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A tidy little haul

luckybob

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
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denver
I have a little bit of a mystery computer that I saved from my local thrift store. Paid a whopping $4.95 for it.

Anyway, thing thing was CLEAN. When I say clean, I mean it got dusty taking it home. The case front was mangled but the system booted fine. Even the onboard battery was still good and the date was only 1 day off.

Because the case front was missing it was in non-turbo mode, so after a little poking around I managed to find and jumper it into full speed, but immediately following it seems like something took a dump because it now fails to boot, claiming the ide controller has failed. The hard drive is fine, I put it into a different system and it booted like before. I'd like to find more information on it but after about 6 hours of google searches, I find bunk.

I want to keep it for gaming, as it would be the fastest 486 class board I have. That and I found it rather humerous when I noticed the "USA" chipset which was made in japan... ALL the drives were samsung drives, which I found rather odd.

And just for background information it has 256kb onboard cache (hard soldered on) :evil: Came with 4x 4mb simms, I'm concerned that they are fake parity (see picture) The vesa ide controller has "TERRA 3000VL" under a 2nd layer of silk screening, its hard to read but I cant find any info.




I apologize for the crappy cellphone photos but any information would be very helpful and appreciated.
 
I get to looking at the NON-removable bios chip and I notice that the keyboard chip is non-standard:



Any info is appreciated. :)
 
The IDE controller is VLB (it seems I have the identical one), any VLB cards are extremely sensitive to overclocking.

You might have to change a jumper on the mainboard then (mostly saying something like VLB>33Mhz)
 
not trying to over clock it, I'd really like to be able to add a cd drive. I have a nice SB32 that I was going to add, and it doesnt have ide so i'm left with the vlb card. I havent changed any jumpter setting, just removed the turbo switch connecor. :p
 
The JETkey isn't really nonstandard...I guess it's more like "enhanced." I have several 386 and 486 motherboards using JETkey keyboard BIOSes.
 
Well I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it, but I had initially disconnected the hard drive to get to the jumpers below. Apparently when I put it back on, I was off my a pin. But I spent a few hours looking at stason.org's website this morning. My intention was to literally examine every board until I found something similar. Thankfully it looks like i've hit paydirt:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/C/CHAINTECH-COMPUTER-COMPANY-LTD-486-425UXL-433UXL-4.html

The problem is that while the jumpers listed are mostly correct, there are several connectors on the motherboard labeled "feature connector" and the cpu setup jumpers dont match. For example JMP6 from stason sets up the vesa speed, and consists of 6 pins. Whereas the JMP jumper on my board is only 2 pins and is labeled "IN > 33mhz"

On a side note, I found that the system originally had belonged to the University of denver, and had a working copy of autocad R12. I remember using R14 with windoes nt back in school. so I'm probably going to save that for giggles. Past that nothing of interest was on the hard drive.
 
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