Things to know for building 386 Retro PC

Can you give information about external memory pack?

Just dont do it 😂

I had a DIGITAL Equipment with a Texas Instruments 386 40Hz with 32MB Memory. It also had a 2MB VESA VGA adapter, a 33.6Kbps US Robotics ISA Modem. Someone had already just about maxed that thing out. It had a 32x CD-ROM and even the cache memory was installed for I think 256K total. When I got it (free) it just needed a floppy drive and a hard drive. I ran windows 95 on it. This was well into the Pentium age because I remember my Dad had a Pentium 200Mhz machine.

Great video Phil! You inspired me to once again bring some stuff down from the Dachboden and drive the wife insane 😂 ended up rigging up a 386 system with a power supply with the switch missing. So I took the power switch off an old tschibo coffee machine and well alles geklappt 😅

I always struggle finding info on these old boards, especially bios info and jumper locations, can get pretty frustrating and pricey. I tend to stick to DOSbox now, and use a period apropriate system for XP era stuff.

I don't mind the test bench. I've used them for years ever since. I first started repairing computers. But maybe once a year, something's special. Something that would catch everyone's eye, but that's just me

You have a very nice Motherboard there! A bit Jealus....
Not only it is a 386 / 486 combo one, but also the last slot is probably an OPTI bus one.
Do not confuse this with EISA. There are very few cards for the OPTI bus.
There is a VGA Tenseg one and performs the same as the VLB version (I have this).
I hope to see more videos one this M/B!

dude just when i randomly got gifted an old AT system you post this lol
on the same day even. i think it has a pentium of some kind idk it has a tiny heatsink with dried thermal paste but i don't have the time to clean or do anything to it right now. it came with a compatible keyboard and mouse too!

I played Dune 2 on my old 16MHz 286 HighScreen PC from Vobis. It was extremely slow but I loved that game.

Aaah the AMD 386DX-40! My first PC was based on this incredible deal of a CPU when I jumped from the Amiga to the PC in late 1991 and built my first ever PC clone. I still remember all the specs: CPU as noted, 4mb RAM with 32k of high speed cache, 105mb Toshiba IDE HDD (what an upgrade from my clunker 20mb Amiga HDD, the drive itself was so old it used a stepper band and not a voice coil to drive the heads, it chattered like a typewriter and you could hear it accessing 2 rooms away and SLOW even with SCSI interface) and of course a Trident SVGA card with 1mb onboard. It supported VESA 1.2 in hardware but I would load a VESA 2.0 framebuffer into himem to get another 10-20% increase in framerate with games that supported VESA 2.0. Monitor was a basic Daytek (Daewoo) 14" with .28 dot pitch. Okay enough of me geeking out about my first PC, time to watch your retro build and see how it compares! ;-)

But do you have a retro AT PC case? Do you have a video on configuring the speed display and how to hook up and configure the turbo and the key? If not, maybe that could be a subject for a future video, talk about a little how turbo works, what the button toggles vs bios/shortcut, how to determine what to show on the speed display and how different jumper configurations work, etc-etc...

I never had a 386 machine myself. I went straight from a 286 clone that I don't remember what speed it ran at, to a Pentium 150. It's interesting to know that there were still speed sensitive games in the 386 era. I was under the impression that was the time games stopped being dependent on the CPU clock for timing. For me, I'm curious about the 286 era when it was new. The wide range of speeds the CPUs could run at and how that affected game performance in that time period.

Nice too see that 386 is enough to play TrackMania xD (But Jokes aside, I know It's Actually Stunts, but definitely looks like a game that Inspired that series to become a thing.)

386 seems like a great platform to be in, if ya looking for those speed sensitive games. With a Custom MS-DOS install this makes even more convenient.

Never had a 386 at all, but sometimes makes me want one. Since I'm always kinda nervous about slowing down a more modern PC in a BIOS, like Athlon 64.

HDD hint: buy a 10Mbit network card (e.g. NE2k compatible), fetch the XTIDE firmware src, compile it for i386 (base address 0xc8000), burn it on a blank 27C128 (16Kx8, these are li'l bit hard to come by) and use it as a boot ROM on the card (actually, an int 0x13 driver / handler, who needs the notwell rpl cr'p anyway 😆), works like a charm. You may also retrofit a 29F0x0 / 39F0x0 flash in place of the 27C128 by pulling the upper address lines low / nWE high / ... (the adapter pcb design is beyond the scope of this comment). 'ave fun 🙂.

I wonder if the reason why the IDE to SATA adapters don't typically work is due to missing support for LBA in the 386 BIOS. If so I imagine you could get it to work with an option ROM like from XT-IDE

My first PC was an Turbo XT - we held onto it until the 486 sx20 and even played wingcommander (slide show) on it.

compability???? the word is com pat a bility.....

When i was young at school we had computers with 33mhz or 66mhz. You switched with a turbo button. And it used DOS and Windows 3.1. But I think it was probably 486. This was around 1994. I loved that little display on that would show 33 or 66 to indicate what speed you were at.

I kept some 386 DX systems, for ISA card issues on 16 Bit I/O
never needed it, i have newer systems that still support ISA on newer CPU's, up to Pentium on 775 systems.
Guess we will never need a 386 system, if we need it, i would have used it here myself !
Music needs, Yamaha MIDI etc, KORG chips on ISA interface cards. Why this if you can do modern Quad Core levels ?

Hey Phil, are you an English native speaker? I imagine I can hear something. Anyway, thanks for this clip, it brings back nostalgic feelings.

Hah, I JUST finished building my pre-teen NCR 20 MHz 386, spent several hours on it today. I actually had to declock a 25 MHz board (CPU and crystal swap), build an inverter gate to use the common ground dual LED. I also carefully added a reset and turbo switch. I even changed the 5.25 inch drive LED from green to red (as mine was 30 years ago).

I actually went with an 8900D TVGA (NVRAM) over a Tseng ET4000AX as it was 25% faster in benchmarks, and you can SEE the difference in Wolf3D. I'm going to install it in my retro corner tomorrow, it's 1AM now.

Having said that I have a wonderful 386 SX 16 with a CRT for sale now :D

My first MSDOS computer was a Leading Tech prebuilt 386 (25 Mhz I think). The first upgrade I did later was to turn it into an AMD 386DX/40. There was a local New&Used Buy-Sell-Trade computer shop that I frequented quite a lot, and that original PC got upgraded over and over again. I still have the keyboard (the clicky type) and 5.25 and 3.5" drives from that original 386, and they are now with my 486DX/120 in the baby AT desktop case. Don't have the 386/40 anymore, it got traded in for the 486/120, but I now wish I had kept it, LOL

Another good method for extending the storage is the XT-IDE project flashed onto a chip and used in an ISA network card.

Great video! My first PC was a 386DX40 (Hercules branded small tower) in 1993. The 486 was the machine to have back then. Dos 5.0 and Win 3.1 :) Great memories

I have a spare AMD386DX40 motherboard, the kind with the chip soldered in. I can't get any hard drive to work with it, using the same drives, controller cards and settings that work on a similar mobo. I wish collecting old volatile stuff like this wasn't my hobby. Or maybe it's a simple config problem that I'm missing.

My brother-in-law had a batt-damaged 386 board, plus missing bios chip, may one day try to recover it (i cut out the batt and cleaned the small damage to prevent it to go too far gone).
On my personal retro pc projects, i'm starting to understand you about cases, hehe. However, last two ones, i went for a couple of mini-atxs.
The very last one is a reverse-sleeper RGB case (mars gaming mc-s1 white) with P4 s478 2.8@3 with a red msi mobo+red msi X1950 pro AGP and a red ESS 1988 Alegro-1 (same as you reviewed some time ago) - all red cards inside. Cheers!

Feeling old as I still remember something the senior tech told us at at the computer shop I did work experience at.

He told us not to play games on the 386. Obviously as the 386DX was the most expensive machine they had there at the time. And didn't want us breaking it.

Thank you for an amazing video! Very good as a basic source of information and a place to start. I just want to add for the real beginners. 1) do not start with the 386SX, these are more like 286 on steroids and if you are not a real collector and enthusiast you won ´t enjoy that too much! It runs 386 code but clock for clock it is still more a 286ish feeling. 2) If you are not lucky as Phill and can ´t get such a fancy motherboard, don ´t be sad! Any board with the plastic QFP AMD 386DX/40 will do the job as well. Remember - it is a 32bit system so you always need 4 same SIMM modules to run it! 3) If you wanna have it cool, get a 486DLC (or SXL CPU) 😉 - what you get is a pin compatible CPU with some 486 instructions and 1kb (8kb with SXL) of L1 cache. There are also rare clock doubled cpus, but this is another story...And that makes a lot of a difference! If you go this way ensure your bord suports that - later chipset with proper cache handling logic are the way to go. 4) One fun fact - there is one chipset from Macronix, that has no onboard cache but it has 8kb of fast cache right in the chipset!! Bloody advanced solution for that time. 😉 Simply said with a 386 plattform you could have a lot of fun. Enjoy! This beast deserves your antention!

Great video as always. Would you consider doing a similar video on the 486?

To be honest, I've never had a 386 machine, but there are quite a few vintage parts in my closet: an AT PSU, an awfully yellowed AT keyboard and a 3 button mouse. Who knows — I just might give your advice a try and build something 😉👍.

Also I remember that in early 2000s, there were many odd mice. For example, A4TECH WOP 35 model had 2 scroll wheels. I'm pretty sure, I saw an optical mouse with a serial connector. Sadly I cannot remember the model 😞.

Is 64k cache good for 40mhz 386?

I have mixed opinions about the 386, leaning towards the negative. Several of the platform advantages of the 386 didn't materialize until late in its lifespan. The 32-bit flat memory model and more comprehensive protected mode were front and center in the marketing, but whether you were taking advantage of Windows 3.1's 32-bit features, migrating to OS/2, or playing DOS4GW games, the 386 was too slow and limited to do any of this credibly. OS/2's slow development also didn't help much. The concept of 4GB addressable virtual memory was downright silly, though there were advantages of addressing more than the 16MB the 286 could. The one feature that did get use was the virtual 8086 mode, which sold a lot of copies of Windows/386 and later versions.


Then there is the matter of the cheaper and limited SX variant being more popular. The 386SX wasn't any faster than the 286 clock for clock, so therefore the lower clocked parts weren't worth purchasing. Not as big as the other issues, but the 387 coprocessor market was a mess, too. You needed different parts for the SX and DX variants, leading to an expensive, fragmented market.

The combination of all these factors led to the narrow window of this platform described by Phil. The models people would realistically consider, i.e. something along the lines of a 386SX 16 or 20 MHz w/ 1 or 2 MB RAM, weren't a huge upgrade over older, cheaper by then 286 PCs and most of the new platform features were nigh irrelevant to regular people for most of the 386 era.

A fully loaded 386DX 33 or 40 with the cache chips, math coprocessor, and >=4MB memory is another discussion. That would have been a nice machine outside of the reach of a 286 hand-me-down, but something like this wasn't accessible to average people.

Considering that the 486DX/2 platform, one of the best of all time, hit the market in 1992, the best time to enter the 386 market probably would have been around the introduction of the 33 MHz part in 1989. While the Am386DX-40, released in 1991, was the killer part of the generation, in retrospect it was introduced too close to the higher clocked 486s in my opinion. If you bought every three years after that you'd constantly find yourself in between product cycles where the older platform is phasing out but the new platform is too expensive, e.g. late 486es vs. early Pentiums in 1994, late Pentium MMXes vs. early Pentium IIs in 1997, and late Pentium IIIs vs. early Pentium 4s in 2000.

Nice video Phil, my first PC was a 386 too. I was fortunate enough to be able to rebuild it a few months ago, it was like stepping in a time machine. I love using it regularly and playing those early 90's games.

My first Intel PC was an old 396 Compaq Deskpro with the unheard of 11MB of RAM. It was an old server machine and it was beautiful. I actually installed a co-pro and it could play Quake at 0.5 frames per second! I played a lot of Doom and Heretic on it and got some Heretic mapping done on it! It was built out of sheet steel and was constructed like a Russian WWII Tank.

Some great info in here! Got a Compaq Deskpro/i from an ewaste some months ago. The original 386 was taken out before getting dumped, so I popped in a 486 DX2. Except for that it was still complete and booted right into it's windows 3.1 installation.

My first pc was a 386 SX25 in about 1992

If only I could had found out about your channel and Vogons a little bit earlier, just 1 or 2 years I could had started collecting this stuff before the prices blew off, right now is very difficult to find a 386 or 486 for a sane price and that don't require extensive repairs (this market in my city is almost zero) so I have to compete with buyer all around the country or globe 😅
At least I can use your excellent 136in1 guide and enjoy the 200MMX as a 386 perfectly and wait for the deal to happen and rebuild my first computer i386DX33!
So thanks for sll you awesome guides Phil!

If only someone would have told us to hang onto these machines back in the day. Most folks, like me, typically sold them off for the next best thing. Fortunately about the late Pentium era I stopped selling my parts. But finding good 386 (and even 486) parts today is not easy anymore.

Great job on the videos too. Always look forward to a new one from you.

I have a huge collection of old pc harware (I still own every pc I had in the day, inclusing my 8088 Atari PC3 XT), including a mainboard with a 386-DX40 and a 387 coprocessor. I remember upgrading it in the '90 with a 486DLC to give it some more power to accompany the ET4000 Svga card I used in it. Paired to a CF to IDE adapter it does the trick for almost anything dos like gaming (in 320X200 that is, and apart from quake), but my everyday dos/win98SE machine is a Slot 1 Pentium 2 - 333Mhz (upgraded from the original Pentium 2 at 233Mhz it had due to being the bottleneck in some windows games). It has an ISA AWE32 installed and an AGP Riva TNT card which also runs great under DOS. It runs on a 160 Watt ATX pico adapter so no fan or noise, only the cpu fan which I hacked with a slow running 120mm fan to keep everything quiet. Since the bios lets me disable al de cache if needed, most older games run ok under DOS. The socket 7 boards are ok but more heat + older chipsets + slower memory + no real ATX support (apart from adapters) so finding a case to house it in is also a thing. I do still have a PCI motherboard with a Socket 7 Pentium 133Mhz in my collection which I know it will do quite OK for most "retro thinkering" since it has PCI slots to host a 3D accelerator cards and ISA slots for older stuff. In the end everyone has his/her memories of what they had at first and it's that what will make us say "hey that's the sweet spot for me"

I never had a 386. My first PC was a 286 that my dad bought in an auction for only £2! It was nearly 10yrs old at the time, which is why nobody wanted it. But I loved it. I played Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, Lemmings, Duke Nukem 1 + 2. I went straight from that to a Pentium 120Mhz (Non-MMX). You have inspired me to build some retro systems. I am currently building myself a retro PC cupboard. Inside is a pull out tray for keyboard/mouse and a trinitron CRT monitor. Theres three permanent "ultra" PCs with specs that are very overkill for DOS, Win98 and WinXP (based on some of your builds). Then, below the keyboard tray is a pull-out drawer that has a open bench inside so I can create any build I like in there for specific games. Then below that are two deep drawers for holding my collection of video cards and sound cards. On top of the cupboard is a shelf where my motherboard collection will go. I may possibly post a video of it once done

Using a serial cable on COM port or laplink cable on parralel port to a second PC to copy files.

While 386 was my first PC and I absolutely 💖it I wouldn't touch it with a stick anymore. There are just too much hassles with it starting from possibly leaking batteries, overpriced hardware, fiddling around with heads cylinders to limit what can you do on it actually. Wolf3d so so ok but even dooms will lag and quake forgettable. Win3.1 wfw3.11 will run but the speed... linux as funny it is because we have the i386 sticker will not work on 386 in case you in it, as I recall Torvalds made the first working kernel for 486. Even 486s I would not touch because you can just go with a Super Socket 7 build turn off the cache if needed and you are back to the speeds of a 386 with all the potential to play another whole era of games up to win95/win98 on it.

80286 16 bit without FPU, but with emulator TSR x87 for floating point instruction using DEBUG on MS DOS 5.

My first 386 was in 97 or so. Was an IBM Personal System 2 we got from a flea market that had Windows 3.1 installed and a few games. It had no CD-Rom drive or sound card, but it was still fun to tinker with and learn how to work MS-DOS commands. In Christmas of 98 we got an HP prebuilt machine with an AMD K6-2 and a pretty decent Crystal FM sound chip which really let me enjoy the buffet of DOS games that was available then.

I've mentioned in a comment on another video that my first PC experience with with a 386SX/25 in a PS/2 Model 55 SX.

At some point, I bought a PS/2 Model 70 at a flea market on a whim (it was something ridiculously cheap like $10 or $20). I never really did much with it, but I did open it up to find it had a 386DX/16 with a 387 co-processor, so that could give it an edge with software using floating point math.

One thing about PS/2's is that they don't use IDE - it's usually either MFM or ESDI. So getting bulk storage attached to one of them might be a challenge, if you don't have a working ESDI hard drive. You'd need to find an I/O board using MCA (IBM's failed attempt to regain control over the PC market - create a new proprietary bus that, while superior to ISA, requires licensing fees to use) that supports IDE or SCSI. You probably won't find any flash storage adapter that works with MFM or ESDI.

Unless the primary purpose is to play speed sensitive games, I would not go for a 386. They are way too slow for later 90s dos games and chance of battery damage is really high. I've been enjoying a Pentium MMX 233 that can have caches disabled with setmul making it perform similar to a 386 for games that are slightly speed sensitive.