Welcome to Falk's world of vintage computers

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Intro

On this site I present my experience with vintage computers which contain 486 (socket 3) and 586 (socket 7) processors. I'm trying to get it up and running with current or elder BSD distributions (i386 architecture with 32 bits is still supported by OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD in 2022).

I'm not a friend of the i386 market leader and its methods to got this position. So you will find only chipsets and cpu's of its competitors (CPU's: AMD, Cyrix, UMC, IDT, Rise or VIA, chipsets: Windbond, SiS, UMC, VIA, Acer/Ali) on this page.

All began with an advertisement on ebay: they offered a motherboard with an AMD 5x86 P75 (a marketing name for the one and only 486DX4 processor: 33MHz external clock - 133MHz internal clock). I thought: I had so a kind of motherboard in the past and was happy with it for a long time... But my second thought was: how does feel so a kind of system today where every RAM-memory is clocked with hundreds of MHz? I bought the motherboard and all has begun...

Passive cooled AMD 5x86-P75 on a Lucky Star LS486E Revision C

Some general issues:

If you find all points are not a problem for you - you can come closer to an old computer...

Benchmarks

Benchmarks

My benchmark programs and some measurement results can be found here.

Motherboard tips

Motherboards tips

My experience with different motherboards, including tips to run and repair it can be found on this page.

The page also includes the fake cache boards PcChips M912 and the AV7543.

The most exotic socket 7 chipset: UTron UT85C501

UTron UT85C501

Relabeled as "VXPro-II or "MMXPro" and with a very bad reputation...

A factory-fresh keyboard with DIN plug for AT-motherboards available in 2020?

KeySonic ACK-595C+ with DIN plug

But only with a little help of my soldering iron...

BSD on vintage computers

NetBSD on vintage computers OpenBSD on vintage computers FreeBSD on vintage computers


falk.richter*at*yandex.com
Last update: June 09, 2022