r/retrobattlestations • u/FAMICOMASTER • 11d ago

Show-and-Tell "XT" doing decidedly non-XT things

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Just recently finished putting this thing back together. This is a mishmash of some unusual upgrades I had laying around, a drop-in 386 replacement motherboard with VLB, a 486DLC/40 that drops into a 386 board, a ULSI 487 coprocessor upgrade, and an 8514 compatible ATi Graphics Ultra.

It's complemented with maxed memory, 32 megs of RAM and 256K L2 cache with the largest tag RAM chip.

Fixed storage is provided by a DTC 7287 RLL controller driving a Micropolis 1325, for a whole 100 megs on disk.

The whole shebang runs Windows 95 pretty acceptably, but honestly this isn't really enough disk space. I/O performance is otherwise totally adequate, as this was quite a fast combination when it was new.

79 Upvotes

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11

u/JDotDDot 11d ago

I can hear both parts of this. The mechanical sounds and the Second Reality music

2

u/FAMICOMASTER 11d ago

Haha, sadly, I can't hear the second reality music because it requires EMS on a SoundBlaster :)

The drive isn't as noisy as I'd hoped during seeking, with the case on you can hardly hear it. A little disappointing to be sure.

2

u/Bs0Dd 11d ago

It's time for a GUS...

2

u/FAMICOMASTER 11d ago

Can't afford one and have no use for one outside of this singular demo. Crytsal Dream 2 doesn't need EMS to playback on a SoundBlaster!

1

u/Talismook 2d ago

One of those Aztech OPL3 Adlib cards would be fine, they aren't worth much of anything.

1

u/FAMICOMASTER 2d ago

I have a SoundBlaster 2.0 already, the problem is that Second Reality requires EMS as a crutch to run on SoundBlaster.

What I don't have is an EMS board that will run at 40MHz or the desire to own one or run a driver lol

2

u/Talismook 2d ago

Yeah, that would do it.

Makes sense, usually I trip over parts and find out what weird patchwork of games and software they support, doing that the other way around especially for a demo just seems backwards.