BSR 386SX/16

[LunaManar]

This was my first computer! My dad bought it when I was 6 and it was our first IBM-compatible PC...and was our family computer for 5 years, much to my chagrin, haha. I learned to love it, and then I learned to hate it when 486s hit the market and my parents refused to upgrade while my friends were all playing Epic Pinball. :P But I did have a lot of good times on this old thing, and to this day I still have the BSR keyboard, which was one of the best keyboards I've ever had. So thanks for this nostalgia kick!

[mikeall]

i love seeing a pizza box with a compliment of floppies. takes me back to my childhood

[infinitecanadian]

The soundtracks for 'Major Stryker' and 'Cannon Fodder' are awesome!

[drimmie]

My first desktop! My grandfather bought it from an office supply company called Dak in the late 80's

[netman]

Hey, this was actually sold by DAK Industries after they acquired the BSR logo. This was one of the first PC's sold in the US. Had a huge software package that came with it..

[brucekempf]

My first PC was the BSR 286 with single speed CD-ROM drive that used caddies. It had a 40MB hard drive and I MB RAM. I remember thinking how huge that was at the time. It was an awesome system and I used Windows 3.1 on it. Over time, I scrapped the original board and replaces it with a 386DX. Those were the good old days. I really wish I kept that as a stock system just for old time sake.

[lactobacillusprime]

Excellent video. Very interesting machine. Using a double speed CD-ROM drive on a sound blaster / sound card with a cd rom interface usually works better on those ancient systems than IDE cd-drives. Good call!

[infinitecanadian]

There's actually people going after the whole 'Master/Slave' thing because they think it offensive. Legacy equipment uses that terminology in code, so changing it would be counterproductive.

[DavstrWrexham]

The possible reason foor the ram problem is that some 386 and early 486 boards required the ram layout to be selected by jumpers or dip switches.

[EricsTechTalk]

My first computer! It had a CD drive upgrade that was weird. You put the CD in a floppy-like case with a sliding gate before inserting it.

[kanopus]

I did have a i386SX in 1991, it was my first PC ever, and I enjoyed it quite a lot until I upgraded it to a 486DX 33 MHz.
The 386SX could do 32 bit operations internally (and then was faster than any 286), but had to comunicate to the rest of the board with 16 bit bus. Although first 386SX was slower than high end 286's, the 386SX got up to 33 MHz and no 286 could manage to get to this level of performance.

[vwestlife]

The only 286 system that I know came with a CD-ROM drive was the
Tandy/Memorex VIS, an early (and unsuccessful) PC-based game console.

[betamax]

Someone has invested in a coprocessor in the i387... you may even have a facility to put something faster in that socket like a 486 overdrive.

[HistoricNerd]

oh shit I think my brother had this computer!

[Lachlant]

Major Stryker looks like it's running at the correct speed, but some of the sounds aren't working, particularly when you fire your missiles and shoot at enemies. I only hear the explosion sound when your ship gets destroyed, I wonder why that's happening.

[blacksvkvideos]

Maybe you have to change that DIP switch to support more RAM

[amdintelxsniperx]

i wonder if one of the dips disables the onboard

[VSigma]

I have a Samsung SD700 386SX-16 and it also has a keyboard port on the front...but it's AT, not PS/2.

[ramdrivesys]

From what I know, a 386SX is not really slower than a 286 at the same speed, BUT most 16 Mhz 286 would be mature, stable, well performing boards with relatively good video cards, while most 16 Mhz 386SX would be from the early 386 era OR budget systems and have worse boards and slow video cards. So it isn't about the chip being really slower, but the typical 386SX/16 system being slower. If you put a Tseng ET4000 ISA video card into this it would really fly considering the clock speed and all the games you tested would run without any choppiness, but that would hurt the uniqueness and the special VGA chip this system has. It is probably best to play on it the way it is. There is also the thing that many 286 systems on Youtube are souped up with Ronald MT32, 8 MB RAM, Tseng videocards... and of course that would beat a 386SX clone that is "the way people actually used it back in the day". Most 286 machines were probably a lot slower than this 386SX, but yes, a tuned late 286 will beat the pants off this system. There were also 25 Mhz 286 chips from Harris that could outdo 386DX in 16-bit apps, but that one has a big clockspeed advantage on this guy.

My uncle run a 386SX/16 with a black and white VGA monitor for years using it for productivity software like word processing and accounting until 2001 or so. May be slow, but reliable, and definitely enough for stuff like accounting, the funny thing is, he runs a toy shop and has a modern machine with a 1080p LCD in place of that 386 now, but he still runs that same DOS accounting software on it in a window in Windows 7 (32-bit so yes, it has VDM for DOS)! If he did not use the PC for other stuff, I would call that the biggest waste of computing power ever.

[jacobrhodes]

386SX 16MHz will run Windows 3.1 well enough to get away with it. I got ripped
off many years ago twice, once on a 386SX 16 and once on a 386SX 25.