386 DX/40 Motherboard repair

Ғылым және технология

I shot this video back in summer time - I was waiting to fully fix the board before publishing it but I am still working on the fault so I thought I should publish a part 1 in the meantime.
Apologies for the not great audio quality, I have improved a bit in the meantime but this was still recorded using the built-in iPhone microphone.
Any comments, please leave a message! Enjoy the video!
Update December 2022 - removing the "part 1" naming on the title as I invested quite a lot of time on this board and never figured out what the problem with the keyboard was. I think I'd rather focus on other projects for now.
Update March 2023 - it turned out the "keyboard issue" was just a bad combination of hardware. I tested it again with a different video card and DOOM works fine! At least I'm assuming it's the video card, I'm also using a Compact Flash instead of an HDD. Anyways: it works! :D
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Пікірлер: 42

  • @rickchagouri-brindle6520
    @rickchagouri-brindle6520Ай бұрын

    I know this is one of your older videos, but I was really pleased to stumble across it because quite apart from it being very entertaining and informative, I was struggling with restoring one of these exact motherboards! Thanks again!

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Ай бұрын

    One of my "cringing" videos, yes :) But I'm glad you enjoyed it and you found it useful! I can't even remember what the fault was on that motherboard! :) Thanks again!

  • @e1woqf
    @e1woqf Жыл бұрын

    First thing to do is to clean up the corrosion from the leaked battery and to look how far the electrolyte has spread. In this whole region look for interrupted traces and damaged solder joints. After repairing the damage it's time to start the troubleshooting. Otherwise you're wasting a lot of time.

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    I don’t disagree! Thanks for watching!

  • @Inject0r
    @Inject0r2 жыл бұрын

    cool video! The difference between the 15ns and the set of 4x 20ns SRAM cache chips are that the single IC is for tag RAM. Essentially, it's a buffer between the SRAM and CPU, with a register to determine if the cache lookup by the CPU was either a hit or a miss. It needs to be at least as fast as the rest of the SRAM IC's, so the fact that the installed SRAM IC for tag RAM is faster, is great! A side note: The tag RAM IC gets stressed the most, so if you would have any caching issues, you'll probably be wise to diagnose that one first.

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    2 жыл бұрын

    Thank you Tom! It’s very interesting indeed. I didn’t know about that. It’s a very cool system. I wonder what would have been the performance price to pay if the TAG RAM wasn’t there and the buffer was on the cache memory itself - besides the space used by the buffer itself. Thanks again for watching!

  • @radionicretrofit
    @radionicretrofit2 жыл бұрын

    Nice video again! I like repair videos like this. Also a post card would be very useful in repair videos. Regarding 5th sram cache chip its tag chip. No difference from others.Keep it up mate!

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    2 жыл бұрын

    Thanks a lot! More videos coming for sure! Interesting about the TAG ram chip, basically an index of the content of the cache. From Vogons :) "As for the purpose of TAG ram, in a nutshell, instead of storing data (banks 0 and 1 are your DATA STORE), it holds identifiers (pointers) to say what data is in those data stores and what location from RAM it came from. When a program points the CPU to a memory location in RAM, the TAG chip should say whether or not (Hit or Miss) that data has been cached for faster access. This is called a Cache Lookup" Been thinking about a post card indeed. It may be useful.

  • @magnum333
    @magnum333 Жыл бұрын

    Congratulations on the repair! I had one 386SX that suffered a similar problem. If you bent it sometimes it booted... at first I thought it was related to the ram sockets, since I noticed that when I pushed the ram down it booted. I replaced the ram sockets many times (a true test of patience), convinced the sockets were the culprits... Finally, I gave up and tried to "reflow it" and I think I cooked it xD Some IC leaked a black gunk on the underside of the board, very weird. Still haven't gotten back to it. I think the poor thing has suffered enough ✝

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    You made the famous "Motherboard Lasagna" :) It could have been a bit of everything to be honest, sorry to hear it did not survive! And thanks for watching one of my earliest videos, not the best in terms of audio and editing :)

  • @magnum333

    @magnum333

    Жыл бұрын

    @@tony359 LOL! That's very appropriate, since it's brown/orange. I'll watch more of your videos since I'm also fond of repairing old stuff. The nice thing about these old motherboards is that almost everything can be repaired. They don't have a lot of ICs. The only unrepairable thing is a damaged chipset. Everything else can be tracked down and replaced/fixed. Maybe even the lasagna can come back to life some day. Anyway, great channel! Watch you later. Have a nice day.

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    @@magnum333 it's one of the reasons I like old stuff: you can follow traces, probe things, fix things and most importantly learn things. Ove the course of many years I was able to use my tools to see how a bus works - I'm not sure I could do that on modern stuff, or at least it would be much more difficult and would require a massive microscope! Have a great day too and thanks again for your kind words!

  • @aliencray7269
    @aliencray72692 ай бұрын

    It was a power good line all that time but you found this in a hard way 😂 Any way it is interesting result because I expect reset line to sticks high when no p.g., not just no pulse at all 😮

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    2 ай бұрын

    For the life of me I cannot remember what was wrong with that board - too much time ago! But I'm glad you enjoyed it despite being a very old video!

  • @hawksights
    @hawksights Жыл бұрын

    I guess the jumpers JP7,8,11 are setting the timing frequency of the varialbe timing ic (which sometimes is governed by a crystal oscillator) so it is always double the processor clock speed

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    I wasn’t aware that it’s supposed to be twice the CPU clock speed - eventually realised after fiddling with more boards! Thanks for watching and sorry for the quality of the video (early days!)

  • @raresp7218
    @raresp721811 ай бұрын

    Hi. Good video. Where can we find the checkitpro dos app?

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    11 ай бұрын

    Hi - thank you and sorry, this is a very old video and editing and sound were... well, improvable! :) can you try this link for Checkit Pro 1.1? (Assuming KZread won't remove the link...) dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/diag_utilities.php

  • @twiterMatt
    @twiterMatt9 ай бұрын

    Hi, quick question, is it possible to replace existing cpu on motherboards like this one?

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    9 ай бұрын

    Hi - good question. I think so but you might need to change the crystal to a different speed if the CPU is different. Obviously you'll have to desolder and solder a new one which is not for the faint of heart! :) Are you trying to replace a broken one or is that an upgrade?

  • @devonandersson300
    @devonandersson3002 жыл бұрын

    Did you ever find out what causes the keyboard problem in Doom?

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    2 жыл бұрын

    I haven’t yet. I have not given up and I hope I can publish a part 2 at some point - but I haven’t fixed it yet! Thanks for watching!

  • @yorgle11
    @yorgle1111 ай бұрын

    Are those power connectors in AT motherboards unique to PCs? I suspect they are generic connectors, but I don't know what they're called. If we knew their name it probably wouldn't be hard to get new replacements. It just seems whoever started using those connectors (IBM?) would have picked an off the shelf part - no need to reinvent the wheel. I looked close at pictures of Molex KK connectors, but I think they're different. The Molex pins are square, the pins on motherboard connectors are rectangular. The design of the plastic shroud is also different.

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    11 ай бұрын

    I had to watch the video again as I could not remember what the fault was with that MB! First, sorry for the very poor Audio/Video/Editing quality of that video, it's very old! :) Yes, I am sure that that connector is standard. It's not easy to search as "AT" is seen as the preposition :) It's like when I'm searching for old Apple Macintosh stuff and Google ALWAYS point me to the modern stuff :) Thanks for watching, I hope you can also enjoy some of my latest videos, should be a bit easier to watch! :)

  • @yorgle11

    @yorgle11

    11 ай бұрын

    @@tony359 No problem with the quality IMO, but I'm sure it keeps getting better. I saw some of your other repair videos and enjoyed them, so I decided to go back to the older motherboard videos and watch them in order. I haven't watched the C64 videos yet but I'll probably go back to those when I'm in the mood for the 8-bit era. :)

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    11 ай бұрын

    Let me know what you think! The latest C64 video has been largely ignored but I thought it was an interesting repair - and the videos are not too long!

  • @roki977
    @roki977 Жыл бұрын

    that was my 1st pc

  • @sotikmaster
    @sotikmaster Жыл бұрын

    tomato 4DPS , не могу починить , не работают ide , отпаял все микросхемы sn74.….. ,проверил в программаторе - тесты проходят, биос пробовал даже 4.01 , даже с флоппи не грузит, процессор a486dx2*66

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    it's difficult to diagnose from over here... All I can suggest is to watch my videos and try to follow my steps (which won't be the only ones of course and others might have better ideas). Good luck!

  • @sotikmaster

    @sotikmaster

    Жыл бұрын

    @@tony359 Спасибо , не знаю точно ли переведется, оказалось был перебит проводник на этой старой плате, в микроскоп увидел, позже сниму видео на канал

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    @@sotikmaster that's good news then!! Amazing!

  • @tedvicarri6153
    @tedvicarri6153 Жыл бұрын

    I thinks its time to chuck it in the bin, and get with the 21st century….who in their right mind would bother repairing a 386!

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    Being in the 'right mind' is so boring though! Thanks for your comment!

  • @tedvicarri6153

    @tedvicarri6153

    Жыл бұрын

    @@tony359 no disrespect intended, and as interesting as fault finding a 386 MB might be, maybe a more current MB might be more useful…..perhaps?

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    @@tedvicarri6153 maybe one day! I’ve repaired some newer boards but not on video. Old ones are good for learning, components are larger and they’re cheap to buy. Also there’s the ‘nostalgia’ factor 🙂

  • @frizzlefry1921

    @frizzlefry1921

    Жыл бұрын

    @@tony359 And anything that can be kept alive and out of a 3rd world country burn pile is great.

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    @@frizzlefry1921 That is a very good point! Those "burn pile" are giving me goosebumps... :(

  • @vinczejani
    @vinczejani Жыл бұрын

    why you did not use diag card?

  • @tony359

    @tony359

    Жыл бұрын

    I didn’t have it back then 🙂

  • @Telee_Pawt
    @Telee_Pawt Жыл бұрын

    You're impressed? What about me?

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