The Gray Dragon, 4-7-2002

The Gray Dragon Intel 386SXL 33 Mhz 4 MB 30-pin RAM ?? motherboard Segate 230 MB hard drive WD 40MB hard drive Novell NE2000T plus 10 Mbits/sec ethernet Large AST desktop w/ 230 watt power Trident 8900 1 MB SVGA card

Inside view.  This is a great depiction of how large the case is in compasison to the motherboard.

   The Gray Dragon isn't quite the configuration of my first system, but close.  The Gray Dragon is powered by a 386SX 33MHz CPU-- just 7 MHz less than my orignal system.  It also has 4 megabytes of RAM spanning 4 rows.  This likely means it's using the RAM 32-bits at a time, ware my old system only filled 2 rows-- so could have only been doing 16-bits at a time.  Operating at 32-bits can give the slower CPU an advantage.  Also, there is a 40 MB IDE hard drive as oposed to the 2  MFM drives.  It's not the storage capasity that makes the diffrence, more the speed diffrence-- IDE drives likely faster than MFM.  The 230 meg drive was needed just to get the system to come to life. It apears although the 40 MB drive works, it refuses to be the boot drive.
   One commen item between the two systems is the exact model Trident SVGA card.  The 8900 chipset with 1 MB of video RAM made it posibal to run 1024x768 in 256 colors, and 640x480 in 16.8 million colors.  At the time, this ability was very important to me as expermenting with true-color video modes was something I found very intreeging.  My Trident card, however, seemed to have problems running in true color.  The screen would become grabled very quickly with eratic pixels.  It is my guess the RAM was not fast enough to deal with both updating the video and being modified at the same time.  None the less, the my Trident 8900 served me very well and was one of the last things to be upgraded-- long after the 386SX-40 had been replaced.  The Trident had been with my computers sence I added VGA to my 386SX-16.

Sicker on back of case with details about the origal configuration.

   The case of the Gray Dragon is intresting.  It once housed a system simmiler to what it runs now.  I got the case from a grab pile.  Big and obsoleate, the system's next stop would have been the dumpster had I not grabed it.  This was one of two such systems I picked up.  I liked the large cases with their 230 watt power suplys as they would make good project cases.  The first case went to a test fixture I built for the compney I worked for.  It was a PC based test and had sevral long ISA cards.  The system ran hot, so I used this large case along with some big case fans.  It worked very well.  The Gray Dragon didn't inherit this case for a long time.  I had the case sitting around, but not doing anything.  The motherboard inside had suffered damage from a leaky battary and didn't look functional.  It was repleaced with the motherboard it has now, a donation from Rob Duhnmum (aka Evermuse).  The downfall of this case is there are only 5 1/4" bays-- and those seem to requier brackets I don't have.  For this reason, the hard drives are not mounted very well.
   Today the Gray Dragon is a strict DOS box.  Old games, such as Hero's Quest "So you want to be a hero" are well suited to the speeds of this system.

Motherboard

   In it's day, my 386SX-40 system proformed a large number of tasks.  It's primary use was a system for me to develope software.  In those days, I coded almost exclusivly in Trubo Pascal.  On this system, I learned Intel x86 assembly.  I wrote my first game, "Dodge or Die" on this system.  I also began to learn graphics software, including Paint Shop Pro-- which I still use today; music software-- primarly those to compose and play Amiga modual (.MOD) files and spawns; I ran a BBS-- "Que's Resort"; and, natraly, games.  I basicly lived on my system. 
   Prehaps it seems strange so much of my teenage life centered around my computer.  However, I loved what I did.  I could take pride in my acomplishments-- acomplishments I made compleatly on my own, doing something even most adults didn't understand.  My computer was my pride and joy-- it truly was the love of my life.  And durring this point in my life, I destratly needed something uplifting.  This system has tought me so much of the base I have in computer programming-- a base of knoledge that got me my first programming job right out of high school.  All my old systems were so important for this knoledge.  This is why I keep systems like the Gray Dragon-- to remember and honner the computers that made me into the enthusist I am today.