#DOScember

[@RetroTechChris]

Very nice video there! What a peculiar machine. That BIOS is really something. Thanks for sharing, never seen anything like this!!

[@sparcie]

Thanks for watching Chris!

Very impressive hardware!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Hey, another Microbyte! Not too many of these around. Welcome to DOScember.

[@sparcie]

Thanks! I saw the restoration work you did on yours, nice work!

[@MrLurchsThings]

@@sparcie thanks. Took me a while to get to the second part. Recently picked up a matching monitor for it too.

[@sparcie]

They'd have to be rarer than hen's teeth, that's quite a lucky find.

[@OzRetrocomp]

idk how I managed to miss this in DOScember...! One of my biggest regrets is not taking an abandoned Microbyte PC230 that I spotted in a toolshed at an open inspection of a house we were thinking of buying. It was the only thing in the shed, and given that the house was a deceased estate sale, I'm sure nobody would've noticed it missing. My wife talked me out of it though. D'oh!

[@sparcie]

Yeah they don't turn up very often. I was lucky to pick this one up on ebay in 2015 for quite a reasonable price (less than $100). So I understand. It has been a nifty little machine when I need a slow 386sx class machine.

[@peterilling1627]

Nice video brings back old memories repairing and building 286s and 386s.

[@dintyshideaway9505]

I really appreciate the fact that you are attempting to preserve a little computer history, even when it is not sexy or gamey (if that is even a word). Companies stopped keeping accurate archival records in the late 80's As a consequence, even larger companies may have whole product lines that simply get lost to history, leaving no more than a few magazine or newspaper adverts to prove they existed at all. I have noticed that Austrialians and New Zealanders are especially adept at this practice, which is great. We, in the states, could learn something from you.

[@sparcie]

I appreciate the sentiment, this particular machine and the company that made it basically almost don't exist on the internet. Unfortunately I'm sure that despite best efforts to preserve the history some will be lost. For me the one that hits home the hardest is the PC that we grew up with. My dad got a Twinhead Superset 590 386sx @ 20mhz early 1990, we played with that thing for something like 7 years. Unfortunately its battery leaked (before I knew much about maintaining old PCs) ruining the chassis and causing minor damage to the mainboard. Looking around now it's basically impossible to find anything about that old machine, let alone a working example. I still have some of the manuals for it and the old mainboard and keyboard, but for the most part that piece of my personal computing history is gone.

[@CRG]

Nice video and a lovely little machine. The connector for the riser looks very similar to the one on my Olivetti 286 motherboard. On that systems the riser card is nothing more than 3 ISA slots wired in series straight down onto the connector. The fact that your system works without the riser makes me think there is nothing special about it i.e. no termination resistors required so a similar riser card may work. Finding one is another story but since it is so simply you may be able to get one made. In fact if you even just got an old ISA slot and hand wired it down into that connector I expect that would work too.

[@sparcie]

Thanks, I did think about connecting/making a riser card, but I decided against it because I wouldn't want to mess up a relatively rare machine if I made a mistake. I have another faster machine I can use if I want better sound or graphics which has ISA and PCI expansion slots. I will try and get an LPT2OPL as that will give me basic Adlib sound, which should be appropriate for this machine.

I really LOVE 286 Olivetti!

[@succuvamp_anna]

Just an FYI, if you've got a phone from the last 5ish years, just film with it, they have mounts/tripods for phones for crazy cheap. A lot of bigger KZbinrs started off that way.

[@xmaniac99]

Perhaps you can expand the system with a generic ISA riser backplane ?

Very diferent machine! SCSI in 386? Just awesome board. Gained a subscriber

[@86smoke]

Regarding benchmarks, you seem to be right on those VGA memory chips. If I'm not mistaken, there are 60ns chips installed, which are awfully slow. Timings for those should be around 10ns.

[@sparcie]

I think they are 80ns, which isn't fast (about 12.5Mhz compared to the 20Mhz CPU), I suspect there are VGA cards around with even slower VRAM.

[@alvaroacwellan9051]

For some 3DBench context: 1WS I got 5.1-6.5 fps with 286-20 CPUs and various VGA cards. 0WS 286-20 systems could even yield up to 7.8 - this was an Octek Fox II with a Cirrus Logic GD5402. With a simple 386SX-40 (twice the clock so it's relatively easy to compare) and a fast Trident 8900D VGA I could measure 10.8-11.2 fps. 386DX-40 (still 2x of your clock) systems could reach even 18.8 but that was with a VLB VGA so it doesn't really count. 16.something fps is more common - with fast video cards again, and probably an overclocked ISA bus because some 386 chipsets simply cry for some ISA overclock... Speed-wise the 386SX in the same ballpark with a 286. 386DX systems fare better but partly because they're usually cached. Of course they have a far more advanced 32-bit register set and an extended instruction set too which is a huge bonus, there's a lot of (even DOS) software that takes advantage of it. Many won't run well at this speed, though. Interesting system btw! head scratch inducing BIOS options, an ability to change slow mode speed, socket for a SCSI chip, onboard IDE and VGA - nice. Unfortunately it needs proprietary PSU and riser. But at least it has a civil battery that didn't leak all over the board. Edit. Oh yes, Commander Keen plays this strange color game on certain LCDs and video card combinations too.

[@sparcie]

Thanks for the information, I looked up some information on both the 286 and 386 to figure out why their performance was often so similar. It turns out that they have very similar IPC based on the number of cycles per instruction I've observed in documentation. There are even a number of instructions where the 286 is marginally faster. Because the 386sx uses basically the same 16bit bus as a 286 it's no surprise they perform similarly. I suspect that most of the performance difference in 286 and 386 machines is often other components such as the speed of the memory and video card, and if any cache memory is present. Assuming the same clock speed of course, many 386's are faster simply by having a higher clock speed. It's mostly later DOS software that takes advantage of the 386, usually the same ones that run a DPMI layer to access larger amounts of RAM. There's usually some text shown on load that tells you which one they used. This particular machine seems to have reasonably fast video ram compared to others in the topbench database, so it's perhaps the main memory which is slowing the system down. From your results I'd say the main memory is introducing 1WS probably.

[@alvaroacwellan9051]

@@sparcie That's possible. I also think that older (8086-286) code reads/writes memory via 8/16-bit accesses so if there's no cache in the system having a 32-bit bus probably won't help at all. Unfortunately I don't have any uncached 386DX and cached motherboards tend to be unreasonably slow after disabling it so it's just a theory. One day I may go through a bunch of boards to find one that behaves. Btw there's a lot of real mode 386 code in the demoscene stuff. They embraced the 386 instructions in, like, 1993 and you can hardly find any demo/intro after that year that runs on a 286. It's very rare but the use of protected mode became widespread much later. So that's where the real mode software with 32-bit calculations and memory accesses hides :) (Unfortunately real mode is still a big constraint with its 64k segments. Thankfully at least the usual 64000-byte MCGA mode screen fits otherwise you'd have to even page video memory like in higher resolutions.)

[@sparcie]

I don't know much about the demo scene, I didn't have any contact with much of that stuff because I lived in rural Australia, and we didn't own a modem. I can imagine that makes sense though. One advantage the 386dx would still retain running 16bit code would be the ability to prefetch 32bits of instruction at a time, saving some memory cycles. Otherwise it would be fairly similar IPC to an 286 even with the 32bit bus.

[@beastworm]

Just come here to say congrats on the rising on subs (I think I was your sub nr 6 ) and now you are over 100. Great Work!

[@sparcie]

Thanks, I'm completely blown away by the sudden influx! Completely unexpected!

[@gemedetvideo]

I don't know how you are capturing the footage but the "stripes" in your capture look very much like your capture card is set to use the wrong phase. Phase is important for VGA signals and sometimes it can't be autodetected accurately. Even a lot of LCD monitors that have VGA input have a menu option to allow you to adjust phase manually if needed. Try looking in your capture drivers, to see if there is an option to allow you to manually adjust it. I have 3 different capture cards capable of VGA capture and one is better than the others at autodetection but all three allow for manual adjustment one way or another in the drivers.

[@sparcie]

Sounds interesting I'll have to check it out. I'll note that these bars don't appear on other machines I've captured with.

[@zsombor_99]

I suggsest to go ahead and try to install an "LTP to OPL" card on this computer! 😉

[@DosGamerMan]

Back when Seagate made more reliable hdds! Also check out OPL2LTP if you want some better sound. Edit: ah you know about it.

[@JVHShack]

Hey, Sparcie! The is the first video of your that I have watched. I see your dilemma about the absent riser card. I believe that with some precise measurements and a ton of pictures, I could help you out with getting a replacement riser card made. The catch is that I live in the USA, but I could eventually send you some files that you could send off to a PCB manufacturer. (I have designed a few PCBs as a hobby.) I wanted to send you and email or at least a tweet, but I didn't I didn't see any of that information pertaining to you. =(

[@sparcie]

Hi thanks for taking your time to watch. I've been thinking about setting up a twitter account and email (exclusively for the channel), will probably do that sometime in the new year when I have more time. I appreciate the offer of help with the riser card, I think I'll pass. I don't want to mess with the internals of this machine unless I _really_ have to, being as unusual as it is I don't want to break it. For sound I want to try out the LPT3OPL, and this would be a good machine/use case for that. I actually grew up without a sound card in our old 386 PC, so in a way it's actually nostalgic for me to use the PC speaker sound for a few games in particular.

[@JVHShack]

@@sparcie If you change your mind, let me know. One thing to note, though: The pin sockets for the riser card of your mainboard have the exact number for 16-bit ISA...

[@eDoc2020]

@@JVHShack I noticed that as well. If you solder an ISA connector onto some male pin headers I bet it would work just fine. I can understand Sparcie's hesitation, though.

[@jeffreyplum5259]

I recommend 4DOS a a Command.com replacement now opensource for bare DOS systems. It will also run on Windows 3 or 9X ( With long filename support ) I had a 386sx40 which was pretty nice as DOS machines go. Your machine has more graphic memory than the others with lower scores. Thanks.

[@sparcie]

I'll have to check out 4dos. The amount of video ram generally doesn't affect benchmark scores, the speed of the VRAM on the other hand makes a big difference. My theory is those other machines have significantly slower VRAM, which would have been used due to their lower cost. I'll eventually do some benchmarking on some of my graphic cards and I'll be sure to look at this.

[@fnjesusfreak]

I use 4DOS on my DOS boxen, if only for the tab completion.

[@prozacgodretro]

What does the CGA version of your game look like in composite out?

[@sparcie]

I honestly don't know, I don't have a machine with a real CGA to test it with.

[@prozacgodretro]

IIRC clyde was one of those games that when you had no sound device, or perhaps something that sorta looked like a sound device, enough to trick it into trying to use it as such - or non-existant hardware etc... it would run slow, as it's not getting the right data back from some sound loop polling thing - I could be way off, this is one of those random memories from 25 years ago .... so .. lol ... MAYBE disable the scsi if you can? (Maybe it's trying to access a joystick port, that just occured to me too ... there's a random neuron firing off back there I can feel it! Just can't figure out what it's saying to me)

[@sparcie]

I made a similar set up in dosbox to test your theory and I think there may be some merit to it. Basically I had the same issue there when the sound wasn't working in that game. Clyde seems to be fussy about which sound card emulation is used in dosbox, I haven't figured out which setting works yet.

[@prozacgodretro]

@@sparcie oh phew, I knew there was something to that, lol I really can't recall exactly why I "remember" that. Just one of those random old things that sticks in your head. Or perhaps other games had issues similar and I'm confusing it!, nevertheless I'm glad it seems to be a good rabbit hole to go down.

[@intel386DX]

I love this machine! :)

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi Nice machine The only real decent mass production Australian machine i knew of was Ipex Re the video card, try a few things - while it is a bottom end card it should be better than that 1. check the bios and write down all the current setting, then try caching shadow bios from what it is eg on to off etc 2. bios also has some memory holes to play with 3. Grab Norton Sys Info and run it, get the video card memory address, then edit your config sys to exclude it if you are running dos 5 or newer- i did have a video card vga that required that for all the modes to work, on VGA backwards comparability to EGA / CGA exists but not always implemented properly, while yo u have EGA there are multiple modes to pick from and not every car supports every option - you need to check you config.sys anyway - i also needed to reserve space for network card so they initialize properly under dos ( lantastic and 3com ) 4. DN1 - you are getting screen tearing - unless it is the youtube video compression, they game will tear but if you travel and stop then only move in the existing rendered screen you should have 100% perfect screen as it is not loading any more sprites or data to attache to the existing screen area - or maybe it is working in the video buffer that is unchanged 5. search for some dos drivers for the trident, while i doubt if for a 386 era , the 486 and vesa local bus worked but the vesa drivers made thing better and created more resolution in dos 6. try phils computer lab web page he may have some generic drivers and i know he has test tools 7. the 3dbenchmark 1.00 is very sad with a score of 6 - i remember my XT and AT was giving 15-20, once you go into 486 use versions 1.0C as it goes and scores over 100 ( 1.00 max at 99 = not that a 386 will beat that = also phil has a google calc table with viewer provided stats ) Nice little pizza box machine anyway Regards George

[@sparcie]

Hi George, I have a few comments in reply. 1. Shadowing or caching the BIOS doesn't usually speed up graphics as the majority of software would only use the BIOS to set up the graphics mode and not during game play. 2. I'll keep this in mind if I need them. 3. This system is running a special version of MS-DOS 3.3 specifically for microbyte systems. What you're suggesting may help, I'll have to see if the himem on this system can do it. 4. I suspect this may be down the the capture setup I have (or youtube) I didn't notice any tearing on the monitor. I've had some suggestions that may help. 5. drivers for graphics in DOS are usually only for making SVGA and VESA modes work (or work better). This machine isn't fast enough for games in those modes. I'll see if there is anything for the trident chip that will help. 6. been there and like his tools and content, many of the tools don't work on slower machines though. 7. yes it's a sad score, but it is only a 386sx @20mhz, I didn't see Phil had some results published I'll take a look. Anyhow thanks for watching and leaving a comment.

[@georgemaragos2378]

@@sparcieHi , cool hopefully testing of a 1.44 m 5.0 or 6.22 boot disk may allow to test excluding some memory address and saving the changes on boot floppy and not disturb the hard drive. The trident is may requiring a specific memory address for hardware. I neglected to mention microsoft diagnostics - msd.com ?? i believe the dos versions are in dos 5 and newer - it provides plenty of information but no comparison machine to machine - norton system info does have about 4 or 5 comparion models basicaly 1 x XT 1 x at 1 x 386 1 x 486 Phils web page is here www.philscomputerlab.com/ benchmark page (norton utility 8 ) www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html 386 benchmark page (single floppy version norton utility 6 ) www.philscomputerlab.com/386-benchmark-pack.html Video card benchmark suer results ( 700 of them plenty of 386's data to compare ) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9nOAMKLeCpHR_SaA48M7sUXItwIi72gHRcw0wpNU/edit#gid=0 It may just be the trident chip does not cater for all modes or may be low in memory or even slow ram chips used - i think 256k was the lowest ram that would work on VGA Some where i have some other testing / info programs i used in the past, if i find them i will let you know - but i have some archived cdroms that have suffered from cdrom - rot Regards George

[@fnjesusfreak]

That system really messes up Commander Keen 4 (EGA)'s displays.

[@sparcie]

It sure does, I would have expected the gameplay to be messed up instead of the user interface however.

YES

[@griftereck]

a good video

[@shakeyourbunny]

The Trident VGA chip is also one of cheapest, worst, incompatible and slow VGA chipsets ;D It was a revelation when I had the money to upgrade to a Cirrus Logic VGA adapter.

[@sparcie]

If you're talking about VLB and PCI cards, then yeah the trident cards are generally not as good. Among ISA cards though they seem to fair much better, although from what I've seen in the topbench database there is significant variation, mostly down to the speed of the VRAM installed. This particular machine has relatively fast VRAM, performing better in the VRAM test than machines with faster CPUs and similar graphics cards. I must admit I did expect better compatibility, although I only had game breaking issues with two EGA games. I recorded the video in the order you see it, so hadn't encountered the issues when I first mentioned the trident chip.