I did once encounter a 286 that had the max supported amount of 16MB RAM. It was in a large AT tower case, running some flavor of Unix (probably Xenix 286), was connected to a small modem bank, and was responsible for running an employee time clock database backend for a number of remote sites. This was well into the 90s and it was still going. We had to shut it down during a server room reorganization, and there was some fear of bringing it back up, but it came right back - that was when I saw the POST (on an amber mono display) showing the 80286 CPU and counting up a full 16MB RAM. Very fortunate since neither myself nor anyone else there knew much about Xenix, and whoever built the system was long gone. Such oddities like that do stick with you years later. I had never seen a 286 with 16MB RAM before or ever since. It must have cost a fortune when built out, and I'm not even sure if it was really necessary to run that backend since it probably was a relatively small database that only received a few batch submissions per day.
Over 20 years ago I played around with a Compaq 386 with 16MiB of ram - didn't do much for Doom. Today I would love to have such a machine for the original Warcraft.
I have a 486 DX2 66 MHz and the maximum memory supported by the motherboard is actually 32 MB, which was a LOT, even for such much faster processors. Anything above that works, but is not cached on the motherboard cache, which means the access is a lot slower, and not really recommended. I had the full 32 MB installed at the time, 2-3 years after I bought the computer, and it worked great even with memory intensive things, like Windows NT, OS2, 3dstudio, etc... so, for a 386 it's an insane amount of memory!
I totally agree - having 8 MB there felt like a lot already. I just wanted to see how far a humble 386 can be pushed, especially that the motherboard caches all 32 MB. I think I'll experiment with audio editing next.
I had a sleepover at a friends house back in 1994 who's parents were millionaires. He told me his Dad (a writer) had bought himself a new computer and that it had 32MB RAM. I didn't believe him of course. That'd be like telling me someone had 256GB memory today, in a home desktop computer used for writing articles.... Anyways, his Dad let us use the computer it sure enough had 32MB EDO RAM, running on a Pentium 75Mhz. I was convinced that computer could be used to take over the entire world.
Nice work! 👌.Do you btw have any idea if possible to have more than 1 MB of sample memory installed on a Gravis Ultrasound MAX??. The older models (1.8, 1.9? and below) even seem to have solder joints for more memory chips. Would if nothing else be great with some addon or mod to be able to expand the memory.
@@neointernalforce Yes that might be the case, i actually have two of the older MAX cards, the newer one beeing the 1.8 version with the addon memory chip. Also a good thing about the older ones is that the for example the GF1 chip is not soldered to the board but socketed, so much easier to swap or mod. Would be nice with a mod for the MAX card so it could accept at least 4 MB of samples. Using a MAX card in combo with a Sound Blaster 16 CT2910 with genuine Yamaha chips in my Socket 7 Retro system. Do have several other systems as well. Thanks for the responce 👍👍
There was another classic old DOS title simply called "Realms". Kind of a precursor to the Total War genre, with some RPG and Masters Of Magic elements thrown in.
Turn off the virtual memory. I remember old versions of Windows, even if you had a lot of ram, still wasted time swapping portions of the OS onto the disk pagefile, and slowed everything down. No matter if you had a ton of RAM.
It depends upon the o/s and what you're going to do with it. Back in the day, 32mb on Win98 while using the internet was not enough....in fact, even 64mb could feel slow at times. 128mb is a nice amount of memory for 98/Me....don't know about 95, I don't have any experience with it
You could get hold of Doom 2 and the DCK toolkit and build custom Doom levels. You may even be able to get hold of Quake 1 and use Worldcraft to create levels. And of course, play both these games. For me, this is incredibly more interesting than Excel or the like. This is what I did on these computers when I didn't feel like doing my work, back in the mid-1990s I also started building websites on them, my first in 1995. You could do a great deal with 32MB of RAM on a 386 with some imagination.
@@matthewtrow5698 I wouldn't attempt to PLAY Quake on that... It may be fun to run it once to witness the slideshow but that's about it. I'm going to try some early non-3D DirectX games at some point though.
@@x12-f9z 32 MB was a luxury up to mid 90s. When Windows 95 was released, PCs normally had 8-16 MB, it was 1997 by the time 32 MB started to get common. Software was well optimised.
@@neointernalforce I think my nostalgia glasses need a bit of tweaking. I do recall, on my work 386, installing Quake1 shareware. My company was too tight to give me a new Pentium, that was reserved for the boss and his PA, so she could play solitaire whilst doing her nails. I had to produce CAD wiring diagrams on a 386 with a 512kb graphics card. Now I think of it, I don't recall getting quake 1 running at all on that 386, but I absolutely tried my hardest! My buddy worked at an ISP and he was forever raiding the hardware cupboard, so we built up a Pentium from spare parts. That's what I'm probably thinking of. However, my work 386 - it played Civilisation 1 really well and of course Doom 2.
@@michaeldale837 yes, it has DIP sockets with 128kB installed :) Yeah, that S3 was a nice catch, although still not cheap at £40. But there are faster ISA graphics cards still and I want to build a Cirrus one with 2MB as one of the future projects
@@michaeldale837 I have an ET4000AX. Runs Doom and SU27-Flanker really well, coupled with a downclocked K6-III (75Mhz). Machine is still way too fast for many older DOS games though. I don't own a 386/486 anymore.
I like the idea! I'm thinking of using a 386 to host a variant of a multi-line BBS, and maybe something like this might help support more clients (or more clients for something like mTCP's FTP?). hope the compatibility works out - old BIOS's don't much care on the size? and is 4MB modules rather the limit, not larger? Maybe 3DStudioMax can use? What about an ISR to save game state entirely? I like the old games, but modern life has more interrupts such that I get to a point in the game where I can't save and have to step out - an on-system way to "mirror" 2MB into a higher RAM drive, and then dump that to a file to get loaded later? Maybe not quite possible. And - there is OS/2 ;) Looking forward to try a set of these someday!
Doesn’t smartdrive use up some base ram? This is going to cause issues with some fussy games? Is this method better than creating a ram drive and just copying the entire game to the ram drive via a script when it’s called? Couldn’t you replace the HDD with an SSD via an adaptor and achieve the same speed increase?
@@Ironbuket You can load smartdrv to high memory. Yeah RAM drive would work just as well, that's why extra memory is useful. You may run into issues with an SSD on an adaptor and IDE transfers hog up the CPU much more.
I did once encounter a 286 that had the max supported amount of 16MB RAM. It was in a large AT tower case, running some flavor of Unix (probably Xenix 286), was connected to a small modem bank, and was responsible for running an employee time clock database backend for a number of remote sites. This was well into the 90s and it was still going. We had to shut it down during a server room reorganization, and there was some fear of bringing it back up, but it came right back - that was when I saw the POST (on an amber mono display) showing the 80286 CPU and counting up a full 16MB RAM. Very fortunate since neither myself nor anyone else there knew much about Xenix, and whoever built the system was long gone.
Such oddities like that do stick with you years later. I had never seen a 286 with 16MB RAM before or ever since. It must have cost a fortune when built out, and I'm not even sure if it was really necessary to run that backend since it probably was a relatively small database that only received a few batch submissions per day.
maybe just me but the background tic-tac sound of the clock is driving me nuts!
Over 20 years ago I played around with a Compaq 386 with 16MiB of ram - didn't do much for Doom. Today I would love to have such a machine for the original Warcraft.
what can you do with 32 meg of ram you would be surprised🤣🤣
32MB? Don't be ridiculous, nobody needs that much RAM.
If it wants to run Windows NT/95, Xenix or OS/2 having that much of ram definitely helps
All a man really needs is 512kb 🙏
I have a 486 DX2 66 MHz and the maximum memory supported by the motherboard is actually 32 MB, which was a LOT, even for such much faster processors. Anything above that works, but is not cached on the motherboard cache, which means the access is a lot slower, and not really recommended. I had the full 32 MB installed at the time, 2-3 years after I bought the computer, and it worked great even with memory intensive things, like Windows NT, OS2, 3dstudio, etc... so, for a 386 it's an insane amount of memory!
I totally agree - having 8 MB there felt like a lot already. I just wanted to see how far a humble 386 can be pushed, especially that the motherboard caches all 32 MB. I think I'll experiment with audio editing next.
That is very cool! I had only 4 megs of RAM on my 386 back in the day. 32 megs would probably have cost more than my entire 386 system :)
4MB Simms were $150 January 1992, dropping to $100 in December 1992, and back to $130 in December 1994. Cool ~$1200 for that much ram.
I had a sleepover at a friends house back in 1994 who's parents were millionaires. He told me his Dad (a writer) had bought himself a new computer and that it had 32MB RAM. I didn't believe him of course. That'd be like telling me someone had 256GB memory today, in a home desktop computer used for writing articles....
Anyways, his Dad let us use the computer it sure enough had 32MB EDO RAM, running on a Pentium 75Mhz. I was convinced that computer could be used to take over the entire world.
Back in the days of the 386, the answer would have been, "ANYTHING!"
there was always that guy in class who had the smoothest cut scenes
Excellent work. Thank You .
Nice work! 👌.Do you btw have any idea if possible to have more than 1 MB of sample memory installed on a Gravis Ultrasound MAX??. The older models (1.8, 1.9? and below) even seem to have solder joints for more memory chips. Would if nothing else be great with some addon or mod to be able to expand the memory.
@@7828191 I don't think GF1 supports more than 1 MB of memory. The older models had places for lower density chips
@@neointernalforce Yes that might be the case, i actually have two of the older MAX cards, the newer one beeing the 1.8 version with the addon memory chip. Also a good thing about the older ones is that the for example the GF1 chip is not soldered to the board but socketed, so much easier to swap or mod. Would be nice with a mod for the MAX card so it could accept at least 4 MB of samples. Using a MAX card in combo with a Sound Blaster 16 CT2910 with genuine Yamaha chips in my Socket 7 Retro system. Do have several other systems as well. Thanks for the responce 👍👍
LORDS OF THE REALMMMM, I HAVE THIS GAME SOMEWHERE!!! I couldn't play it very well, because my dad's PC didn't have very much RAM, but yeah
There was another classic old DOS title simply called "Realms". Kind of a precursor to the Total War genre, with some RPG and Masters Of Magic elements thrown in.
Turn off the virtual memory. I remember old versions of Windows, even if you had a lot of ram, still wasted time swapping portions of the OS onto the disk pagefile, and slowed everything down. No matter if you had a ton of RAM.
I found that switching off virtual memory often weirdly slows the system down - not sure why
It depends upon the o/s and what you're going to do with it. Back in the day, 32mb on Win98 while using the internet was not enough....in fact, even 64mb could feel slow at times. 128mb is a nice amount of memory for 98/Me....don't know about 95, I don't have any experience with it
Get a compact flash adapter and card for this beast and it’ll fly
@@stephenpearce8341 It has one already as a secondary storage. I'm not going to torture it with the swap file though
You could get hold of Doom 2 and the DCK toolkit and build custom Doom levels.
You may even be able to get hold of Quake 1 and use Worldcraft to create levels.
And of course, play both these games.
For me, this is incredibly more interesting than Excel or the like.
This is what I did on these computers when I didn't feel like doing my work, back in the mid-1990s
I also started building websites on them, my first in 1995.
You could do a great deal with 32MB of RAM on a 386 with some imagination.
@@matthewtrow5698 I wouldn't attempt to PLAY Quake on that... It may be fun to run it once to witness the slideshow but that's about it. I'm going to try some early non-3D DirectX games at some point though.
As a Gen Z, I'm astonished how y'all made the world work on 32MB
@@x12-f9z 32 MB was a luxury up to mid 90s. When Windows 95 was released, PCs normally had 8-16 MB, it was 1997 by the time 32 MB started to get common. Software was well optimised.
@@neointernalforce I think my nostalgia glasses need a bit of tweaking.
I do recall, on my work 386, installing Quake1 shareware. My company was too tight to give me a new Pentium, that was reserved for the boss and his PA, so she could play solitaire whilst doing her nails.
I had to produce CAD wiring diagrams on a 386 with a 512kb graphics card.
Now I think of it, I don't recall getting quake 1 running at all on that 386, but I absolutely tried my hardest!
My buddy worked at an ISP and he was forever raiding the hardware cupboard, so we built up a Pentium from spare parts.
That's what I'm probably thinking of.
However, my work 386 - it played Civilisation 1 really well and of course Doom 2.
Wishful thinking.
Nice! Love a 386 DX40, nice machines. Does yours have cache on the motherboard? Also ISA S3 must be nice...
@@michaeldale837 yes, it has DIP sockets with 128kB installed :) Yeah, that S3 was a nice catch, although still not cheap at £40. But there are faster ISA graphics cards still and I want to build a Cirrus one with 2MB as one of the future projects
@@neointernalforce I've got a WD90C31-LR ISA which is pretty good. Although the ET4000 for DOS is pretty perfect.
@@michaeldale837 I have an ET4000AX. Runs Doom and SU27-Flanker really well, coupled with a downclocked K6-III (75Mhz).
Machine is still way too fast for many older DOS games though. I don't own a 386/486 anymore.
great video, subscribed
I like the idea! I'm thinking of using a 386 to host a variant of a multi-line BBS, and maybe something like this might help support more clients (or more clients for something like mTCP's FTP?). hope the compatibility works out - old BIOS's don't much care on the size? and is 4MB modules rather the limit, not larger? Maybe 3DStudioMax can use? What about an ISR to save game state entirely? I like the old games, but modern life has more interrupts such that I get to a point in the game where I can't save and have to step out - an on-system way to "mirror" 2MB into a higher RAM drive, and then dump that to a file to get loaded later? Maybe not quite possible. And - there is OS/2 ;) Looking forward to try a set of these someday!
I had a 20 MB hard drive on my 286 lol.
windows 95 would also boot and be usable even with just 8MB of ram too.
@@MarkWhich Yes, but you'd have a lot of swapping once you start actually working with it
So you basically can do 90% of a normal office day?
@@kinghans6266 yep, most common office tasks could be still successfully accomplished on a 30+ years old computer.
Doesn’t smartdrive use up some base ram? This is going to cause issues with some fussy games? Is this method better than creating a ram drive and just copying the entire game to the ram drive via a script when it’s called? Couldn’t you replace the HDD with an SSD via an adaptor and achieve the same speed increase?
@@Ironbuket You can load smartdrv to high memory. Yeah RAM drive would work just as well, that's why extra memory is useful. You may run into issues with an SSD on an adaptor and IDE transfers hog up the CPU much more.
is that ticking a 💣?
When I play Minesweeper, it is ;)
I like retro stolik z kubkami lol
i have the same monitor
Super film ];-D i fryzura.