single-sided boards are very common applications. Anyhow, I love the channel and the content. Cheers! p.s.: Leadframe pins are also used on small modules like the ESP-32 and Pi Pico, instead of Molex headers, to prevent them from spreading (obliterating!) the contacts in a standard socket.

This sounds funny but those board are beautiful works of art.

Those Micronics 386 DX mobos were awesome late 80's goodness! I put an AMD DX 40 and loaded it up with like 16 Megs by the mid 90s. Used it as a Windows 3.11 machine. Totally useful.

Entered the PC world around 92 (after the Amiga) with the Pentium, so it's fun to see all these older boards that I never got to experience. Everything looks extra chunky! :)

Very special boards you have there 🤩. For Speedsys make sure to use ver. 4.78. On some chipsets speedsys really like to freeze at the memory detection. You can start with „speedsys dspdr“. This is disabling the memory type detection and u can use the program then just normally. Thanks for your videos. Cheers, Peter

The best way to deal with SIPP memory these days that I found is this: get some SIMM sockets. The pins from those fit perfectly into SIPP slots, and you can install regular SIMM modules in them afterwards. This way you don't have to modify either the motherboard or the memory modules. Or if you're so inclined you can desolder the SIPP headers and solder instead SIMM sockets.

Don't worry about the length, I usually watch your videos at 1.5x, sometimes 2.0x but I never skip one :) This is a promising video, looking forward to watch it later! Edit: I watched it and it was fun. At 41:40, that motherboard looks pretty, I feel like biting into, looks like chocolate :) You have much more luck with motherboards than I have, I was looking for a neat 486 motherboard and had to buy 2 broken ones before I got my hand on a cool working one. I thought I was onto something with one of the boards but I had no luck, switched some components, tested the BIOS in a different motherboard (it was okay) and nothing helped to fix that one, I think maybe the chipset was fried or something.

DOS 6.22 also has the handy F8 option during startup to selectively choose which lines to run in the autoexec and config sys. This way you can choose whether to run EMM386 and/or HIMEM and so on without having to edit the startup files in some situations.

As others have said, the length of the video is fine. It's total fun!

Also, one of the things I've had immensely good results from when cleaning boards is hot water, dish soap, and baking soda. The baking soda helps clean mechanically, and the hot soapy water cleans chemically. Combine the two and it's how I get some of my immensely disgusting boards looking a million times better. I had a dell 386 machine complete with leaky battery pack that was left in a rotting shed outdoors for 20 years, and it come back to life with nothing but cleaning. It was in such bad shape that the base was almost rusted entirely through.

Hi Adrian. If you ever get your hands on an EISA (32 Bit) motherboard, that would be very exciting!! I had one back in the day. They seem to be very rare nowadays!

I mentioned your channel in the comments on JayzTweCents, His last video he showed a C64 and I said your channel is great for trouble shooting etc.. cheers.

Really enjoyed this video, just feels like sitting next to you watching you slowly go through your process, and picking up tips for my own projects along the way