Rare SQ PC motherboard opportunity...

[Johnathon]

Alright, so... I gather some may be wondering as to why I'm bothering to post this, considering that we have DOSBox; but some of us perfer not to deal with minor glitches that come along with DOSBox, or may be severe hardcore retro gamers who want to play some of the games that DOSBox is not compatible with.

 

Or, some of you just may be serious 486 nerds like myself, so...

 

I thought I'd point you to a rare find:

 

You can buy Baby AT 486 motherboard (the ESA TF-486) from this website, newly designed by ESA to industrial standards, for $200.00. It has very nice expansion ability, the rare ability to use PS/2 keyboard and mouse with a 486, from the looks of it it meets all the standards necessary to easily build a custom SQ PC refering to Frans' article, and this board will probably last you forever. Retro Motherboards are literally the most difficult component to find at a good price and working condition these days (oftetimes getting ripped by bad sellers on eBay because they're availability has gone down and their price up.)

 

ESA would normally require a higher fee, as far as I know, to have them build you a new 486 motherboard, by calling them and getting a quote, but it seems they have produced extra of these for a particular client who didn't need them all, and so now the extras are being sold at this website.

 

Peripherals to go with a system based on this board could also easily be purchased from this other site. Memory, I recommend getting from S.A.Tech, as I've used them several times already.

 

And... here would be the manual for the motherboard.

 

Happy Building, for those of you geeks like me! :D

[drdrslashvohaul]

Great find! Not the sort of thing I'm into, but I'm always fascinated by people that buy old tech and do some good with it. There must be millions of obsolete chips and components out there that could be doing a serviceable job.

[FroggyMe6581]

NICE!!! On eBay, it's probably still there, there's a Vesa local bus 486 motherboard with the 2MB screen card and lots of mem (like 64MB I think, wow, that's a lot for a 486) for only $100. (it's not mine, so no, not a shameless self promotion :) )

 

The only real way to play classic games in my opinion is on the real hardware (whatever that means haha). I just installed SQ4 on a 400MHz machine with Win98SE, but thanks to the AMAZING support for these games found in the "Archive" section of this site, SQ.net, I was able to update the program with patches, and on that computer, which is way too fast to normally play SQ4, but way too slow to play it in DOSBox, it can now be played, with all the music and digital sound effects including narration, timing issues resolved (no instant robot death!) and full screen, all smoothly with no lost frames (as would be the case under DOSBox).

 

I find that even on my faster, newer computers, games under DOSBox will lose frames, or even have a low framerate, while playing them on a "proper" machine imbues the game with the same fluid smoothness that they originally had. I tend to think that we, as people in general, forget how good gaming actually was (or has always been), as we view classic games through the modern lens of slow framerates under emulation and blurry images on non-multisyncing LCD screens. (remedied by using a CRT! :) )

 

Sorry for the ramblings and super long run-on sentences. :)

[Dat Engineer]

I have actually kind of tried to emulate using a CRT monitor by applying a scan-line graphics filter in DOSBox. It's not quite the same, though.