I have been building computers for over 30 years. I have seen tech change and kinda laugh when these younger people on YouTube build “period correct” retro computers.
Having a retro computer is to be used for running old software that modern computers can’t run very well or way too fast. To me it’s more fun to turn on and do whatever such as playing an old DOS game. Now old hardware has limitations just because of it’s age. For a example an old mechanical hard drive could die at any moment. Dipped tantalum caps deciding to leave the chat. Old CMOS batteries deciding to leak and rein havoc on the motherboard.
In the car world you have Classic/Vintage and Restro modding. With a retro computer I am going the restro modding route. What I mean by this is I want to use some modern parts in the build. Not all of the parts will fall in a certain “period”.
The goal is to have a 486 DX4 at least 100MHz. A minimum of 64MB of RAM. A Motherboard that has floppy and hard drive controllers built in. ISA and PCI BUS prefer as well so I can have more hardware options.
What I would use as “modern” parts is a IDE to Compact Flash for the hard drive. 4GB is plenty and most operating systems don’t like anything bigger then 4GB because of the partition type. However I’ll probably have four 1GB partitions and boot DOS/Win3.1, Windows 95, Linux and give CPM86 a try.
An full size ATX case and power supply. The motherboard is going to be a AT platform but as long as the motherboard is a Baby-AT and has a maximum of seven BUS slots it will fit. Might have to drill/tap a few motherboard mounts but it should be a direct drop in. There are power supply adapters all over that will work. Just keep in mind a ATX power supply doesn’t have the -5V rail so some Sound Blaster cards that require that voltage rail will not work.
Modern fans such as Noctua brand. Fans from old equipment are worn out from years of use and honestly don’t provide much in CFMs.
Now let me say this. VLB was not common and does not make or break the build. I have worked on and built many 486 systems back in the day and I did see motherboards with VLB but they were never used. Same with EISA. When the PCI BUS got standardized VLB and EISA vanished. Since I am going for a system with PCI BUS I’ll just slap in a Jaton 2MB Trident TGUI9440 card. For audio back then almost every card had some sort of Sound Blaster 16 compatibility. I’ll probably go with a Sound Blaster AWE 64 ISA card. They’re cheap and have excellent SB16 compatibility. Just don’t do the PCI version or you;ll have DOS compatibility issues. Reason why I selected those two is price, compatibility, should work with all of the DOS and early Windows95 games I played back then.
I honestly don’t know why people put in 5 1/4 inch drives. The only time I’ve seen a 486 come with one was with IBM’s PS\1 line. Now if the system was upgraded like it use to be a 286 or 386 then sure but brand new not really. They typically just came with a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. Also a lot of high end systems had the “multimedia” option that had an CD-ROM drive. My build is based off of the late 486 / early Pentium systems of the mid 90’s. Now it was unheard of a consumer PC having 64MB of RAM. Most people had 4MB to 8MB. I know my Dad spent a pretty penny to upgrade to 16MB back in 1995. Since RAM is cheap today I’m going to just max it out.
Naturally I’ll toss in a Ethernet card. I do have a PCI 3com 3c509 nic and a NE2000 compatible PCI nic that should work fine.
I’m not going to buy all of the parts right away. I bought the Video card, Sound card and a IDE to Compact Flash adapter. I’m still on the hunt for the perfect motherboard. The closest I found is in Ukraine and shipping is expensive.
A co-worker gave me a full size ATX case and I got a power supply laying around.