• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Scored a pentium 150!

S

sean1978

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2015
Messages
51
Location
New Orleans, LA
So I bought a set of PC's from craigslist cheap.
The older one was what I was interested in. Based on the case I was hoping for something a bit older, but I do want to build a final generation DOS machine and this will fill the bill:
eBeB9M5.jpg


The original owner unfortunately (but understandably) removed the hard drives. Lots of wires were left disconnected. I got the PN for the motherboard and used it to find the booklet and reconnect the speakers / ports / etc..
2wNLyo3.jpg



While I was inside I pulled some of the components for a closer look:

16 bit ISA Diamond Sound card. I wonder if this is DOS compatible. I have not found much info about it online yet:
5p7Tvo2.jpg


PCI Cirrus based VGA Card, I don't know much about this yet either:
oWJ6d9e.jpg


Speed LED Indicator. It says HI now. I'd like to make it say "150". Can't find the settings online (yet)
ZBzSCE8.jpg


Check out all the cool labels:
RMnB8Hp.jpg


Really cool AT keyboard and Serial mouse. I don't remember having a computer of this era without PS/2 connectors:
hAhUfle.jpg


Boot er' up! looks like 96mb of RAM.
pw1UPiG.jpg


I tried connecting an older IDE 200GB drive to the thing, no dice. I'm gonna need an older hard drive or CF maybe. I'm really looking forward to replaying Mechwarrior 2 and attempting the original Fallout.
 
Very nice generic AT case! Usually you don't see LED speed indicators on Pentium machines, so a big plus there. Just glancing at Google, that motherboard should have a regular coin cell battery instead of one of those nasty integrated clock/battery chips that many generic budget boards used, so no maintenance headaches there!

The BIOS is probably limited to 8GB and expects CHS addressing, with no LBA support. The 200GB drive probably is sticking its nose up at the idea of using CHS. If you want a larger drive, you might consider a VIA 6421 SATA PCI card. Those work well with DOS, Windows 95, NT, 98, etc, and should work on that machine.
 
Played around a bit with the drive this evening. It has a "limit" jumper. I shorted that one and the drive was detected. It's only capable of using 8gb of the drive (in 2gb partitions), but that's more than enough.

CD ROM drive is going nuts. I don't have another IDE cable around to run it as a secondary master. I'm thinking it's either crapped or doesn't like being a slave to that hard drive.

I replaced the battery, I just bought a pack of energizer 2032's the other day (My PS/2 uses said crappy clock/battery chip, my coworker modified it to use standard batteries)

Installed MS DOS 6.22
 
sean1978 said:
PCI Cirrus based VGA Card, I don't know much about this yet either:
Click to expand...

It's a CL-GD5446 with 2 MB of VRAM.

The CL-GD5446 is part of the Cirrus Logic Alpine family, and is a descendant of the CL-GD5436, which is a descendant of the CL-GD5434

Features:
- Windows 2D GUI acceleration with DirectDraw.
- Hardware BitBLT.
- 64 bit memory interface (when 1 MB memory upgrade installed, otherwise 32 bit.)
- Hardware motion-video acceleration for MPEG videos up to 30 fps (assuming below 640x480.)

As for the sound card, Diamond Technologies (Diamond Multimedia) always used other OEMs designs and slapped their brand on it. From obscure information on the internet, your sound card seems to be an "Avance Logic ALS007". It's just a cheap dime a dozen 1990's ISA sound card, and it most likely sounds awful in DOS games with MPU-401 emulation like most of the other bottom of the barrel sound cards of the era.
 
I tried a few thing out, Doom 1 and some Battletech games I have on disk. The sound card works, I told the settings it was a "sound blaster" and used default settings. It was really quiet and didn't sound that great, but it's been so long since I played this stuff I can't remember what it's supposed to sound like in the first place. Time to check some youtube videos I guess.
 
Get some amplified speakers, preferably with decent bass drivers, and a better sound card.
Doom always sounds awesome - well the music does.
 
sean1978 said:
It was really quiet and didn't sound that great, but it's been so long since I played this stuff I can't remember what it's supposed to sound like in the first place. Time to check some youtube videos I guess.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's the crappy MPU-401 emulation. Other cheap sound chips from the era like ESS, Realtek, Opti, etc. will have similarly bad sound.

You probably want to find an ISA Sound Blaster of some sort or an AWE32/64. I don't recommend a PCI Sound Blaster because of incompatibility issues. One such annoying issue is some BUILD engine games like Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior will crash if the reverb/echo sector effector is used. There's patches available for some games to work around the issue but it's easier to just get an ISA sound card.
 
>CD ROM drive is going nuts

I usually got the best results by having it on a secondary channel apart from the hard drive but you can also open the tray and blow some air into the slot to clean the lens.
It's amazing how much air gets drawn thru the CD-ROM by the case fans which leaves a dust track right across the lens. I have also cleaned the lens with Q-tip and eyeglass cleaner.
CD-ROM drives used to be expensive.

Larry G
 
Nice find! Similar to my first Pentium build...I bought the P150 because it was cheap...and had no problems at all running at 166MHz. :) Even had a 5446 video card. Everyone talks specifics of various video cards of that era...I never noticed an appreciable difference in the vast majority of them, at least not at nominal 800x600 or so resolutions. The 5446 was cheap and did a fine job...

Wesley
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top