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Compaq Deskpro 386/16 Restoration

This restoration is great, keep up the good work! :clap:

I am curious if you had problems cleaning the battery spill from the vias in the board. I am now facing a similar restoration and I find nearly impossible to clean some vias, the stuff is firmly attached inside and the holes are so thin that anything I try to stick in bends out, making cleaning impossible. Also some vias are placed under the components and may even not being visible at all.
 
Luckily for me there do not appear to be any vias under the chips where the battery contents got, so I managed to dodge that bullet. As for the rest of them, for the most part the goo seemed to be thick enough that it didn't work it's way into them. On the couple that it did get into I simply scrubbed at it with a toothbrush and warm water with soap until the via either got cleaned out, or in one case I used a thin wire like yourself when it was immersed in the warm water. That softened it enough that I was able to clear the hole.
 
Thanks to the efforts of one of the techs at work we were able to get the sockets and the soldered-on chips that were most in the path of the battery contents safely off the board. I then took the board home and scrubbed and scraped the areas as clean as I could make them. The amount of material under the sockets and chips actually wasn't that bad at all. I think the battery contents must have been a thicker goo, since it didn't seem to be able to penetrate small areas that effectively.

Thus being cleaned I took the board and parts back to work and got them re-soldered in place. Our guys are very well trained so he did an amazing job; you almost wouldn't know that anything was removed. I then put the ROMS and keyboard controller back in their sockets.

Having gotten it cleaned, there was only one thing left to do; put the big boy pants on and apply power. :eek:

I installed the motherboard, power supply and new CMOS battery pack into the case and took it outside; just in case the magic smoke was going to come out.
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Plugging it into the wall, I threw the switch and hoped for the best......

No sparks or smoke, so a good start. In fact the power LED on the motherboard lit up and seemed stable.
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I took a couple of quick readings off the power headers on the board and everything seemed to be within spec.

Bringing it all inside I hooked up the system memory board and a new video card that I purchased for this system. It's a Western Digital WD90C30-LR based board with 1 meg of 0WS video RAM. Obviously not period correct, but it's as fast as any ET4000 card in DOS, has good driver support for Windows/386 and 3.1 and will let me get all the performance out of the machine that I can. Plus I've always been partial to Western Digital/Paradise video cards in an ISA-based computer. A quick change to one of the dip switches on the motherboard let the machine know that there was no longer a Compaq video board in it.

In any case with those installed, I hooked up the keyboard and threw the switch, nervous as all get out.
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It lives! :cool:

The memory seemed to check out fine and all the other errors were expected, so I turned the computer off and installed the multi-I/O controller and hooked up the floppy drive. Inserting a copy of the setup disk I powered it back up and was greeted with the following. :)
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Feeling confident I entered the setup utility and updated the BIOS.
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Apart from being an idiot and getting the date wrong everything else looked perfect. I saved the settings and they seemed to stick on subsequent reboots and after the power was removed.

I will get to work on setting up the hard drive next. I need to prepare some more 5.25" disks with the OS and other utilities, however the 5.25" drive on my 286 literally just died and I'm waiting on the replacement. So this will be put on hold until it arrives.

In any case I'm very happy and relieved. Now the work of building it back up and upgrading can begin. 8-)
 
With the motherboard and floppy working the last thing to test was the hard drive. I installed everything back into the case as well as the following addition.
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This Sound Blaster 2.0 lived in the 386SX-25 that I had growing up; and while that computer is long gone I did scavenge some parts out of it before it was sent to the recycler. My ultimate goal is to build this machine up into an MPC-1 compliant system so I'm glad I have this. When used with the littler external mixer that I bought, it should forego the need for me to track down a Sound Blaster Pro 2.

With the computer set up on my retro PC desk, I fired it up.
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Success!!!! The hard drive fired up on the first try and sounds great. :D

At first glance it operates without any errors or hesitation and seems very fast, especially coming from an MFM drive on the 286. Based on my poking around the machine it looks like this computer was used in some kind of a medical practice in it's past life. It's full of medical and financial records (which I did NOT look at) and boots into some kind of bill logging system.

Poking around the hard drive a bit more revealed a couple of things:
- The computer is running Compaq DOS 3.1 which is what it originally came with.
- Based on the dates on files it appears that this computer was in use up until the year 2000 (?!) which is crazy considering it's age at the time. I don't know exactly how much use it saw since the dust wasn't really that bad inside considering the huge span of time.
- The only other software on the machine was this cool slideshow demo for EGA paint.
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I backed up the DOS files as well as the EGA paint demo and have wiped the drive to protect any personal information that may have been there.

Next, I'm going to start making this into my computer. :D
 
AndyM1981 said:
Now I see why the Deskpro 286 was underwhelming for you at first. A nice 386 like this is so much more capable.
Click to expand...

A DeskPro 286 is a fast DOS machine. A DeskPro 386 is a workstation. The 386/16 was standard issue for engineering in 1988, but the DeskPro 386/20e had just been introduced. That machine could compete with the big boys in performance and had the looks to put them all to shame. And had one of the best keyboards, to boot. I came up with all sorts of reasons why I needed to be upgraded. Finally got it a year later.
 
resman said:
A DeskPro 286 is a fast DOS machine. A DeskPro 386 is a workstation. The 386/16 was standard issue for engineering in 1988, but the DeskPro 386/20e had just been introduced. That machine could compete with the big boys in performance and had the looks to put them all to shame. And had one of the best keyboards, to boot. I came up with all sorts of reasons why I needed to be upgraded. Finally got it a year later.
Click to expand...

I take it you're an engineer by trade? I'm one as well, in aerospace. Very cool! :cool:
 
AndyM1981 said:
I take it you're an engineer by trade? I'm one as well, in aerospace. Very cool! :cool:
Click to expand...
Yes, and I was a computer engineer at Compaq from '88 to '92, thus my affection for early Compaq machines. I was headed for aeronautical engineering until I met my first computer in jr. high school ;-)
 
The Static Column RAM chips finally arrived this week so I was able to upgrade the system memory board to a full 2MB of RAM.
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Here is the fully populated board.
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This helps ease the memory crunch somewhat for the things that I would like to do with the machine, but I would really like to get it updated to at least 4MB of total RAM. The will require either the 1-2 MB or 4-8 MB expansion boards which are proving to be impossible to find. If anyone has any ideas on where I could track one of these down I would be most grateful.

The "new" video card I installed in the machine had a strange problem where anything that used mode 13H displayed with incorrect colours, almost like they were inverted. I did a graphics test with Checkit and the Mode13H pallet test did not display correctly; with the middle third of the pallet repeating the final third. It was very strange since it only seemed to affect his mode. I temporarily inserted the PVGA1A card from my 286 and everything displayed and acted correctly.

I've since returned the WD90C30 card and have ordered a GD5428-based card to take it's place. Just waiting on the delivery of that.
 
After much delay, my replacement GD5428 based video card finally arrived in the mail. :)

I installed it and put it through it's paces and was happy to find that all of the text and graphics modes work perfectly on it, including Mode 13H. All of the classic VGA games are now available to me, including this beauty. I figured it was the perfect place to start since anyone back in the day would have installed it on their shiny new 386!

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It actually runs quite well given the somewhat pedestrian 16 MHz clock speed. Just out of curiosity I did a Topbench run once I installed that new card and got a score of 40. This actually compares quite well to a Deskpro 386/25 that is in the database already and is quite a bit faster than the 24 that my 286/12 machine scores.

I also installed an Adaptec AHA-1542CP SCSI card that I picked out of the IT e-waste container at the office over a year ago. It worked perfectly on the first shot. The card was installed to support another piece of vintage gear that I'm rather pleased with, an NEC CDR-73 external single speed CD-ROM.

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I knew I wanted this machine to have a CD-ROM drive and a good single speed one was a perfect match in my mind. This took me back to the feelings of the Magnavox 386SX/25 with a single speed drive that our family had in the early 90's. I still regret that my parents recycled that machine..... :-(

Finally with everything in place I installed Windows 3.1 along with some Microsoft Home educational software that I always enjoyed as a kid (Musical Instruments and Dinosaurs). Again, the 2MB of RAM in the machine limits what I can run in here, but with some Autoexec.bat and Config.sys juggling I can get a decent amount of software to run. The acceleration provided by the GD5428 also seems to help smooth over many slowdowns.

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The computer does have a couple of glitches that I'm still trying to sort out and perhaps some of you will have ideas on what I can do fix them.

1.) The realtime clock in the machine is running a bit slowly. I'll set the time in the BIOS and it will slowly move out of sync with the actual time. This happens when the machine is on or turned off. The CMOS settings are retained so I know it's getting power from the battery and obviously also when it is on. Around 5-10% of the time it actually stays in sync for long periods while the computer is running, but the rest of the time it slowly lags behind the actual time and I have to update the DOS time every couple of hours to make up the difference. Any thoughts?

2.) The CD-ROM isn't outputting any CD audio. Everything else on the drive works perfectly, but I can't get any Redbook audio out of the front or rear jacks. It seems to play, but I get no sound. This is more of an annoyance than super critical, but I would like to solve it if I can. Any thoughts here would also be appreciated.

Other than these two problems the computer is running perfectly stable for long periods of time.

In any case this is coming together better than I could have hoped when I first opened the machine and I'm enjoying sharing the journey with you. :)
 
This has been a very inspiring evolution Andy. Thank you!

I just was at Computer Reset a few weeks ago and scored a plethora of Compaqs... every model they had available actually from 286, several different 386, and one or two later 486 types. No major board damage observed. All of them posted to the BIOS screen, so I feel very fortunate. They are truly filthy, so they will all receive similar attention to what you just did. I ended up coming home with enough projects that I'll be busy for years. I highly recommend a trip to Reset if you can manage it. Wonderful folks who are very helpful. I took a cargo van down from Michigan and it was absolutely packed coming home (and worth the effort!). I just joined the forum because of the visit and recommendation from Ray.
 
Very NICE!!! (to quote Borat)

AndyM1981 said:
After much delay, my replacement GD5428 based video card finally arrived in the mail. :)

...

It actually runs quite well given the somewhat pedestrian 16 MHz clock speed. Just out of curiosity I did a Topbench run once I installed that new card and got a score of 40. This actually compares quite well to a Deskpro 386/25 that is in the database already and is quite a bit faster than the 24 that my 286/12 machine scores.
Click to expand...

That TB score can be pretty dependent on the quality of the VGA card. My 386/25 has quite the pedestrian VGA (the one in the TB database).

Time for some COVOIDS! - actually I wold like to know how it runs on your 386/16.
 
AndyM1981 said:
2.) The CD-ROM isn't outputting any CD audio. Everything else on the drive works perfectly, but I can't get any Redbook audio out of the front or rear jacks. It seems to play, but I get no sound. This is more of an annoyance than super critical, but I would like to solve it if I can. Any thoughts here would also be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Probably obvious, but I'd check the internal audio connectors. If it has been worked on before, it may not have been plugged back in correctly. If one has shorted to ground, then both might not work. Try the front one with any internal audio connector detached.

Very nice setup!
 
Airxx said:
This has been a very inspiring evolution Andy. Thank you!

I just was at Computer Reset a few weeks ago and scored a plethora of Compaqs... every model they had available actually from 286, several different 386, and one or two later 486 types. No major board damage observed. All of them posted to the BIOS screen, so I feel very fortunate. They are truly filthy, so they will all receive similar attention to what you just did. I ended up coming home with enough projects that I'll be busy for years. I highly recommend a trip to Reset if you can manage it. Wonderful folks who are very helpful. I took a cargo van down from Michigan and it was absolutely packed coming home (and worth the effort!). I just joined the forum because of the visit and recommendation from Ray.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the kind words. :)

I would LOVE to visit Computer Reset someday, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get the chance. Just browsing through all the stacks of amazing old technology would be almost a religious experience. Lol!

The worst part is that I'm pretty sure that they would have one of the memory boards that I need to upgrade this computer there; I just need someone to go take a look for me is they're going to be down there anyways. It goes without saying that I would pay for the shipping and that persons time along with the item.
 
resman said:
Very NICE!!! (to quote Borat)



That TB score can be pretty dependent on the quality of the VGA card. My 386/25 has quite the pedestrian VGA (the one in the TB database).

Time for some COVOIDS! - actually I wold like to know how it runs on your 386/16.
Click to expand...

Thank you sir!! I'm really very happy with how this is turning out. :)

Yeah, when I was upgrading the video on this thing I was hoping that the choice of a fast (but not period correct) board would help to make up for the "slow" processor somewhat. The results would seem to bore that out.

What is this COVOIDS program of which you speak? I'm not familiar with it.
 
SomeGuy said:
Probably obvious, but I'd check the internal audio connectors. If it has been worked on before, it may not have been plugged back in correctly. If one has shorted to ground, then both might not work. Try the front one with any internal audio connector detached.

Very nice setup!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion!

So I tried playing through the front jack after disconnecting the audio connectors from the rear of the drive. No change.

I guess my next task is to go into the drive as you have suggested and see if there is anything obvious in there. Sadly I can't find any kind of documentation or a schematic. I guess I'll just have to look carefully and pray that I don't screw anything up. :?
 
Airxx said:
This has been a very inspiring evolution Andy. Thank you!

I just was at Computer Reset a few weeks ago and scored a plethora of Compaqs... every model they had available actually from 286, several different 386, and one or two later 486 types. No major board damage observed. All of them posted to the BIOS screen, so I feel very fortunate. They are truly filthy, so they will all receive similar attention to what you just did. I ended up coming home with enough projects that I'll be busy for years. I highly recommend a trip to Reset if you can manage it. Wonderful folks who are very helpful. I took a cargo van down from Michigan and it was absolutely packed coming home (and worth the effort!). I just joined the forum because of the visit and recommendation from Ray.
Click to expand...

Oh and welcome to the forum!!!! :)
 
AndyM1981 said:
Thank you sir!! I'm really very happy with how this is turning out. :)

Yeah, when I was upgrading the video on this thing I was hoping that the choice of a fast (but not period correct) board would help to make up for the "slow" processor somewhat. The results would seem to bore that out.

What is this COVOIDS program of which you speak? I'm not familiar with it.
Click to expand...

Oh, just my stupid shelter-at-home project (shameless plug) : http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?74390-Covoids!
 
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