Building a DOS PC with no Expansion Cards

Trying a fun project of building a competent MS-DOS computer using no extra expansion cards, just what we have built into the motherboard. The motherboard features built-in S3 video and Yamaha OPL3 and general midi.

[philscomputerlab]

🎉 I have a few OEM boards and they are overlooked, but really stable and reliable.

[JohnSmith-iucj]

Socket 7 comes in so many variations, it’s fascinating! AT, ATX, simm and dimm modules, voltage regulator modules, cache chips, Isa, pci, agp, integrated audio and video, usb, all the i/o, so many first time or last time features

[Aisflou]

Im new at your channel, youtube recommended you 1 month or so ago and i was seeing you since then 😊❤ nice to know about this channel! Keep it going!

[conbotonesnadamas]

Very nice board! I did like how its MIDI sounds, but to each his own. The channel offers great content, so it is no surprising it keeps growing!

[JohnSmith-iucj]

You deserve it, watching your videos for a long time, quality content! Thanks!

[shadowfox-nfzi]

Oh cool, a new (to me) vintage PC channel! Thanks for the great content! Subbed to see what comes next.

[jameseldridge]

Was one of the early subscribers, found your YouTube channel after reading your blog many years ago and noticed you started making videos. You had your "Anatomy of" series, like you were doing some kind of autopsy.

[danielpetrov]

Congrats for getting more viewers and subscribers! Nice Intel board with all you need for DOS, Yamaha MIDI sounds good, but it is just different.

[BollingHolt]

3:32 What kind of jerk would make a nasty comment aimed at those precious pups? I love how the dogs are part of your videos. Keep up the good work! :)

[cptcrogge]

I got a Toshiba Tecra 740CDT laptop with OPL3 emulation a year ago, the music quality is amazing.

[LifeLifeLP]

Man, your Videos just really hit that spot♥ keep it going :)

[ljrretropcs]

That Yamaha chip is also reffered to as OPL4. I had one on a soundcard a couple of years ago. Sounded alright to be fair but nothing on the higher end GM devices.

[YarisTex]

I love those integrated Yamaha YMF chipsets. Excellent SB Pro compatibility, great sound quality. I like them better than the Crystal or the ESS options.

[anonytuser]

This is a great video and you had to feature some of the best DOS games. Have a subscribe!

[DxDeksor]

Unfortunately your motherboard *does* have the infamous S3 black level issue.
Right at the POST screen, the background should be black, and it's grey. The whole recording looks very washed out compared to many other recording. Not just the S3 trio are impacted, even S3 savage cards are impacted. You can see it a lot in the rest of the video, things that should be black look very grey compared to the black borders on both sides of the 4:3 recording. The DOS prompt also makes it obvious since that is very well known to be white text on black. Not white text on grey :)

This isn't actually a problem in the chip itself but rather a problem in their BIOS.
Some people have patched or used bioses from other cards to fix this issue, the problem is that here, the video BIOS is merged with the motherboard's bios, so you can't just swap the video BIOS without also touching the motherboard's BIOS. I'm sure there's a way to extract the vbios from the main bios and patch it, but this hasn't been done a lot yet.

Alternatively you can run some DEBUG commands to fix it temporarily (you can then put that in autoexec.bat to fix the black levels at every reboot). There are some topics about this issue on vogons that explain the procedure.

A real shame because like you said, they have pretty good DOS compatibility and a great 2D core.

That's a pretty cool motherboard otherwise ! I think that extra yamaha chip is actually called the OPL4 ! That must be why it says "Yamaha OPL" on it. Now has nothing to do with FM music like the OPL2 and 3 had, but for some reason yamaha thought it belonged to the same category of chips.

[RodBeauvex]

You should be able to use an MMX 233 with the board multiplier set to 1.5x, which the CPU will translate to 3.5x

[kj]

Great video. I have had a similar OEM Gateway Socket 7 motherboard like this in my eBay cart forever. I just haven't come to buy it with all of my other Socket 7 junk filling up my house.

[jonchapman]

Well, that all went unexpectedly smoothly 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Miasmark]

I tuned into some 8088 stuff (particularly the pb500 stuff from wordpress) and youtube just started recommending videos on occasion.


My latest project possibly requires an 8088 so I have been having to do research since it seems like there are few system resources available as a result of the system being 8-bit. I tend to deal with 486/pentium era computers most of the time otherwise so the channel seems to be a good enough fit.

[jwoody]

A MOTHERboard on a CUTTINGboard. love it. lol