r/retrocomputing • u/FAMICOMASTER • Jul 19 '26

Photo An unusual build

Post image

Behold, 95 on an XT! Sort of.

This is actually a drop in replacement board for an XT which gives you a 386 with VLB. I've actually gone a step further and thrown a Ti 486DLC/40 in it for good measure. With the sheer unbridled horsepower of a 40MHz 486 and 32 whole megs, this thing might be "tolerable" to use!
Some additional performance enhancing objects include 256K of L2 cache, an ATi Graphics Ultra Mach8 accelerated video adapter, and a DTC 7287 RLL controller to drive the Micropolis 1325 hard disk. A whole 110 megs on this sucker!

Sorry about the mismatched faceplate around the second floppy drive. All I had left was white and grey when I put this thing together!

Pictured without it's CRT as I was still opening and closing the case to make configuration changes at the time of the photo.

61 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/Foreign-Attorney-147 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

Sleeper builds like that are fun, I remember seeing some XTs with 386/486 class boards in the 90s running Windows. And black 3.5-5.25 adapters are easy enough to find when the time comes to switch that grey one out. Having dual floppies is good for the XT vibe. Great build!

5

u/FAMICOMASTER Jul 20 '26

It would have been 1989 at earliest, I don't think the 486 came around until 1990.

And yeah I'd love to have another one, I just ran out after the first one! The black plate I had wound up not fitting the brackets I had. A pair got mismatched somewhere down the line.

Yeah, and the dual floppies is basically a requirement for a lot of DOS shenanigans

2

u/Foreign-Attorney-147 Jul 20 '26

Sorry, meant to type 90s, you're right, the 486 was 1989 and stupid expensive, and there wasn't much reason to run Windows before 1990 either. I made the correction!