Building my first 486 PC // Pixel Fragment

I rescued a huge collection of mid-90s computers from being recycled, and I decided I finally have no excuse not to build a 486 system! Except of course... I have no idea what I'm doing.

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[PixelPipes]

What are some ideas for "alternative" operating systems I could try on this 486 build besides the ones shown (DOS 6.22, Win 3.11, GEOS Ensemble 2.0)?

[philscomputerlab]

What an amazing haul! But well deserved, the machines are going to an awesome person and you'll have your work cutout. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, every machine you showed had more treasures 😁

[Paul-xsks]

Your haul is amazing. 486 and even socket 7 computers and parts are becoming much harder to find and more expensive. AT cases are really unobtanium at least where I am. You could however look to use a newer power supply with an AT to ATX cable adapter. It would be a crying shame to see the system taken out by a power supply failure. Your 486 machine is a wonderful throwback and such a great example of a brief window in time. For me exploring DOS and the programs from that era is gold. Wing Commander, Pool of Radiance and Wizardry under DOS6.22! Sweet.

[Choralone]

I am so jelly for that haul of 486 era PCs! I cut my teeth on 386 & 486 era PCs back in the day which led to a 20+ year IT career. Back then I had a run of the mill Packard Bell 486 PC that by the end of it's life was seriously pimped out with all sorts of mods & upgrades. I also had friends that had other 386 & 486 machines so there was plenty of learning to be done then.

[myrandom]

I wish a FRACTION of that nostalgia landed in my Tech Shed. Man, what a score - so jealous!!! I totally get how some folks say you don't "need" a 486 but I'm a purest and love using original hardware down to the floppies and period correct drives when available. I hope you gave that lady a $100 and let her know she was about to toss at least a grand worth of cases and hardware lol.

[RiksRandomRetro]

That machine turned out great. It's really fun to mess with "average" machines sometimes, not just the top tier stuff. Growing up with a 486 myself as my first real computer this hits home.

And my goodness all the glorious clicks and noises it made as it booted up. Brb digging out a 486 now too!

[TechAmbr]

I surfed the early internet on my 486, and played around with swapping in a DX4/100, an AMD 5x86 133 and an old Pentium Overdrive 83MHz. I loved that machine, and miss it every day. This takes me back, thanks for sharing your journey. I love these machines. Get a PicoGUS for it!

[Marco.Teixeira]

I am half way rebuilding my own 486 DX2 66, on a VESA Local Bus motherboard. Spent a couple months sourcing components but it’s almost done. You are a lucky man to be at the right place at the right time! Nice video.

[crabdonkey]

IRQ & ports settings reminds me of when we had an IBM AT with an expansion chassis running 6 CDROMs and there was one set of nonconflicting IRQs and ports that would work on the various card interfaces. This was before ISO 9660 so all the interfaces were proprietary!

Very nice!, such a good thing that you rescued all those retro PC's :). My first PC's case (1994, and still have it) is almost identical it seems to the baby AT case that is second from the bottom left, mine has a black power button instead and the outer shell have indents on the top and sides, also the case structure is almost identical to the one you chose for you build :). Actually rebulding it now with both new and used parts, used to be a 486 DX2-66 VLB but will now be upgraded to a Pentium 166.

[JohnSmith-iucj]

So nice of you to save them! Thank you!

[retrocoisas]

I've never seen anyone so excited to see 66MHz displayed on a screen 😂

[Scorpwanna]

Wish I still had some of those old 386s and 486s that I once owned. A few of them were towers, some were desktops. I had a buddy of mine that lived over 1000 miles away send me a huge 2ft x 2ft x 2.5ft box full of old computer stuff 20 years ago. It was like christmas. Bags of old ram modules, a graphics card that was over a foot and a half long. I use to love tinkering with the old 386/486 PCs back then. Especially installing Dos on them the old fashion way, nothing but floppies baby! Running DOOM... Having to modify the autoexec.bat file to make even the sound work correctly and tell it to boot. Installing windows 3.1 along side dos and having to type "win.exe" to make it run. Now I don't have those PCs anymore, so I rely on virtualbox to feel the nostalgia from time to time.

[heilong]

The 'D' in the 'D' parameter stands for "device" not drive letter. It is the name the device driver registers itself under in memory.

[RedStar-dztc]

Great save! Would like to see also a Socket 7 or Super Socket 7 build and more videos on retro gear!

[timmturner]

Great to see another upload from you Nathan. It's interesting to see you learning as you record the video as I'm used to seeing your GPU videos where you are already knowledgeable and have a script.

[GianmarioScotti]

Call me crazy, for me a motherboard with the fake cache RAM chips is super-interesting. I've never seen one in real life, let alone own one.

[blakecasimir]

Branching your content out into some occasional retro builds or examining some of those towers and doing some teardowns or fixes would all be welcome imho.

[tofuguru]

Fellow socket 3 user here (and retro pc collector)

I'd say you should definitely grab a Am5x86 133ADW chip.

I have one in my asus pvi486sp3 board along with a cardex tseng labs et4000w32p vlb
Threw in a voodoo1 just for giggles and light glide gaming.

You'll love the extra speed! I have mine clocked at 160mhz. 512k cache board. Also 60ns ram.

I've been wanting to try out a yamaha card for ages. Haven't found one for a decent price yet. Until then I'm using an awe32 with the ram maxed out on it along with a terratec midi daughter card. I also have a dreamblaster s1 daughtercard to swap it with, but I i think I like the terratec better.

A project I may do soon is install a scsi controller and hdd.
I have an adaptec 2940W/UW scsi controller with a scsi Seagate Barracuda 7, 200rpm 4.3GB in my shelf that is fairly period correct.
It'll be a lot of work reinstalling everything but I i think worth the extra speed and scsi sound!

Congrats on your socket 3 journey and build. Good times.

[tarajoe]

Been wanting that very top left case. That housed my first own PC