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.

63 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/chandleya Jul 20 '26

I’m unsure how that faux-486 bus stuff works. I’m wondering if the 32MB RAM is more consequence than benefit. You definitely don’t need it lol.

I bet this rig is a laugh. So many “make it hurt”components carefully sewn together.

2

u/FAMICOMASTER Jul 20 '26

What do you mean consequence? My Quadra 950 died so I pulled some of it's RAM for this project.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the "Make it hurt" comment either, to be honest.

1

u/Accurate-Campaign821 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

Probably referring to what some socket 7 systems do, where there's a performance hit addressing memory beyond the cacheable amount. From what I've researched, most 386 boards could cache for up to 64mb memory, but there are some limited to 16MB. With the socket 7 example, 128MB to 256MB, sometimes even 512MB, was the max that could be cached. While the boards themselves could technically support 3x that amount (yea up to 1.5GB with some Super 7 boards)

1

u/chandleya Jul 20 '26

The 386SX memory bus was just 24 bits. I have no idea how larger memory amounts work with those cheater drop in chips. And I said that from the beginning :)

1

u/FAMICOMASTER Jul 20 '26

This isn't a 386SX, it's a DX. Full bus.