To be fair, for most use-cases and users those systems are indeed nothing special after their regular lifespan. It was an outdated „toy or tool“ which was replaced and then useless in the eye of the former owners and I get that.
@@MKRENB I fully understand why people discarded these systems. I (or my family) had a couple of systems in the 90s I wish I had kept myself. I’m just saying, in retrospect, it’s unfortunate and I’m glad this system was restored so well 🙂
I have my recreated fleet of custom-built PCs that mirror setups I had back in the day, but I find that I'm intrigued, now, by OEM builds that I never looked twice at before. They're little time capsules, and it can be fun to recreate the experience of bringing home a full PC as if you just unpacked it from its original box, with original guts, software, matching monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. It's like seeing how the "other half" lived, when everything I ever experienced was an incremental evolution from my first complete PC build, through years of parts swapping, to my current rig(s).
Great video! Fun fact, Jurassic Park is one of the games used on Gona's DOS game compatibility test results page! Apparently it has issues on quite a few graphics cards and a good test.
Who the hell is complaining about you restoring a "boring office machine"? You said yourself that this was a massive learning experience. Simple as that. It turned out great.
Boring? You've gotta be kidding me. If watching this master do PCB-level troubleshooting and repairs to a unique and almost undocumented system is "boring" then those people are in the wrong channel 😅
Great work on restoring this PC! It's a shame you weren't able to get the machine to run properly with L2 installed. Back in the early to mid 90's I had PB machine with the other earlier version of this mainboard that also had an ACC micro chipset. I had the version with only 1 SIMM slot and the Headland Technologies local bus onboard graphics with 512KB of VRAM. I was able to install 128KB of L2 cache and not have any memory speed issues with 1 8MB stick of RAM in the SIMM slot for a total of 12 MB of system RAM. In my case the added L2 made a noticeable difference in many games, especially when I also changed the Intel 486 DX2 66MHz CPU with an AMD 5x86 133MHz in a socket voltage adapter. I ended up having to run the AMD chip at 120MHz (40MHz FSB 3x multiplier) as I could not force the board to send a 2x multiplier to the CPU which would have enabled the 4x multiplier mode. I know these days there are in socket voltage adapters that will allow for this, back then the only one I could get my hands on did not have that option. It only had a few options for selecting the voltage from 3.2 and 3.5 volts with a couple of steps in-between. I distinctly remember I had to set my CPU to 3.45 volts in order for it to run stable. I had the machine fully decked out with 2 HDD's, a 3.5 inch floppy drive, the same Panasonic 2X CD-ROM attached to the Aztech sound card I had, a 28.8 kbps US Robotics modem, a SCSI card attached to an external Zip Drive and a NE2000 compatible NIC with a BNC connector on it. My best friend and next door neighbor and I had a coax network setup between our houses (which were close to each other) and would regularly host LAN parties with our friends in our respective basements while we were in high school. Those were definitely good times!
I live in Brazil and I have a friend who had one of those, his sister lived in the US and brought it when she came for a visit. It was a nice computer, I remember the speakers hanging on the side of the monitor made it look really futuristic and advanced.
This was my family's first new PC, and first PC at all after getting a hand-me-down Macintosh SE from a friend who was upgrading a recording studio. It originally came as a SX and was upgraded shortly thereafter to a 75MHz Pentium.
As always, Great Video !!, it is so nice and relaxing to see you restore this PC. In a way it motivated me to start my own project and revive my Olivetti PC1 which was laying at the attic all this time :)
Far better than any Packard Bell deserves. I learned to hate this brand with every fiber of my being in the mid to late 90s. I worked at a dialup isp at the time and the stupid combo soundcard/modem most of the pentium era Packard Bell's was probably over 50% of the calls at the time. Desprite that, one customer upgraded to a discreet modem and gave the packard bell one to me, and I somehow managed to get it to work under Linux. It was a Frankenstein machine I built entirely of spare parts for my then girlfriend of an old vesa board, my amd 5x86, 3 hard drives, an adaptec scsi card and that PB modem under Debian.
This was kind of a different era for them. I suspect this era was actually OEM'd by Samsung, which appears to have also OEM'd at least the IBM PS/1 486 that I have. These machines weren't too bad. Those combo cards were made by Aztech, which ... for reasons I can't fathom ... are well regarded today. I remember them being an absolute pain in the @$$ back then. Configuration was often an obnoxious jumper / software-select combo, sometimes storing assignments in EEPROM, etc. If you set them up correctly, they work pretty well. But it was not as obvious as e.g. a contemporary Sound Blaster. It was also a pain to find the correct drivers for a given board.
I didn't find it boring and coincidentally it's the same system I had when I was young. I've got 2 of these new that I need to restore and this information has been extremely helpful. I hope to achieve what you've done here and would love to see more like it.
I'm certain I've said this before here but I don't think It will hurt to mention it again. The program "Spinrite" from GRC is a paid program that can really test a hard drive and sometimes recover data from bad sectors. It can sometimes "exercise" the drive enough to fix bad sectors, but I wouldn't trust the drive except only get the data off. Edit: It's really expensive, unfortunately but I think the cost is worth it.
Nice work, Packard Bell PC's were considered close to bottom of the line back in the 90's. Popular PC's in places like Walmart for those who didn't know what they were buying.
great video very well presented . i love how you don't shy away from showing the "didn't go as planned " portions of your repairs .very admirable & informative Yes i too attempted the cache upgrade on 1 of these for a friend back in " the day " & found the same problem . i ended up exchanging him a 2nd hand case & board &( believe the old ones got passed on ) . the result giving him a speed boast using the same cpu & adding memory & SVGA card he had from an older pc of his .
Just yesterday, by great chance, I rescued a IBM PS/2 Model 50 from being thrown into the trash. I had to look for the case in the trash dump, with the accumulated garbage of three days and I only found the lid and the front, covered in mud and crap. the internals almost follow suit, but I save them. The owner, a neophyte, for some reason took it apart, slipped the screwdriver and destroyed 5 resistors and a line on the motherboard. But I have the schematics and hope I can fix it. Today has been a deep cleaning day. The level of dirt was incredible. I even had to disassemble the entire keyboard, down to the springs and keycaps. Now is almost all pristine clean. still to clean the FDD. Only the 80287 is missing. According to the owner, the last time it was used was perhaps in 2000. It will be interesting to see if the HDD still works as well. the bottom and the back I will try to build similar ones, somehow. the lid still have some rust points, after I clean those I will paint it anew.
@@repairwins yep. now also looking for some CGA/MDA/EGA videocards, with composite output (or I'll build a converter) or VGA 8bit or 16bit but 8bit friendly. all those for restoring some machine with historical relevance in my country. at least that PS/2 have on board VGA. find a microchannel videocard is almost impossible for me meanwhile, I have some 386/486 and Socket 7 motherboards in the pipeline for testing and repair (I'll need to bring my inner necroware to restore a battery ravaged 386 motherboard)
Sounds like quite a project. It's nice to have one that is pristine and beautiful, but also kinda cool when you can point to some battle scars and claim that you saved it from the brink of death. Good luck!
Thank you for your incredible efforts and videos I always find them so interesting. I think your style and approach is so calm, welcoming and kind sharing some incredible knowledge. All the best for 2024 🙂
I think you are simply superb! As a Engeneer for sure, but even more as a person! Thank you for this very nice and interesting video! All the best! From Ralonso 😊
This was the first IBM compatible I owned as a child. Unfortunately by the time I had got to it as an adult to fix the varta problem it had too much varta juice for too long and there was basically a large hole in the motherboard where the only traces left disintegrated at the slightest touch. I still have it and all the other parts. I use the power supply regularly to test motherboards that needed AT style connectors. you may even spot it in my ISA doom videos since it is handy for the power supply to have a switch mounted directly on it and being rather small.
Another great video! I would love to see a video explaining optimisation and histroy of config.sys and autoexec.bat files i am yet to find a good video. Cheers Necroware
Asking you why to fix this machine shows that the person do not understand the retro-PC idea at all! Is is like asking a car collector why is he saving a commercial van from the 1960s...Why do anybody restore old furniture? Etc. Great job!! You have saved an interesting piece of history - the CD-Rom and badly designed chipset makes the thing even more interesting. 👍 It has bug? Yes! But this is why we love those! The technology was not fully adult in the 90. at there were so many bugs and problems..😂
I had the tower version of this, minus the multimedia features and with the modem. IIRC, there was an optional COM2 port kit for these. I’d highly recommend modding this for an intake fan going over the processor area if you ever want to run a DX/2 or faster chip on this system.
Also, the fact that you have the 5428 is a win. If you can find the ZIP chip memory for it, you can upgrade the video memory to 2MB, which makes a mild difference in overall video performance from what I remember.
Seeing Flugverein Celle rather surprised me, the company I work at has one of its sites in that town. It is quite a bit away from me still but well interesting to hear a familiar name! Good job fixing the computer, can't wait till i can get my hands on a 1980s/1990s PC myself, already have a Compaq Conture 410c
Love the video. My Brother had one of these models the compact versions of the Packard Bell in that exact form factor his was a multimedia version but it had the blue overdrive socket. His motherboard did accept both the 5 volts and 3.3 volt chips and he was able to upgrade his to the AMD 5x86 133 Mhz CPU.
wow, this game is really ahead of it's time! Weapon is even at side of screen like in modern first person shooters, and unlike doom where it feels like you're pushing stock of your shotgun right to center of your chest
I (my parents, really) had a Packard Bell in this same case, but it was long before the multimedia edition came around, a 486SX-20, 2MB RAM, 106MB HDD, 3.5" drive only. It was pretty sad. It didn't last long, either.
Just for your information jurassic park on the snes was very similar and also featured the 3d first person levels which was kind of incredible at the time
I have the same L2 cache issue with my Packard Bell 486 system. I had upgraded the BIOS a long time ago using MicroFirmware and I thought maybe their BIOS wasn't properly optimized for my system. I never thought that adding L2 cache would slow down the main system RAM! The next time I power it up, I'll have to try disabling the L2 cache to see if the system RAM speeds up. So annoying if that's true.
This HDD looks like it really has a lot of hours on his back. However if you have time try to use some software such as HDAT2 and give it 2-3 unconditional format. I did this on approx. 2-3 drives of that age and some / all BB disapeared. But I had like 2-3 BB per drive. In your case there might really be a phisical surface damage. Anyway the drive still can serve in a retro machines some years...👍
Great video ! About Jurassic park, it seems similar to the one on the SNES, which also has a "3D" view (although more limited). I don't know if they're identical, but it's probably been made by the same team or company. I wonder if the cache issue is a chipset issue, a design issue or a bios issue (which doesn't seem to be fixable with another Packard Bell bios). Maybe you could try the BIOS from a more standard machine using TRW ? Maybe it'll let you tweak more settings, including the memory/cache timings ?
It was indeed made by the same company (Ocean Software) but other than having a lot of stylistic similarities (the motion sensor terminal poles, some similar dinosaur enemy art, indoor first person segments) are completely different games between PC and SNES. The PC CD-ROM and Amiga game are identical (though the Amiga one is inferior technically), the game is completely different than console releases.
Hi Deksor! Thank you. I indeed tried to play with different BIOSes, unfortunately with no real success. I got one BIOS which was very different kind of working, but that didn't change anything, so I assume, there is some kind of hardware bug. Currently I'd like to put this project aside, I already invested a lot of time into it, but in the future I might give it another try, if I get new ideas. Thank you for watching ;)
Great work, saving another retro PC. One thing I immediately noticed: You use the wront screwdriver for the case screws. The screws in computer cases in most cases are Philips type 2 while you are using a type 1 or smaller. This way you can easily mess up the screws. By using the proper screwdriver, you can apply way more force without destroying the screwheads.
Yeah, as you saw in the video I'm lazy and just take the screwdriver which I have at hand. If I notice, that a screw is sitting tightly, of course I take a proper screw driver then.
Shenanigans like using a chipset with a known bug that slows the CPU were among the reasons that Packard Bell got such a bed reputation in the US around this time.
I know that it's too late now, but for future restorations, you might have been able to recover some or all of the damaged files by using SPINRITE software. There is no demo version, but I have used it several times with very good results.
Could the cache bug be a chipset bug/feature similar to that of the Intel Triton chipsets where most of them can't cache more than 64MB of RAM? I wonder if dropping the amount of physical memory would make any difference?
Shame with that cache bug... I had a similar project some time ago, a boring HP Pro 3410 series computer, I was always amazed by those mini computers, always liked HP computers and needed another one since my 10 year old Hp laptop died, the first one I bought Quickly gave up on the motherboard cause it was also bad but I tried to keep it same generation, intel 1155 socket, had a P8H61 board lying around and upgraded to the max wirh i7 3770 and 16 gb of ram, my old gt 1030 for light gaming, maybe one day I will make it really powerfull and try to modify the bios to look more HP-like
@michaelscarport tried that too. As I experimented with various BIOS dumps I took s.t. what didn't had integrated Cirrus Logic VGA bits, so I had to use another card. Neither that, nor my BIOS adventures did change anything on the situation.
Re cache issue - had you tried checking memory speed using only onboard memory chips? It could be an issue with chipset being unable to cache "large" amounts of memory - 12MB are a lot for 486 era.
just got one of these mainboards in a ZDS Z-100 pc, weird but whatever. seems to be rather nice, it performs well when running with a DX2-66 @ 80 mhz. curiously the turbo switch PAL was not populated at all, so turbo does nothing and the machine is always in high speed mode. it's a shame that this chipset mishandles L2 cache so badly though, still i'll try with 512 KB and see if it makes any difference. also, i wonder what J29 does, seems to make no difference on my board, but i saw it labeled as "Fast CPU" on some manuals. sadly, this chipset feels like one of those pcchips crapshoots, there are no datasheets whatsoever on the internet. quite mysterious.
I am happy I grew up on pentiums not 486. Some People Say 486 was Golden era but only for 2d games I think. From pentium 1 you actually can play real 3d
Idk, 486 era was a lot of fun for me. I remember this was around the time when sound cards and CD-ROMs became really popular and was becoming pretty much standard for PCs and as a result the PC became more of a real and progressive (and growing fast!) gaming market for developers and consumers, instead of just boring office machines they had been before, when games had been an afterthought and very limited in quality. Also, there were many types of games on PCs you couldn't easily find on other platforms, like point and click adventures, real-time and turn-based strategies, huge RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic. And then of course Doom happened and this was actually crazy exciting if you had a PC back then.
That makes no real sense on IDE drives. On MFM drives it was necessary to reformat geometry to fit the controller, but on IDE it's not what should be done.
@@necro_ware If memory serves, IDE controllers will actually recognise commands for low-level formats, and then proceed to ignore them. I think the recognition needs to be there because they understand the command set from earlier controllers, and the ability to do a low-level format was part of the spec, so they have to include it, even if they don't actually do anything with it.
Wouldn't this technically be part 4 and the turbo repair be part 3? It would be easier to view the whole journey in order if you would number it accordingly and make an updated playlist. I had to jump back and forth. Just a suggestion.
![ประสบการณ์ จ้าง Developer ที่ผมจะไม่มีวันลืม [ภาค2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pZbsSDRrmXA/mqdefault.jpg)
So many of these once-popular systems were just discarded by people thinking they were nothing special. It’s nice to see one so diligently restored!
To be fair, for most use-cases and users those systems are indeed nothing special after their regular lifespan. It was an outdated „toy or tool“ which was replaced and then useless in the eye of the former owners and I get that.
@@MKRENB I fully understand why people discarded these systems. I (or my family) had a couple of systems in the 90s I wish I had kept myself. I’m just saying, in retrospect, it’s unfortunate and I’m glad this system was restored so well 🙂
Only reason they become something special is because they werent and most of them has ended up as ewaste
I have my recreated fleet of custom-built PCs that mirror setups I had back in the day, but I find that I'm intrigued, now, by OEM builds that I never looked twice at before. They're little time capsules, and it can be fun to recreate the experience of bringing home a full PC as if you just unpacked it from its original box, with original guts, software, matching monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc.
It's like seeing how the "other half" lived, when everything I ever experienced was an incremental evolution from my first complete PC build, through years of parts swapping, to my current rig(s).
Great video! Fun fact, Jurassic Park is one of the games used on Gona's DOS game compatibility test results page! Apparently it has issues on quite a few graphics cards and a good test.
Indeed! That's a good hint. Thank you very much.
37 minutes of Necroware?! Yesss!
He is back! Now I know what to watch once the kids are sleeping 😊
Such a shame about that cache bug. Really beautiful work with this system!
Who the hell is complaining about you restoring a "boring office machine"? You said yourself that this was a massive learning experience. Simple as that. It turned out great.
Boring? You've gotta be kidding me. If watching this master do PCB-level troubleshooting and repairs to a unique and almost undocumented system is "boring" then those people are in the wrong channel 😅
Such a nice project - weird behaviour with the cache indeed which makes this system unique though :) Well done!
Hi Tony :)
@@harvaldi Hi there :)
Love this. Thank you
OMG new necroware video!!! what a glorious day !
Thank you very much for your videos. Looking forward for the next
Great ending of the great series!
Good to have you back Mr Necro
Good to see you back my friend!
its been a long time pal good 2 see you back
Great work on restoring this PC! It's a shame you weren't able to get the machine to run properly with L2 installed. Back in the early to mid 90's I had PB machine with the other earlier version of this mainboard that also had an ACC micro chipset. I had the version with only 1 SIMM slot and the Headland Technologies local bus onboard graphics with 512KB of VRAM. I was able to install 128KB of L2 cache and not have any memory speed issues with 1 8MB stick of RAM in the SIMM slot for a total of 12 MB of system RAM.
In my case the added L2 made a noticeable difference in many games, especially when I also changed the Intel 486 DX2 66MHz CPU with an AMD 5x86 133MHz in a socket voltage adapter. I ended up having to run the AMD chip at 120MHz (40MHz FSB 3x multiplier) as I could not force the board to send a 2x multiplier to the CPU which would have enabled the 4x multiplier mode. I know these days there are in socket voltage adapters that will allow for this, back then the only one I could get my hands on did not have that option. It only had a few options for selecting the voltage from 3.2 and 3.5 volts with a couple of steps in-between.
I distinctly remember I had to set my CPU to 3.45 volts in order for it to run stable. I had the machine fully decked out with 2 HDD's, a 3.5 inch floppy drive, the same Panasonic 2X CD-ROM attached to the Aztech sound card I had, a 28.8 kbps US Robotics modem, a SCSI card attached to an external Zip Drive and a NE2000 compatible NIC with a BNC connector on it. My best friend and next door neighbor and I had a coax network setup between our houses (which were close to each other) and would regularly host LAN parties with our friends in our respective basements while we were in high school. Those were definitely good times!
I have that board, which you mentioned. You could see it in the last video. Unfortunately, it has the exact same issue.
Every repair is a challenge to yourself to find a solution.
Good work. Waiting for new interesting video.
I always look forward to watching your videos great content great skills !
Always nice to see your videos!
Great video and very interesting story about the L2 cache issue!
Great work. Even the screwdrivers are retro, i had the same, when i was a kid and played with these pcs at there time.
I live in Brazil and I have a friend who had one of those, his sister lived in the US and brought it when she came for a visit. It was a nice computer, I remember the speakers hanging on the side of the monitor made it look really futuristic and advanced.
Finally! Been waiting on this one!
This was my family's first new PC, and first PC at all after getting a hand-me-down Macintosh SE from a friend who was upgrading a recording studio. It originally came as a SX and was upgraded shortly thereafter to a 75MHz Pentium.
What a series. Incredible work done on this system. I'm thoroughly impressed.
Great Job Very Interesting Video Thank You
Your game content is riveting, as far as retro hardware people go you have the best gaming segment I've seen.
As always, Great Video !!, it is so nice and relaxing to see you restore this PC. In a way it motivated me to start my own project and revive my Olivetti PC1 which was laying at the attic all this time :)
Far better than any Packard Bell deserves. I learned to hate this brand with every fiber of my being in the mid to late 90s. I worked at a dialup isp at the time and the stupid combo soundcard/modem most of the pentium era Packard Bell's was probably over 50% of the calls at the time. Desprite that, one customer upgraded to a discreet modem and gave the packard bell one to me, and I somehow managed to get it to work under Linux. It was a Frankenstein machine I built entirely of spare parts for my then girlfriend of an old vesa board, my amd 5x86, 3 hard drives, an adaptec scsi card and that PB modem under Debian.
This was kind of a different era for them. I suspect this era was actually OEM'd by Samsung, which appears to have also OEM'd at least the IBM PS/1 486 that I have. These machines weren't too bad.
Those combo cards were made by Aztech, which ... for reasons I can't fathom ... are well regarded today. I remember them being an absolute pain in the @$$ back then. Configuration was often an obnoxious jumper / software-select combo, sometimes storing assignments in EEPROM, etc. If you set them up correctly, they work pretty well. But it was not as obvious as e.g. a contemporary Sound Blaster. It was also a pain to find the correct drivers for a given board.
Very intresting !!! Thank you!
Very NICE!
I didn't find it boring and coincidentally it's the same system I had when I was young. I've got 2 of these new that I need to restore and this information has been extremely helpful. I hope to achieve what you've done here and would love to see more like it.
Thank you for the education and inspiration
This montage music reminds me of flying through hyperspace.
hellooooo good to see you !! many mo0nths have passed we missed you
Oh man, that game is a massive score. I admire your perseverance.
I'm certain I've said this before here but I don't think It will hurt to mention it again. The program "Spinrite" from GRC is a paid program that can really test a hard drive and sometimes recover data from bad sectors. It can sometimes "exercise" the drive enough to fix bad sectors, but I wouldn't trust the drive except only get the data off.
Edit: It's really expensive, unfortunately but I think the cost is worth it.
Nice work, Packard Bell PC's were considered close to bottom of the line back in the 90's. Popular PC's in places like Walmart for those who didn't know what they were buying.
great video very well presented . i love how you don't shy away from showing the "didn't go as planned " portions of your repairs .very admirable & informative Yes i too attempted the cache upgrade on 1 of these for a friend back in " the day " & found the same problem . i ended up exchanging him a 2nd hand case & board &( believe the old ones got passed on ) . the result giving him a speed boast using the same cpu & adding memory & SVGA card he had from an older pc of his .
Just yesterday, by great chance, I rescued a IBM PS/2 Model 50 from being thrown into the trash. I had to look for the case in the trash dump, with the accumulated garbage of three days and I only found the lid and the front, covered in mud and crap. the internals almost follow suit, but I save them. The owner, a neophyte, for some reason took it apart, slipped the screwdriver and destroyed 5 resistors and a line on the motherboard. But I have the schematics and hope I can fix it. Today has been a deep cleaning day. The level of dirt was incredible. I even had to disassemble the entire keyboard, down to the springs and keycaps.
Now is almost all pristine clean. still to clean the FDD. Only the 80287 is missing. According to the owner, the last time it was used was perhaps in 2000. It will be interesting to see if the HDD still works as well. the bottom and the back I will try to build similar ones, somehow. the lid still have some rust points, after I clean those I will paint it anew.
@@repairwins
yep.
now also looking for some CGA/MDA/EGA videocards, with composite output (or I'll build a converter) or VGA 8bit or 16bit but 8bit friendly. all those for restoring some machine with historical relevance in my country.
at least that PS/2 have on board VGA. find a microchannel videocard is almost impossible for me
meanwhile, I have some 386/486 and Socket 7 motherboards in the pipeline for testing and repair (I'll need to bring my inner necroware to restore a battery ravaged 386 motherboard)
Sounds like quite a project. It's nice to have one that is pristine and beautiful, but also kinda cool when you can point to some battle scars and claim that you saved it from the brink of death. Good luck!
I would really love to see someone (ideally Necroware :) ) digging deeper into this strange L2 / mem issue.
The first-person levels with raptors scared the crap out of me as a kid, more than Doom did.
Uhullll. Yesterday I was searching for New vídeos ar you channel. See your notification was a Very Nice surprise.
Thank you for your incredible efforts and videos I always find them so interesting. I think your style and approach is so calm, welcoming and kind sharing some incredible knowledge. All the best for 2024 🙂
I was just looking a couple of days ago to see if you had uploaded anything recently. Man, I love your humor. LOL
Great video! I also never saw that jurassic park game. Will try it now, thank you.
I think you are simply superb! As a Engeneer for sure, but even more as a person! Thank you for this very nice and interesting video! All the best! From Ralonso 😊
Very good work. Respect to you for her.
I did think about the volume control as you were doing it, though I agree it's a nice piece of character!
This was the first IBM compatible I owned as a child. Unfortunately by the time I had got to it as an adult to fix the varta problem it had too much varta juice for too long and there was basically a large hole in the motherboard where the only traces left disintegrated at the slightest touch.
I still have it and all the other parts. I use the power supply regularly to test motherboards that needed AT style connectors. you may even spot it in my ISA doom videos since it is handy for the power supply to have a switch mounted directly on it and being rather small.
Awesome video, very much useful. Thank you a lot so far.
Another great video! I would love to see a video explaining optimisation and histroy of config.sys and autoexec.bat files i am yet to find a good video. Cheers Necroware
Asking you why to fix this machine shows that the person do not understand the retro-PC idea at all! Is is like asking a car collector why is he saving a commercial van from the 1960s...Why do anybody restore old furniture? Etc. Great job!! You have saved an interesting piece of history - the CD-Rom and badly designed chipset makes the thing even more interesting. 👍 It has bug? Yes! But this is why we love those! The technology was not fully adult in the 90. at there were so many bugs and problems..😂
I had the tower version of this, minus the multimedia features and with the modem. IIRC, there was an optional COM2 port kit for these.
I’d highly recommend modding this for an intake fan going over the processor area if you ever want to run a DX/2 or faster chip on this system.
Also, the fact that you have the 5428 is a win. If you can find the ZIP chip memory for it, you can upgrade the video memory to 2MB, which makes a mild difference in overall video performance from what I remember.
Seeing Flugverein Celle rather surprised me, the company I work at has one of its sites in that town. It is quite a bit away from me still but well interesting to hear a familiar name! Good job fixing the computer, can't wait till i can get my hands on a 1980s/1990s PC myself, already have a Compaq Conture 410c
🤣🤣🤣The world is just a village. Greetings from Celle
That is super weird - I have also never heard about that Jurassic Park game and I played ALL the games in the 80s / 90s!
Love the video. My Brother had one of these models the compact versions of the Packard Bell in that exact form factor his was a multimedia version but it had the blue overdrive socket. His motherboard did accept both the 5 volts and 3.3 volt chips and he was able to upgrade his to the AMD 5x86 133 Mhz CPU.
For PSU Fan you can use 5 Volt to get them very quiet :)
wow, this game is really ahead of it's time! Weapon is even at side of screen like in modern first person shooters, and unlike doom where it feels like you're pushing stock of your shotgun right to center of your chest
Bravo ! I pretty much what you are talking about at the end, and I do similar things.
I've had some success with using a paste made from Oxyclean on yellowed plastics in the past.
I love your videos!!
I love that system
My PB 286 was my first computer, loved that machine.
What type of Oil did you drop in the fan?
Machine oil for small mechanical parts.
@@necro_ware Just checking, I swear at some point in the past someone on yt was using eucalyptus oil for lubricating fan coils for some reason,
@@necro_ware I think those fans have integrated ball bearings, so not much to be really done with oiling them...
I (my parents, really) had a Packard Bell in this same case, but it was long before the multimedia edition came around, a 486SX-20, 2MB RAM, 106MB HDD, 3.5" drive only. It was pretty sad. It didn't last long, either.
Just for your information jurassic park on the snes was very similar and also featured the 3d first person levels which was kind of incredible at the time
Why remove that sticker? I think it adds to the value of the machine, it shows its history.
I have the same L2 cache issue with my Packard Bell 486 system. I had upgraded the BIOS a long time ago using MicroFirmware and I thought maybe their BIOS wasn't properly optimized for my system. I never thought that adding L2 cache would slow down the main system RAM! The next time I power it up, I'll have to try disabling the L2 cache to see if the system RAM speeds up. So annoying if that's true.
This HDD looks like it really has a lot of hours on his back. However if you have time try to use some software such as HDAT2 and give it 2-3 unconditional format. I did this on approx. 2-3 drives of that age and some / all BB disapeared. But I had like 2-3 BB per drive. In your case there might really be a phisical surface damage. Anyway the drive still can serve in a retro machines some years...👍
dir/w/p my fav. great work, sad cache was an issue
NICE VIDEO.
i cant get into dos on the one in bought, it freezes at the i.d. grey indication screen, then i get operating system not found.._
The slowdown is due to having more RAM than the L2 cacheable area size. If you put less ram, or more cache, the problem will go away. It's not a bug.
No. Trusted with down to 2MB.
I have a Matsushita branded CR-585B cd drive.
On a CD-ROM drive, it's only a caddy if it's a separate unit that you have to remove from the drive, in this case it's a sled.
Thank you.
Great video !
About Jurassic park, it seems similar to the one on the SNES, which also has a "3D" view (although more limited). I don't know if they're identical, but it's probably been made by the same team or company.
I wonder if the cache issue is a chipset issue, a design issue or a bios issue (which doesn't seem to be fixable with another Packard Bell bios). Maybe you could try the BIOS from a more standard machine using TRW ? Maybe it'll let you tweak more settings, including the memory/cache timings ?
It was indeed made by the same company (Ocean Software) but other than having a lot of stylistic similarities (the motion sensor terminal poles, some similar dinosaur enemy art, indoor first person segments) are completely different games between PC and SNES. The PC CD-ROM and Amiga game are identical (though the Amiga one is inferior technically), the game is completely different than console releases.
Hi Deksor! Thank you. I indeed tried to play with different BIOSes, unfortunately with no real success. I got one BIOS which was very different kind of working, but that didn't change anything, so I assume, there is some kind of hardware bug. Currently I'd like to put this project aside, I already invested a lot of time into it, but in the future I might give it another try, if I get new ideas. Thank you for watching ;)
Don't make me wait so long for the next movie, I'm hungry for new stories :)
He can take as long as he needs to
@@ryballs4569, you must be fun at parties...
@@ruxandythanks 😊
Great work, saving another retro PC.
One thing I immediately noticed:
You use the wront screwdriver for the case screws. The screws in computer cases in most cases are Philips type 2 while you are using a type 1 or smaller. This way you can easily mess up the screws.
By using the proper screwdriver, you can apply way more force without destroying the screwheads.
Yeah, as you saw in the video I'm lazy and just take the screwdriver which I have at hand. If I notice, that a screw is sitting tightly, of course I take a proper screw driver then.
That Jurassic Park game kinda reminds me of the SNES one (also top-down with 3D/FPS elements) but perhaps better executed.
Shenanigans like using a chipset with a known bug that slows the CPU were among the reasons that Packard Bell got such a bed reputation in the US around this time.
I know that it's too late now, but for future restorations, you might have been able to recover some or all of the damaged files by using SPINRITE software. There is no demo version, but I have used it several times with very good results.
Where did you go bro?
Could the cache bug be a chipset bug/feature similar to that of the Intel Triton chipsets where most of them can't cache more than 64MB of RAM? I wonder if dropping the amount of physical memory would make any difference?
Shame the cache has a catch!
Now that's a bit of a bummer. L2 cache bug? Would have been fixed, If you had changed the chips and increased the L2 cache?
This machine allows only 128K or 512K cache, but for 512K you need super rare chips which I don't have. I even never saw such ICs.
Does clmode work with ISA cards? Can you give a link to download?
do you think the issue is address space size? what if you run 2MB system memory or something like 2x2MB?
No, it seems to be unrelated to the memory size. I tested with all kind of combinations down to only 2MB RAM without any change.
Shame with that cache bug... I had a similar project some time ago, a boring HP Pro 3410 series computer, I was always amazed by those mini computers, always liked HP computers and needed another one since my 10 year old Hp laptop died, the first one I bought
Quickly gave up on the motherboard cause it was also bad but I tried to keep it same generation, intel 1155 socket, had a P8H61 board lying around and upgraded to the max wirh i7 3770 and 16 gb of ram, my old gt 1030 for light gaming, maybe one day I will make it really powerfull and try to modify the bios to look more HP-like
Have not you thought about messing arround with BIOS and unlocking timing options? Maybe that's an issue with ram/cache situation?
I did try of course, but there was nothing to show, so I decided to skip.
@@necro_ware it's a shame. I thought that there might be some hidden timing settings :) thanks for the reply :)
@michaelscarport tried that too. As I experimented with various BIOS dumps I took s.t. what didn't had integrated Cirrus Logic VGA bits, so I had to use another card. Neither that, nor my BIOS adventures did change anything on the situation.
I would love if someone could troubleshoot the cache issue on the MB.
Re cache issue - had you tried checking memory speed using only onboard memory chips? It could be an issue with chipset being unable to cache "large" amounts of memory - 12MB are a lot for 486 era.
just got one of these mainboards in a ZDS Z-100 pc, weird but whatever. seems to be rather nice, it performs well when running with a DX2-66 @ 80 mhz. curiously the turbo switch PAL was not populated at all, so turbo does nothing and the machine is always in high speed mode. it's a shame that this chipset mishandles L2 cache so badly though, still i'll try with 512 KB and see if it makes any difference. also, i wonder what J29 does, seems to make no difference on my board, but i saw it labeled as "Fast CPU" on some manuals.
sadly, this chipset feels like one of those pcchips crapshoots, there are no datasheets whatsoever on the internet. quite mysterious.
As a ppl pilot I really want to get my hands on that ppl program 😊
That JP game looks a lot like the SNES version that i played when i was a kid but slightly different
Lieben Gruß aus Celle ❤
Liebe Grüße zurück :)
I am happy I grew up on pentiums not 486. Some People Say 486 was Golden era but only for 2d games I think. From pentium 1 you actually can play real 3d
only the 3d quality was still limited.
Idk, 486 era was a lot of fun for me. I remember this was around the time when sound cards and CD-ROMs became really popular and was becoming pretty much standard for PCs and as a result the PC became more of a real and progressive (and growing fast!) gaming market for developers and consumers, instead of just boring office machines they had been before, when games had been an afterthought and very limited in quality. Also, there were many types of games on PCs you couldn't easily find on other platforms, like point and click adventures, real-time and turn-based strategies, huge RPGs like Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic. And then of course Doom happened and this was actually crazy exciting if you had a PC back then.
I think of the 486 as the era when x86 was first delivered in a completed form. No need for a dedicated FPU chip any more.
how's it been?!?!?
It's a shame the chipset has that cache bug, you might be able to make up for it with an Intel Overdrive chip (or similar brands)
what about a low level format on the original drive?
That makes no real sense on IDE drives. On MFM drives it was necessary to reformat geometry to fit the controller, but on IDE it's not what should be done.
@@necro_ware If memory serves, IDE controllers will actually recognise commands for low-level formats, and then proceed to ignore them. I think the recognition needs to be there because they understand the command set from earlier controllers, and the ability to do a low-level format was part of the spec, so they have to include it, even if they don't actually do anything with it.
Wouldn't this technically be part 4 and the turbo repair be part 3? It would be easier to view the whole journey in order if you would number it accordingly and make an updated playlist. I had to jump back and forth. Just a suggestion.