Building a DOS box

I recently bought a lot of 5 old PCs. One of which was a Targa X system, with an AT motherboard. My brother was complaining about Warcraft 2 not running correctly in DOSBox, so why not build a real DOS computer. The computer proved hard to get started. Upon inspection it was easy to see that it was because of leaking caps. I bought a set of new Panasonic caps off ebay. Replacing the caps made the system boot up without any trouble. Other improvements: The front had a teared up energy star logo, streaks from office chairs rubbing off on the front. Also a Norman anti-virus sticker. I cleaned it all off.

Targa x System, all cleaned up!

As for upgrades, I switched the IBM 6x86 P166+ running at 133Mhz for an Intel Pentium MMX 233Mhz. The system was fitted with 96MB EDO across four 72-pin SIMM sticks. This makes the system slow, as the FIC PT-2006 motherboard and its i430VX chipset can only cache the first 64MB of RAM address space. Thus I removed two 16MB sticks to speed the system up. The motherboard also have a free slot for a 256KB COAST cache module, I’ll see if I can get a hold of one of those. Also, I found the motherboard has an USB header. The connector does not have the alignment pin, but the pinout seems standard, so I fitted an 2x USB bracket. in the rear. The passive CPU cooler was replaced with a Socket A cooler master cooler from my scrap bin.

Leaking capacitors and a gold cap IBM 6x86

Leaking capacitors and a gold cap IBM 6x86

On the wishlist is a 256KB COAST 3.0 module, a Sound Blaster AWE32 non-PNP and a network bootable NIC for PXE booting some tools.