0084 A battery powered 486DX2/66 setup and a 386 motherboard with a fancy BIOS

On the next super mini mail call episode, we have a super mint 386DX motherboard complete with math co-processor that was found at a value village in Canada. THen we look at a brand new power supply replacement for IBM PC and compatibles that can enable you to easily run your computer off a battery power via USB Type-C Power Deliver.
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--- Instructional videos
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[@eric67361]

I have found with old BIOS CMOS setups, the +/- on numpad are the only keys that work, regardless of numlock status

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Heh that's quite rude -- but I kind of figured that was what was happening. I know to try a full size keyboard next time :-)

[@SuperVirus1978]

​@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I guess nobody cared back in the day as TKL (Tenkeyless) keyboards became popular way later...

[@TechnicolorMammoth]

Yeh makes sense, thinking about it. All keyboards had the numpad then.

[@eric67361]

Maybe it's not a real biz computer if you're not doing spreadsheet data entry? I always found having to reach that far over to be annoying, and I agree it sucks. Accessibility and usability was certainly not a consideration back then

[@therealjammit]

My memory may be old but I remember one machine I ran across that did something similar. I had to use the shift key with the "+" and "-" or shift with "+" but not "-".

[@snekulcire]

That's a really nice 386 board. I don't think I've ever seen that BIOS before.

[@volvo09]

Yeah that is a very unique bios

[@hyoenmadan]

In the strings you can still read American Megatrends... So is probably a very customized AMIBIOS tree by Mylex. Just like Acer BIOSes (Actually, looks like American Megatrends and Acer partnered to make the AMIBIOS). Other OEMs did the same but using Phoenix BIOS as core. Actually only a very few did really their own BIOS stuff at home, as Olivetti, Compaq (partnered with Phoenix to RE IBM stuff and create the Compaq BIOS, and later Phoenix was allowed to use that code to create their own), AT&T or IBM.

[@cromulence]

The USB powered 486 is such a cool trick - logically makes perfect sense but breaks my brain.

[@TechnicolorMammoth]

Same here! But, remember, USB powers devices we use everyday that do laps around a 486. What breaks my brain is the leaps in tech in such little time.

[@nickwallette6201]

This was pretty much how 386/486 laptops worked. Take a desktop PC, shrink everything down as much as possible, connect a battery. :-) Technically there were SL chips, but it was just as common to see full on SX and DX chips in there.

[@drphilxr]

Imagine cramming all thaat (486, picoATX, battery, LCD) into a minitel sized case for RETRO AWESOMENESS!

[@sirmalaki79]

I grew up in Port Huron, MI, across the river from Sarnia, Ontario. We had a big Victorian house on the St. Clair River, and I could see Canada from my bedroom window. I would always grab ketchup chips when over there. They were great to much on when in queue on the Blue Water Bridge after a night drinking at Campbell Street Station. For those that didn't get to grow up in a border town, the drinking age in Ontario is 19. Pre 9/11 and border crossing hassles we have now, it was a right of passage to go over on the weekends. MMMM... ketchup chips and coffee crisp candy bars.

[@bruwin]

We definitely have Value Village, at least up here in Washington. Unfortunately my local one stopped selling as much electronics, but I occassionaly still get a deal there.

[@wotsac]

I've recently seen some wild crap systems at my two closest Seattle area stores lately. A couple of complete or almost complete HP desktop shovel systems from the mid 00s

[@ChrisDreher]

There is 1 Value Village in the Portland, OR area. It is in Tigard, which ~9 miles SW of downtown Portland.

[@jessiec4128]

I am very aware, I have family in Canada. And when I was a young guy, I spent many summers there. After I grew up, I visited my cousins there also. They loved getting me drunk. But it was so fun driving my car there! I have many friends in Toronto. I have had those Ketchup. And have ate a few bags of them. I really like them too!!

[@kaitlyn__L]

Ketchup crisps are the best!

[@drewnewby]

The Bic pen mod, Adrian knows all the old tricks! I'm assuming its the same as we always did, either sand or trim the opening just a bit with a hobby knife. Perfect fit, no damaged boards. Still have mine from 30 years ago.

[@jeromethiel4323]

Never did the bic pen trick, always just used a needle nosed pliers, never had an issue. I heard about it, but never felt that i needed any help.

[@TechnicolorMammoth]

A viewer sent that in. Adrian has lauded this person ever since.

[@therealjammit]

I made one with a brass tube soldered to a thick copper ring as a handle. I used the tip of a needle nosed pliers as a tapered cone to flare out the business end of the tube.

[@pb_magnet]

“Dollary-doo “ is Australian. We call our dollars “Loonies”

[@AtreidaeChibiko]

DollarBucks is now the correct Australian word thanks to Bluey

[@Bill_Yarkakar_XVIII]

Saw the VGCats webcomic refer to them as "Canadian Dollary-doos" at one point. I feel like Adrian would be the type to have read VGCats back in the day.

[@gilbert1975nf]

10:42 - Sometimes back in those days I used a very thin screwdriver to unleash the standoffs. But, yes, it's really a pain in the buttom!

[@jandjrandr]

That 386 is a pretty neat piece of history and in excellent condition too, wow!

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Looks like a server board. The mem test on server boards is always a thorough test and slow.

[@rtechlab6254]

This Mylex board may be a server type board. Mylex made a lot of high end disk controllers

[@kencreten7308]

I vote that the word of the day is, "chonky." A perfect description of those switches.

[@bddemir]

51:23 - Looks like your USB battery bank supports 15V3A and 20V3A output as well. If you have a WI variant (Wide Input) of PicoPSU, you can feed it with anything between 12-25V. Surely you'll need the appropriate trigger cable, or maybe use a ZY-PDN USB-C decoy (

[@ringtailedfox]

wooo! thanks for the city shout-out, adrian! ya got a few fans here in Windsor, Ontario! :D

[@wesley00042]

Value Village (also called Savers) is all over the US and Canada but the only one I saw in Oregon is in Tigard.

[@MrBillmcminn]

The logo on that T-shirt looks like the boot screen of my portable oscilloscope

[@_irdc]

Interestingly, those USB power banks can have microcontrollers of their own. Running a retrocomputer off of a battery with more computing power than the system it’s powering is surely some flex.

[@rottmanthan]

ketchup chips are the best, i live in maine near one of the borders, when my niece goes up there to see her half sister i have her bring some back.

[@MagnaRyuuDesigns]

In Wisconsin we have a Gas Station Chain that has their own brand of Ketchup Chips and All Dressed :D

[@duncanyoung8688]

Love the vids keeps me entertained i may even start tinkering with this older stuff, seems so much easier to fix than modern pc systems

[@HwAoRrDk]

30:26 It was probably just opened for inspection at random (i.e. not x-rayed or anything like that). I used to work for DHL many years ago. We would have to randomly open and inspect a proportion of international packages at our local depot before they even left the country.

[@davidflorey]

I have always wanted one of those My386 boards

[@dustinhipskind7665]

In the past, for those plastic standoffs, I recall using a 3mm nut driver....maybe 3mm was not the right size, but I remember sliding it over tightly.

[@nichtwichtig9242]

You can exclude a part of memory from being cached so extensions cards can use this part per DMA without causing every write to get the cache flushed IIRC.

[@JmyHDK]

Whenever I have to remove standoffs I'm using a suitable size rawplugs (the ones used for mounting screws in concrete walls), I use to have 3-4 different size in my toolbox, works like a charm to remove those stubborn standoffs.

[@Bill_Yarkakar_XVIII]

Smarties are available in Canada and the UK, and were originally a Cadbury product (not sure if they still are). The candies that are called Smarties in the US are sold under the name Rockets here. They're sour, chalky, and (if I'm being honest) kind of nasty.

[@xenonkay]

Hey Adrian. Regarding repacked shipments, some federal transport authorities require carriers to conduct and document inspections of outgoing shipments on the authority's behalf, so that repack probably happened before the shipment even left the UK. For DHL in particular that's the only tape they have and they can end up using it even for first-time packing when senders show up at a shipping centre without their own packing materials. They have a policy where they're not allowed to use or even possess any other kind of packing tape on their premises, so they couldn't use clear packing tape even if they wanted to.

[@BlueBarnTech]

I wish I could offer a better suggestion, but I was a needle nose pliers guy too at our shop. The good news is that we can get ketchup potato chips pretty often here in the Midwest. I believe the original of these is actually Herr's in Pennsylvania. The also make some outstanding cheese curls! We can usually find them at Menards or Ollies.

[@sumplais]

There's a Value Village in Tigard...theres a woodworking shop next door.

[@briangoldberg4439]

You most certainly can get Ketchup potato chips in the US. Every single Indian or Pakistani grocery store I've ever been to carries them.

[@ReneKnuvers74rk]

About the blade type car fuses: there is some recent fuzz about chinese ones that don’t pop at the right current or within the right time. The guy with the swiss accent and some other people did some testing and published videos on youtube. You should defenitely check them out.

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

I would love to see you run memory and CPU benchmarks with the power meter attached just to confirm your point about power draw being invariant with workload on old machines.

[@cliffshockley4406]

I never needed a tool for the nylon standoff removal. I would just squeeze one side, angle it down into the hole to hold it "closed" and then squeeze the other side while pushing it through.

[@IvorySoul696]

There are about a dozen Value Villages here in the Seattle area!

[@Frostfly]

there is Value Villages in the US. there at least used to be one in Tigard (south of portland)

[@ultrametric9317]

This was a really tricked out ISA computer! I remember Mylex as a maker of RAID controllers. I don't remember mobos from them. This is a very nice board and deserves a period-correct case! And OS/2! :)

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

I think the new retro show was at VCF East, I think I remember seeing the logo there.

[@Heike--]

The man says: I have enough RAM for the rest of my life. Don't send me any more. Someone: sends RAM

[@danhorton6182]

Awesome video as always. Just as an FYI Adrian, we do have Value Village here on the west coast. There is one currently in Tigard, we used to have one here in Salem, but it closed and I want to say there was one in Keizer as well. Then of course Eugene, Corvallis, but I think Tigard is all that’s left sadly.

[@AntonyTCurtis]

BIC pens get worn out after a while. The plastic just doesn't last long. It was common to have non-cacheable regions to support things like EMS memory cards.

[@stonelaughter]

You'd need a numbers keypad - the "+/-" on there would work in the BIOS.

[@Nerd3927]

Ohh the copy /B option, happy to see you use it!

[@rommix0]

As a unix user, Microsoft has always had weird commands. cat is where it's at. cat 1.bin 2.bin > 3.bin

[@nickwallette6201]

I’ve always wondered why that was necessary too. Is there something in DOS redirection that tells copy to use text mode by default? You don’t have to specify binary mode when copying files normally…

[@Nerd3927]

@@nickwallette6201 Every one was using xcopy back in the day. That was always in binary mode. Most people knew that using 'copy' could mess up your exe and com files, but only a few knew to use the /B option. Why text mode was the default? Only MicroSoft knows. Or maybe even the Q-Dos guys :-)

[@zxrenew5642]

Cool. Need to get some of these.

[@duncanyoung8688]

keep up the vids Adrian

[@Nukle0n]

Lots of those power banks or power supplies really limit the output of the ports when using more than one connector, so that's something to be mindful of too course, but hopefully it'd just mean it won't power on.

[@thesmokingcap]

Holy cow batman! 20MB of RAM is insane for a 386!

[@parjf]

1991 was when AMD won against Intel regarding production of their own 386, which would drive down the price of 32bit PC computing. Seeing a great motherboard from just before that era is neat!

[@billferguson8049]

There are Value village locations on the left coast. There are 10 in the Seattle area, and at least 1 near you in Tigard.

[@tomstdenis]

53:10 re "power draw" I don't recall exactly when but around the Cyrix M2/AMD K6 era if you repeatedly issued a HLT instruction in a loop (while something like windows was running to wake the CPU up) it would actually draw less power because the idle task (which is literally just a loop) actually consumed more power than halting the CPU completely. This might not be the case for 386/486/586 era cpus I don't recall. There were a slew of windows "utilities" that would do this and you could measure a small CPU temp delta at least on idle setups when it's present.

[@eDoc2020]

That's more of a problem with DOS and classic Windows. Real OSes tended to issue the HLT instruction. Linux used to have a "no-halt" option to suppress this because the lower power consumption was known to make some power supplies go out of spec (or something like that). I haven't looked into it but I suspect all static CMOS processors save power with the HLT instruction and older HMOS models don't. The 286 was mostly HMOS but the 386 appears to be only CMOS so halting would make a difference to CPU consumption. However the 386 never used much power so the reduction didn't matter.

[@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse]

Given the low power draw of the system maybe you could mod the power supply with an internal rechargeable battery something like a 7AH and have it "portable (luggable)".

[@SilentShadow-ss5xp]

I live in Windsor. We definitely have ketchup lays here.

[@atariforever2002]

I don't know where all guys are looking but I see smarties and ketchup chips all over the place in the central United States.

[@Walczyk]

4:38 I really do love our crazy standards like month/day/year! It's our old british ancestry! It corresponds to when you say "April 18th 2024" which is in month date and year. And our standards for measurements are very pragmatic for commerce (back in the day when accurate measurements to the millimeter/milliliter were impractical) and we just stuck with it and never changed. Inches are fractional because we can always divide a length in half with a compass and straight edge. I love this topic lol, I convert my physics work to US standards to get a physical feel for the sizes because, that's just what my brain is used to and it helps! Like lengths for instance, we have a natural feel for mile like other cultures have that innate lizard brain feel for kilometer. The Hubble telescope travels at 7km/s or 4.5 miles per second, only the second value really means anything in my mind visually.

[@jaybowles112]

Those Pico PSU's are awesome!

[@Bill_Yarkakar_XVIII]

you need to use plus and minus on the numeric keypad to change BIOS settings. Which means you'd need to use a full-sized keyboard.

[@charlesdorval394]

Looking forward to the Deskpro 286 useful video ;) hehehe

[@erickvond6825]

Honestly the plastic standoffs were so cheap we used to just cut them to save time and effort.

[@Megatog615]

always a pleasure seeing pc motherboard videos (my favorites) on your channels

[@markvandesande8855]

Lays are Walkers crisps or chips in the uk.😊

[@Jackpkmn]

It's crazy to think about that most of the power draw from these old computers is in the hard drives and monitors. I just grabbed a random IDE 80gb spinning rust drive off my shelf and it's listed at 0.8A for 5v and 0.75A for 12v. That's almost 75% of the power draw of that whole setup in one drive. And this is a newer drive, the drives that would have gone with these 386/486 computers would have taken a lot more I bet.

[@eDoc2020]

Before the early 2000s most consumer-level drives were lower RPM which saves tons of power. AFAIK it's a square relationship so the spindle power of a 5400rpm drive is barely half that of a 7200rpm one. Also the labelled power usage of a hard drive isn't strongly correlated to the actual power draw, it's more of a maximum. But not a real maximum, any drive pulls more than its rated current on spin-up.

[@evaDrepuS]

Someone has been watching Action Retro with the 'portable' computing device he came up with.

[@mfryer100]

We have some Value Village stores here in Washington State.

[@Megatog615]

i would LOVE to have a "USBPD4VC" that has a direct USB-C connector and PD chip onboard!

[@Inadvisablescience]

Value Village, aka Savers in the US

[@Nukle0n]

I assume the animation on boot is it testing the video memory, cycling all the bits.

[@pelgervampireduck]

just change the keyboard, I'm sure you have like 100 keyboards in your basement, XT, AT, PS2, and ps2 to at adaptors too. the "I can't change things in the bios" problem was very easy to fix.

[@jammi__]

You need to use the numpad + and - keys.

[@taomicioli]

Herrs makes a killer ketchup chip in the us

[@billermanthegreat]

We have many value village stores in the Seattle Area.

[@Spudz76]

BIOS definitely needs Keypad +/- (different keycode from the other +/-)

[@aidanrosenberg3513]

value village is still in Washington state as of 1 year ago.

[@frugalprepper]

When I was in Ottawa I went to McDonalds. They had some weird white gravy stuff on the fries and they were in a bowl. Nice people. Everyone spoke French first but then when you said something in English they switched to perfect English. People would just come up to my table and sit down and start talking to me. I would say I was from America, and they would look at me funny, and be like well yeah, but where? I leaned I had to say "The States", they consider themselves from America too (Which they are). I would tell them I was from Ohio and they would be like "Oh, I hear Ohio is a nice city, eh." The blinking green arrow traffic lights I never figured out though. And I came home with Ketchup Chips and Ketchup Popcorn!

[@tanithis]

Value Village is here in the US. There is actually one in Tigard.

[@rommix0]

In certain regions. In other ones it's called Savers.

[@summerlaverdure]

they had ketchup flavor Doritios chips over here for sale a few months ago and i liked them, i had no idea they're just everywhere in Canada normally!! 0_0

[@PaddyPatPatrick]

Hello All From The UK👋

[@atheatos]

Nice video, Cool M/B, custom Bios.

[@justintraer5181]

I thought Mike was from Canmore....

[@skesseks]

value village is here in Washington

[@markdjdeenix6846]

so the +- thing foxed me for a while .+- on older keyboards is to the right.above the seprate num pad

[@markdjdeenix6846]

A chap called Lawrence told me about.I have a AT to ps2 adapter for my keyboard

[@YarisTex]

lol my old Socket 7 DOS Topbench entry keeps coming on Adrian’s videos

[@ChrisJackson-js8rd]

i've gotta check out value village i guess lol

[@rottmanthan]

if you need another size stand off remover i think you could make one out of a pen, just pull out the ink part and drill the end of the pen to the correct size. thats pretty much all that is anyway.

[@aakh3500]

Try F5/F6 to change values.

[@suvetar]

What is that BBC Model-B Motherboard at 38:46? Remake I presume? It's beautiful!

[@SomeMorganSomewhere]

Maybe that BIOS requires you use the num pad keys.

[@pupaepedorra]

They also sell ketchup flavoured chipß here in Argentina.

[@stonent]

That 386 looks like it may be conformally coated.

[@peopleman14226]

We have ketchup chips in Buffalo NY.

[@BestSpatula]

I love ketchup. I love potato chips. But I've never had the ketchup potato chips, and I'm afraid I never will 😢

[@duncanyoung8688]

crazy how much this old tech sells for 😮

[@atkelar]

Noncached RAM might have to do with some expansion cards mapping RAM and reacting bad to random cached updates? Not sure if memory mapped IO was a big thing on ISA cards, but I heard something similar with cached HDD controllers once...

[@ArcJupiter]

Guess i gotta visit Windsor

[@lindoran]

That pico ATX card edge is Amazing!

[@Cherijo78]

I like the idea and form factor of the PC power supply alternative... But as an owner of a 5160 I have to say I wouldn't be able to use this because all of my slots are taken except for one, which I have reserved for putting a picoGUS into for a sound card... Sooooooooo... Lolol

[@johnsonlam]

Hi Adrian, did you try the famous CTRL-ALT-+ or CTRL-ALT-"-"?

[@horusfalcon]

Seems like you would want to be careful with these PSU adapters to use a source with enough current capacity to support all the loads in the system. I did something similar with my SC126 single board system: I use a 10,000 maH power cell to provide the +5v it uses. At 91 ma of total current draw, the system can run for over 100 hours on one charge. Not bad for a CP/M system, huh?

[@elv1swest770]

Can you do a ”how to use a oscilloskope” for fault searching old electronics? How to think, how to set up (intervalls and other settings)

[@jon-paulgrainger1303]

Love ketchup crisps, struggle to find them in the UK thanks to Walkers stopping them a while ago.

[@smcic]

Wegmans near me in VA has ketchup potato chips!