An expert among retro mainboards (Part 1)

Some time ago I got one very exciting mainboard DataExpert EXP4349. In this video I would like to bring it back to life and in the next part I'm going to show you why this board is so amazing.
The Retro Web entry:
theretroweb.com/motherboards/...
Music by Model Povedeniya
modelp.bandcamp.com/
Patreon:
/ necroware

[@CPUGalaxy]

Great video and very interesting board indeed. Looking very much forward to the following episodes. And dude, good that you are back after months of waiting for new videos! Best retro repairing channel!! Thanks and cheers, Peter

[@darthtripedacus1]

You both have amazing content and I thank you for it.

[@hgbugalou]

You make desoldering look easy. Getting slot headers out cleanly without melting plastic is no easy task even with a desolder gun. Trust me I know.

[@Takeshi.Nakagawa]

Yay, another video about a topic, I even asked myself back in the days looking through the manuals. And almost 30 years later I got the answer 😅😂

[@esc2dos]

Adrian Black had a 386sx board with Vlb slots the other day but was unable to get the board to work, and amazingly you appear with this video. Makes you wonder why there weren't more Vlb 386's if it has such a benefit. Still it's a peculiar question unanswered as to how an SX processor could work with the 32bit Vlb Slots. Maybe you'll solve that riddle someday too. You are Awesome, always learn so much from your work.

[@SergiuszRoszczyk]

There was even spoiler trailer in the comments of that video ;-)

[@esc2dos]

@@SergiuszRoszczyk Thanks, I found that comment, answers all my questions. much appreciated.

[@BeniD82]

You make clearing those filled solder holes look so easy. I did that on an LC II board and it took ages and had me half in tears by the time I got done 😂 I'll have to try your technique next time. Awesome job there!

[@necro_ware]

Once you desoldered 1000 holes you get used to it ;)

[@davidw.2467]

@@necro_ware Browning of the plastic parts can be avoided by covering them with Kapton tapes

[@necro_ware]

@@davidw.2467 Yeah, I usually do, just didn't think, that it would happen so fast in this case.

[@nickwallette6201]

No kidding. I had a bear of a time trying to pull a rusted DB25 jack off a motherboard. Ended up warping the fiberglass a little by the time I was done. :-( This technique is definitely the way to go.

[@HBAVHS]

Probably one of the best videos on the net for all retro enthusiasts. Thank you. Love it

[@creopard]

Wow, I guess you won't see a working(!) 386 + VLB system that often nowadays. Also, great work on these tedious soldering tasks. It always looks so easy while "watching over your shoulder".

[@deineroehre]

Even back in the days there was a very little number of 386 Systems with VLB...

[@Stratotank3r]

Ich bin so begeistert, dass ich das kaum in Worte fassen kann. Ein super tolles Board welches durch perfekte Lötarbeit zu einerm Hybrid Unikat umgebaut wurde. Absolut genial! Bitte setze auch einen 486DLC ein, damit man die 1kb bzw 8kb bei den TI Varianten sehen kann. Und toll, dass wieder ein Video von Dir gekommen ist.

[@Inject0r]

I’ve been looking forward to this video, ever since you’ve posted a sneak preview inside one of Adrian Black’s channel’s video comments. And man, I’m not disappointed! I can’t wait to see the follow up video after such a cliffhanger. Thank you!

[@EHProjects]

Love it! Not only did you save that board from the scrap heap, but you also took it to 11. Great vid!

[@SvDKILLSWITCH]

Impressive stuff! Hardware from this era is a bit before my time so to speak, but I'm fascinated by it nonetheless. Always happy to see stuff like this saved from becoming scrap. Seeing your skills with a soldering iron always make me want to get on with recapping my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2... but then I remember that I'm not Necroware...

[@jk180]

Great video Necroware. Your soldering skills are always impressive

[@mndlessdrwer]

Gotta say, putting all of the available components back onto a stripped-down board and managing to get them working is really living the dream. Very cool board and an awesome project.

[@MyAmdr]

Nice channel, great to see old stuff repaired and working again.

[@teknologyguy5638]

Awesome - you make repairs I hope to do soon on my own hardware appear effortless. Great tips in this video. I hope I am able to raise my skill to this level.

[@bad.sector]

Interesting board, and nicely done change! I spotted the non-soldered sockets right away! ;) I'd be really interested in how it performs... If you're interested, I made a quite accurate bench for SVGA performance (results are in MB/s), including bank switch speeds. Would be interesting to see the raw video throughput of 486 vs. 386 CPUs over the same board...

[@wkjagt]

I saw yesterday you had a new video, but waited until today to watch it, because I knew the house would be quiet (kids at school), and I could take my time to really enjoy it :-) Can't wait for part 2 to come out!

[@LeeMc007]

Your videos are fantastic for the retro community, really looking forward to the next one, that board is really cool, can't wait to see all the performance comparisons, I love how it says on the board "WE RECOMMAND THE AM486" in massive letters, hilarious lost in translation stuff going on there, thanks for all your hard work.

[@modlabs]

Waiting for second part. Results amazed me.

[@stonent]

I remember seeing an ad for a system in the 1990s that said "386 + 486 = 786!" Assuming it was using a board like this, that ad was very misleading, trying to indicate that you could combine the processors.

[@brzeczyszczykiewiczm]

OMG, Finally new video :D. I was so hungry for new one. What's most interesting last few weeks I also spend time repairing two MBs which support 386 and 486 CPUs and VLB inteface. One is working, second I don't know because I'm waiting for SC425APB clock generator which is missing. My MBs are OPTi-495SX 3486WB CACHE (working) and Impression 786 ACIO VESA (don't know). Please, don't let me wait so long for the next part of this history xD. Greetings from PL.

[@GabrielZ666]

Amazing! I knew about some 386/486 hybrid boards from a couple of Vogons threads, but this one looks very promising for handling a wide range of options. Looking forward to the next episode!

[@Chriva]

Welcome back! Always a highlight when you release a new video :)

[@ryballs4569]

Welcome back, hope all is well. I missed your entertaining and informative videos

[@wittonleung8732]

Luckily for the motherboard there is no missing resistor or capacitor necessary to support the 386 except the jumper is shorted. Great retro computer DIY & MOD video, again!

[@-leya-]

A pleasant surprise on a Sunday to see a video from you in my notifications!

[@Dan-TechAndMusic]

Any Macintosh user can tell you those lithium batteries can absolutely leak and damage the PCB. While Tadiran leaks are rare on Macs, I have seen it happen.

[@necro_ware]

Ok, thank you, I'll keep an eye on it and replace it with a coin battery later.

[@christopherjackson2157]

I actually saw a coin cell battery leak once too. Definitely extremely uncommon tho.

[@tomashasek7588]

Not impossible to leak, but these Tadiran batteries appears to be high quality. I also have board from DataExpert - model EXP4044 with this battery and it's also in great state. No signs of leak and voltage is 3,7 V.

[@TheMikeMan777]

That old lithium battery just knew it had a future that's why it stayed alive! 💗

[@necro_ware]

LOL

[@eltrash]

great and exciting video that answers a number of questions that have always been asked. In addition, excellent soldering work, where I could learn a lot of tips. I'm really looking forward to part 2. Thank you very much. See you in the forum

[@joshhiner729]

Amazing video. I know Adrian’s digital basement tried to do a similar video but his motherboard died before he was able to finish. He’d likely be interested in this video. Cant wait to see the followup to this.

[@joshhiner729]

Ok I read down further and another did mention Adrians video.

[@tony359]

What a super cool motherboard, thanks for showing it to us! That half-soldered VLB socket was very weird indeed! I would "RECOMMAND" the manufacturer to improve on their QC process :) Now off to watch part 2!

[@Quickened1]

Back from the dead! Amazing ...

[@JovinRepairs]

That would be a very handy motherboard in any collection, especially fully populated as you did with this one. Would be great for a retro enthusiast with storage space constraints. With a couple of CF cards and a small store of CPU's and FPU's, the base system could pretty much all remain the same and cover most DOS games on up through very early Pentium Era titles. Very impressive work as always!

[@Starter61]

Impressive soldering job.

[@dmitriytsap5844]

Amazing, wait for pt2!!!

[@ryzen_9-3900xt]

you are a blessing to to computers

[@lorenzo.c]

Your videos are great! I'm impressed by the effort you make to restore these archaeological finds 😃 It's funny how Adrian Black (Adrian's Digital Basement ][ ) tried his luck with a 386 board also featuring VLB extensions just a few days ago. His board had a 386SX fitted though (soldered on the board, no socket!) so, technically, it didn't really make much sense because of the 16 bit wide bus. PS: just noticed you already commented on that video

[@JorgeCarvalho_web_dev]

First of all, welcome back! Awesome board, very flexible one. Waiting for the next part. Please don't take so much time... Your fans are waiting for you

[@necro_ware]

Hi Jorge! Thank you very much. Unfortunately, bad times require shifting priorities :(

[@mattvan3583]

​@@necro_ware I for one don't mind the wait. Especially for a reason as good as yours.

[@oldhuntersu]

I'm looking forward to the next video!!!

[@blakecasimir]

Good to see you posting again, sir. More quality repair content! 👍🏻👍🏻

[@davidw.2467]

I believe the VLB socket is a manufacturing defect. I once repaired a broken Apple IIc with non functioning floppy drive, it turned out the floppy ribbon socket was wave soldered improperly during manufacturing, with its pins almost flat with the motherboard, and some pins were making bad contact. Resoldering the socket fixed the problem.

[@svgaming234]

Great video as always! Can't wait for part 2 :D

[@drkamilz]

VLB on 386? This is awesome!

[@SaltyMeatHook]

Fantastic video! I had a fancy 5x86 @160mhz with a mobo that had PCI. I built a ton of computers during that era, and I never saw a DataExpert board. That is really neat! All the options are amazing. Looking forward to the next video!

[@dalecomer5951]

A rare mainboard, indeed.

[@horusfalcon]

Always with your videos I learn something each time. Thanks for putting this up - I will definitely be there for Part 2. Glad to see you back in business.

[@86smoke]

Great board, retroenthusiast's wet dream

[@FirstLast-we8cb]

I'm always happy when you put out a new video.

[@GigAHerZ64]

That's an amazingly cool motherboard! Waiting for next video(s)!

[@ThorLite]

Great video,i missed your excellent content.

[@atheatos]

I was very close getting a board like that too. I payed the seller but he canceled and returned the money T-T Yeah that is a great one, a bit jealous here ^^. DataExpert went full ASRock mode with this one. This board should also support 486SXL2 in the 168p form. BTW this battery, basically can last forever with a capacity ~1Ah and minimal self discharge (

[@necro_ware]

Yes, this battery is definitely there from the factory. There is also a jumper to select between Lithium (non rechargeable) and NiMH (chargeable) battery types. In regards of VLB, you are probably right, but really don't understand, how that could go through QA :)

[@kokodin5895]

very interesting test rig

[@Jayoldstuff1]

Excellent video as usual. Id be cautious of that lithium battery if i was you, it looks to be the same type as used in the MAC classic only with solder tags rather than a holder. If so they DO leak.

[@andrew1977au]

Great video, I've been waiting for this one.

[@BobPlank_KK4DIV]

That is an interesting and versatile board. Thanks for the video.

[@austinmaxi]

I love this sort of stuff, making older hardware do things that hasn't really been explored, and pushing it as far as you can, to and past the limits such as with your socket7 videos. So of course i'm wondering how far you can overclock / optimise that 386dx with all the new adjustable features of that motherboard.. And if VLB makes it possible to play DooM on a 386 at a realistic fps. Sort of like Quake on a 486. Really looking forward to the next vid!

[@hgbugalou]

I really miss the days of finding goofy multi configuration boards like this.

[@K10driver]

Very nice to see you again! And the Board is impressive - i want to see not just one follow Up, i want to see a Video with a certain amount of 486 overdrives!

[@CheshireNoir]

What an awesome board! Your repair work was very inspiring. From memory, while supported, 3 different VLB cards in a system is not recommended. (Not that there were that many combos of VLB that you could justify 3. Video + Super IO + Fast Network was about it.)

[@necro_ware]

Yeah, usually VLB IDE didn't even give so much of an advantage over ISA. It had to be SCSI. The same was about network adapters, so VGA was the only real reason for VLB.

[@Choralone422]

Very interesting mainboard! I seem to remember there were a couple of boards out there that could host a 386 or 486 CPU but most only had the proper socket to support one or the other. Makes sense a board mfg. would want to design a board that could do either or in the fairly early days of the 486 CPU. The price difference between a 386 and 486 was quite significant and for general office use most 386 machines were seen as being "good enough" compared to a much more expensive 486 based systems. I seem to remember a friend of mine back then had a PC that had such a board but it only had the 386 socket installed so he ended up using an AMD 386DX 40mhz. His board also did not have the VLB slots so instead of trying to modify it to work with a 486 he ended up replacing the CPU & mainboard with a Pentium 100 based one later on.

[@rodhester2166]

Glad to see you back.. seems like forever since your last video..

[@necro_ware]

Yeah, bad times require shifting priorities :(

[@rodhester2166]

@@necro_ware I was worried and very happy you okay.. cheers.

[@kosmosyche]

I love how easy you make it all look.

[@ljrretropcs]

Absolutely awesome video mate! Love this

[@charlesdesmond1]

Scorp, I sincerely hope you and your loved ones are surviving despite the atrocities perpetrated by this horrific invasion of Ukraine. You are a treasured member of our community and your knowledge and talent inspire us all. I share your ideology of pacifism and I am perplexed by the fact that our society has managed to advance technology in such amazing ways but some are still unable to overcome their base instincts of hatred and violence. I only wish that the efforts of the US and EU will bring a stop to this ongoing crime against humanity. CD ✌

[@necro_ware]

We all hope, but unfortunately it doesn't look good for humanity these days. The violence is hard to stop, once it was unleashed in such a brutal way :(

[@charonunderground8596]

Man ! You are amazing !

[@nickwallette6201]

It's interesting to see actual results (and thank you for that -- this was really interesting to watch), but I think we could reasonably expect there to be an improvement in performance with VLB, even on a 386. Consider that EISA and MCA both debuted in the 386 era to solve the problem of the bus and CPU running asynchronously. It was quite well understood that a 16-bit bus, capped at 8-10MHz (depending on divider options and how frisky your add-in cards were) is a problem worth solving. I think it's easy to forget that, based on how heavily associated the VLB bus was with 486s, and how most of us never used anything but ISA on a 386. But, in fact, I think we only really survived the 386 generation due to two factors: 1) It was now essentially mandatory to have an intervening chipset that would move RAM into a local bus, where it had previously been on the same bus as all the ISA peripherals (even being installed on a card as an ISA peripheral.) That, at least, kept the most critical operations 32-bit, and running at high speed. 2) Windows wasn't obligatory yet, and those that needed to move objects on a screen of 640x480 or higher, could use dedicated accelerators that moved the drawing commands from a series of I/O events between the CPU, RAM, and video memory, to an operation carried out on-card between the graphics controller and its own video RAM. That really only left brute-force graphics and, to a lesser degree, disk and network I/O facing a bandwidth bottleneck. And, at the time, disks and networks weren't very fast anyway. :-) If it weren't for those factors, IMO, the 386 era would've been unbearable. Luckily, users were just happy that their spreadsheets recalculated a little faster, and CAD was still spending more time doing 3D math than drawing lines on-screen.

[@sandmanxo]

Looking forward to the results of this. I have a motherboard myself that can handle 386 and 486 cpus that I haven't tested out. It only has 30 pin memory slots but has 16 of them so it can support a ridiculous amount of ram for the era. I'd also love to see how a 386dx40 works with my vesa Diamond Stealth 32 card that I used to use on my 5x86 at 150mhz and was rock solid stable on a 50mhz bus. It did have some minor battery leakage though so I need to test and see if i have a keyboard or if I'll need to fix that too.

[@BorgSwarm]

Wow! Awesome job on this board. 🤩

[@mesterak]

This was amazing work. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to seeing your next video with this board 👍

[@tarajoe07]

One board to rule them all

[@necro_ware]

ash thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul

[@charlesdesmond1]

We missed you

[@fft2020]

WOW! New necroware video ! luck day ! lucky day! I also have one motherboard with 386/486 sockets and VLB, but I'm lucky that this one is already socketed It is a "Master rev.A-2" and it has a "USA sc9204" chipset I would love to test it with a 386 but I dont have any

[@ypoora1]

That's such a cool old board! Nice work populating the missing features and getting it all working. For pleace of mind i would still replace the lithium battery, because they CAN still fail and cause issues.

[@crbielert]

I love filling unpopulated parts of boards :)

[@chikaw0ng]

Really like your channel! I built a retro PC because I felt inspired by your videos! Thank you!

[@userperson5259]

Super interesting and always nostalgic.

[@DanielDeyette]

I'm sure others agree with me, but I'm actually looking forward to the next video

[@BigBadBench]

Great work. Such a fun board!

[@christ2290]

Fantastic video! I'd recommend putting some Kapton tape over the plastic bits in the future to shield then from the hot air and melting. Melting.... Like my mind with the fact a 386 is running with VLB lol. Again, fantastic work!

[@SonicBoone56]

This is a really awesome board, I have to imagine they made it this way so they could sell multiple configurations at different price points and not need different motherboards.

[@NoxiousPluK]

I always love your content and strive to get to this level - I have quite a bunch of old motherboards to recover one day.. Thank you for the inspiration and great videos!

[@Gectms]

Super interesting video!

[@Linkintime1]

That was a lot of fun! I am excited to see more!

[@Metalliferous]

Excellent video as always, very interesting board indeed. If you could support multiple voltages this is the 386/486 era dream board 😊

[@MrLukealbanese]

Superb work🎉🎉🎉

[@CaptainDangeax]

I remember my best VLB video card, it was an S3 968 with 2MB Vram. Really expensive... My 486DX2-66 was able to run games like a Pentium 66 at the time

[@yxxy3260]

Спасибо, было очень и интересно )

[@slvclw]

Man this is elite work!

[@victorwidell9751]

Awesome!

[@andreabc1469]

oh, a new one😃

[@JamieBainbridge]

Good quality parts and design, but no QA at least on the VLB. In Australia we would call this a "Friday afternooner" because the person soldered the VLB slot at 4:55pm Friday and just wanted to get home for the weekend 😅

[@Bedfford]

nice board!

[@darthtripedacus1]

MORE!!!!

[@bstar777777]

I want this board.

[@copescale9599]

I like how you work on your computer on a slab of wood instead of one of those ugly electronic repair mats.

[@Telepatok]

Awesome content!

[@mattparker9726]

LOVE this board! I already looked online, looks like it's an unobtainum status board. 😔😔

[@necro_ware]

Yes, probably true. I got it really by accident.

[@Thomsonicus]

And it didn't go up in smoke! +1 over Adrian, hah😂

[@SonicBoone56]

Omg your desoldering pump sounds like it's saying PUMP PUMP PUMP at 11:30

[@charlesdesmond1]

❤