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Questions about Improve it technologies "Make-It 486&qu

Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward

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I am wondering whether or not anyone has ever tried playing around with one of these chips in various configurations. Does the "make it 486" truly run asynchronously to the system bus, or does it somehow select a clock multiplier by determining the speed of the bus speed. The reason I ask this question is because the make it 486 is said to work in 8, 10, 12 and 16MHz systems, and I would like to try it make it work in my 20 and 25MHz 286 motherboards. However, since these upgrade modules are quite difficult to find, I don't want to risk destroying it with overclocking. Depending on how these chips work, I might even consider trying to overclock a late model 286 board to 33MHz.
 
i don't know if this will help but i can tell you about my 286 to 486 adventures.

i have a tandy 1000 TX that had a 10mhz 286 chip in it.i believe the 287 math chips are incompatable with the 486 chip so you may want to pull that chip if you have one.

i found a 286 to 486 upgrade chip and installed it and it gets 200% increase in speed.i put a heat sink on the chip as it was geeting pretty hot.i had to use a program that enabled the 1kb cache on chip for 200% and a dram program to speedup ram which then showed benchmarks of that of a 19 mhz 386 although it also shows its a 486.
 
In terms of "real world" performance, I found the Make-It-486 to provide little if any improvement. However, the memory management and 386 instructions of the new chip are useful.

But, one interesting thing that I noticed is that some of the "cache enabling" software doesn't work very well. I have this one release that reports the cache to be "on", when infact it is not. If you are using the software that came with your chip, it's probably doing a good job. But, I highly recommend using the software for the Cyrix DRx2 and SRx2 upgrade chips. It is much better (and newer) than the earlier Cyrix programs, and allows you to configure the chip so you can do DMA properly. This probably doesn't matter much to you since your Tandy only has 8-bit expansion.

You are also correct about the Math Coprocessor not working with Make it 486. According to documentation I have seen, I was pretty sure it could...but my testing has proven otherwise. I have tried both original 80287 and 80287XL (387sx based) chips. If you want to use an FPU, you'll need the version of Make-It-486 that has one soldered on the underside. Neither of my two units have this feature unfortunately.

However, I am currently using something much better than "Make-it-486". It is a module by a Japanese company called "Buffalo" for upgrading proprietary PC-98 systems. They come in a number of versions, but mine has a 40MHz Ti486SXL with 8kb L1 cache, and a Cyrix Fasmath FPU. The performance of this chip seems much better than Make-it-486 (probably because of the cache).
 
I have a couple of 8-bit speedup cards but I haven't tried them yet.

1) Orchid PC-Turbo 186 in the original box with memory daughterboard

2) Intel InBoard 386 , this one has a cable that plugs into the 8088 socket
after you remove the CPU

I haven't found any drivers for either of these.
 
I don't know much about the Orchid. Does it even need drivers? But, I am pretty sure somebody in here has the drivers for the inboard 386. I remember someone showing off a photo of the Inboard 386 with boxes, manuals and software disks.

I also have an Inboard 386, but aside from testing to confirm that it works I never bothered to use it much. It has some pretty weird limitations, and it just stinks up my XT.
 
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