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Anyone interested in a 386 SX/20 machine in 'barebones' condition?

jmetal88

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 23, 2010
Messages
878
Location
Derby, KS
This machine is nearly identical to another 386 I have that used to belong to my grandpa, and I've essentially used a bunch of parts from this to make my grandpa's old machine more complete. What's left is the case, motherboard (including math co-processor and riser card) and power supply. What I'm wondering is if anyone would be interested enough to offer $30 plus shipping for the machine in this condition. The last time I powered it on, it worked, but the hard drive LED did not light. I did not spend any time tracking down the cause of that fault. I will say that once I got all the parts together in my grandpa's old machine, I discovered his machine had several cracked solder joints that were causing odd behavior. A little time with a narrow-nozzle heat gun fixed those right up, so if you discover any issues with this after receiving it, that might fix them.

It'll take IDE hard drives. Up to what size, I'm not sure, but I ran it with a 64MB SD card in an IDE adapter for a little while. Supports 360k, 1.2MB, 720k, and 1.44MB floppy drives. The 5-1/4" drive bay is standard height, but the floppy drive and hard drive bays are slightly taller than normal. You can fit a normal 3.5" floppy drive in there and it will sit against the bottom of the opening, but will leave about 1/4" of empty space between the top of the drive faceplate and the bottom of the 5-1/4" drive bay above. External drive bay covers are all missing (except the bottom one which fits over where the hard drive sits) and standard snap-in covers won't fit very well (the original cover screws in place). All rear ISA slot covers are also missing. It also originally came with rails that screwed to the side of the hard drive and floppy drive on one side each, but these are not included. They are helpful, but not strictly necessary for mounting the drives. It may be possible to fabricate replacements if necessary (they were just bent pieces of metal that screwed onto the bottom screw holes of the left side of each drive). It has 2MB of on-board RAM and 6 30-pin SIMM slots, and has standard VGA graphics (640x480 16-color variety, can support the 256-color mode that some DOS games generate via palette switching, albeit with visible 'snow' on the screen).

Sorry for the poor quality pictures. I took them with my phone and my apartment has terrible lighting, yet my phone's flash tends to wash everything out. If you want to see it powered up to the BIOS configuration screen, let me know and I'll hook it up to get that for you. I also have a spare 1/2AA battery I could stick in prior to shipping if you don't want to hunt down your own in order to be able to save the BIOS settings, but I figure due to the nature of this as a barebones machine, I'll keep it unless asked (it might just sit in there running down while the machine waits to be finished).

IMG_20160615_201544.jpgIMG_20160615_201437.jpgIMG_20160615_201622.jpg
 
I would have been interested in it a couple weeks ago, but a zenith 8086 "laptop" just entered my life and I dont need another project at this moment

but I am really posting cause I at one point had a 486SX version of this machine, and I was quite impressed with it, and it was a fun machine to tinker with. Hope you find it a good home!
 
The problem is that a 486SX is a lot closer to a real 486DX, but the 386SX is a much weaker relative of the 386DX. There are late 80286 systems that are faster.
 
The problem is that a 486SX is a lot closer to a real 486DX, but the 386SX is a much weaker relative of the 386DX. There are late 80286 systems that are faster.

Yeah, I know. It basically runs like a fast 286, but for me that fills a nice hole in my collection (closest slower system I own is a 10 MHz 8088 machine, and the closest faster machine is a 133 MHz 486).
 
That's actually its 'feature' :)
This is one of the slowest possible machines you can find that is capable of running 32-bit x86 code (the absolute slowest would be the 386SX-16).
 
That's actually its 'feature' :)
This is one of the slowest possible machines you can find that is capable of running 32-bit x86 code (the absolute slowest would be the 386SX-16).

This one actually has a 'slow' mode you can boot into via the BIOS as well. I'm not sure what exactly it is that that setting affects, but it is noticeably slower.
 
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