Yes, I think the majority of 386-era games shipped on 3.5" or dual media.
On the other hand, most CD titles ran a little slow on 386 (e.g. Police Quest 4)..

This experience is from my 386 build in my signature, which has 5.25, 3.5, and a 1x CD drive.

There are exceptions of course (e.g. Mad Dog McCree runs even on 286, Space Quest 4 CD runs just fine on 386). But I think 386 was commonly found as a 5.25"+3.5" machine way more than 3.5"+CD machine... at least that was my experience back in the day. Consumer CD drives barely started to show up near the end of the 386 era and jumped in popularity just as the Pentium became available..

Hi, here in my place the 5,25"1,2MB floppy drive was common well into the Pentium era. Especially on tower PCs.

Tiny mainboards with a am386DX-40 processor were popular until early Windows 95 days, too.
Users who bought a cheap 386DX-40 not rarely opted for buying a bit more RAM, also.

On desktop PCs, the 3,5" floppy drive was most important, followed by CD-ROM drive.
Compaq PCs also had acustom audio chip, "business audio" built-in, I remember.

So yeah, both 5,25" floppy drive and CD-ROM drive were common.
The CD-ROM drive was more attractive, though, due to the multimedia craze of early 90s.

OK. So far then it seems to be one vote for CD and one vote for floppy drive. Haha.

I am a little concerned at how difficult it will be to get data onto this PC if I don't have a CD drive. But if most software that I will run on it is small enough to fit on floppies then that would be OK.

I would need to get some games on 5.25" floppy to make it worth having I think... any suggestions?

Period-correct for 386 it would be the floppy drive but with Pentium inside I'd argue a CD-ROM makes more sense for newer games. Even some older games had re-released with speech packs and cutscenes. CD-ROMs became more common on PCs with 486 CPUs (esp. DX2) and above. And if you are not going to use the CD-ROM, why install it at all, all it will do is gather dust and kill the laser. But the same argument about gathering dust can be made for the floppy drive(s).

Frankly the only reason you'd want a floppy drive at all is because you have floppies and you like to use them. Keeping in mind those can get damaged so you don't want to risk your original game/software floppies, make copies. Other than that though most people would go for a floppy drive emulator. I do like floppies so I'm biased towards builds with floppy drives but I'm not blind to the issues (old age, dust, reliability, etc). It's like with using old mechanical HDDs instead of CF cards - both have pros and cons but CFs are easier to work with these days.

My recollection of 1989 is that CD-ROMs were available but they were slow 1x devices that cost > $300 and came bundled with proprietary 8 bit SCSI-ish cards that were only good for a specific device and the device was only good with that card. The DOS drivers were ornery memory hogs and outside of "single use" reference machines at a library, they were rare. Very few of those devices survived to 1995, much less 2025, and if they did, they would be clumsy in a multi-purpose computer.

5.25 diskette drives on the other hand were still very common up through 1992 and it was common in the 386 / early 486 period to get device drivers on a 5.25" floppy and nothing else when you bought non-PS/2 hardware, so if you didn't have a 5.25" (and you hadn't gone full PS/2) you needed to have a friend with a 5.25" floppy just to get by.

In the early 486 era, there were a lot of competing CD-ROM interfaces. The choice was whether you wanted Panasonic, Mitsumi, or Sony if you couldn't afford to go full $CSI. While I can still find sound cards for those proprietary interfaces, I have not seen a working drive for years. The drives that are alive today are usually ATAPI drives and those didn't really hit their stride until the socket 7 / socket 8 era. While you could put an ATAPI CDROM drive in a 386, it seems anachronistic.

If you wanted to get really fancy, a 386-33 with a true 2x SCSI CD-ROM would have been a jaw dropping rig back in the day. My recollection is that >= 3x drives didn't appear until well into the 486 era. But it would have had a 5.25" too.

+1

The story about the ATAPI drives is a complicated one, also.

IDE/ATAPI drives as we know it appeared in mid 1994, but prototypes had been made in 1993 already.
And they require special/draft CD-ROM drivers, because they need special care.

That's why it's tricky to replace vintage CD-ROM drives in old NEC PC-9821 machines.
NEC did use early drives, because CD-ROM media was very important in Japan.

The FM Towns from 1988/1989 had an integrated CD-ROM drive, for example.
It was a top-loader (or rather front-loader).

Also, the early CD-ROM drives were essentially external CD players with a computer interface.
I had one myself, actually, a Philips CDS 46x series model. It needed a special interface card for IBM PCs.

The first "cheap" CD-ROM drive here in Germany and UK was the Mitsumi LU005S, I think.
It used proprietary Mitsumi interface. The Mitsumi controller card had DMA support, sound cards didn't.
My father had the card and the 005s in his 386DX-40 PC with 16 MB of RAM..

Personally, I had a 286-12 with 4MB and a Pro AudioSpectrum 16 with Trantor SCSI interface and a Sony CD-ROM drive.
Both were part of a multimedia upgrade kit (common in early 90s).

To this day, I'm still telling my dad that he made a good decision when he got me that kit.
It sort of became a running gag! 😁

But seriously, the PAS16 was user friendly and "just worked".
Downside was plain SB 1.5 compatibility in most cases, since merely DOS4GW games had native PAS16 support.

Windows 3.10 had been fully supported, though, which was my primary "sand pit" when I was little/young.
I loved playing simple Windows 3.1 desktop games and the PAS16 had full 44,1 KHz, 16-Bit, Stereo support.

And then there's OS/2.. PAS16 has two sound cards inside, so one for OS/2 and one for DOS/Win-OS2.
The upshot was that the optional MMPM/2 for OS/2 2.1x had shipped with PAS16 drivers already.
OS/2 Warp shipped with it, as well, of course. It added many more soundcards to the list.

In terms of computers I owned, in regards to removable media:

- 286/16 - 3.5" floppy (though this was a very late 286; around 1991-92)
- 386/40 - 3.5" floppy + 2x Mitsumi cd
- 486/50 - 3.5" floppy + 2x Creative cd

By the time I was on Cyrix/Pentium systems and above I was using 4x and 8x minimum, but still retained the 3.5" floppy (and swapped to DVD-ROM and added a Zip 100 by the time I had a Pentium 3).

The floppy drive would probably see no use.

What about a third option: blank in the bay with an extra hdd behind it on brackets, with an ethernet card at the back?

Here's my timeline on the matter:

Age of 286's
1984 - Early Period
1986 - Market Leader
1989 - Budget System
1992 - Windows 3.1 starts removing the 286 from common use

Age of 386's
1986 - Early Period
1989 - Market Leader
1993 - Budget System
1996 - Windows 95 starts removing the 386 from common use

Age of 486's
1989 - Early Period
1993 - Market Leader
1996 - Budget System
1999 - Windows 98 starts removing the 486 from common use

Age of CD-ROM
1988 - Proprietary, SCSI interfaces, 1x speed
1990 - CD-R starts to appear for SCSI
1991 - Microsoft Multimedia PC specification comes out (MPC)
1992 - 2x Speeds
1994 - ATAPI introduced, 3x and 4x speeds arrive
1995 - Proprietary interfaces start to disappear, 6x & 8x introduced, Bootable CD-ROM s introduced
1996 - UDMA make ATAPI less troublesome, 10x, 12x speeds
1997 - DVD-ROM & CD-RW appear, support for bootable CDs becomes common, 14x & 16x CD-ROM speeds
1998 - USB external CDROMS, 24x & 32x speed drives with CAV (Constant Angular Velocity)
1999 - 40x CD-ROMS
2000 - 50x CD-ROMS
2001 - DVD drives to replace the CD-ROM as the default optical in new builds
2010 - Thin light laptops start omitting optical drives
2015 - Optical drives start becoming optional in new systems
2020 - Optical drives are rare in new systems

douglar wrote on 2025-01-23, 15:47:

1992 - Windows 3.1 starts removing the 286 from common use

I'd like to think that Windows 3.1 was the 286's last stand and that it saved a lots of old ATs from scrapyard.

(After all, adding a few SIMMs to an existing 286 PC was more straightforward way of running Windows 3.1
than getting a new PC/motherboard just for trying out Windows.)

Since 1991 Visual Basic was on it's rise and new shareware applications supporting Windows 3.0 MME and 3.1 appeard.

It's in the readmes of the applications or games.
Minimum is often a 286 or 386, running Windows 3.0 MME or 3.1.

Software developers moved on from Windows 3.0 in 1992 and Real-Mode compatible applications were on the decline.
So 1992 was decline of Turbo XTs running Windows 3.0, I think.

Also, Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.0 and 1.5 were new in 1991/1992.
And the could compile both 8086 and 80286 compatible Windows 3 executables.

Thus, I would rather say that 1993 and 1994 were the years that 286 PCs declined quickly.

1993 Because of 32-Bit DOS4GW games and memory managers such as DPMI supporting QEMM.

1994 Because of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had finally removed Standard-Mode.

But that's just me. I'm thinking here of the socalled "silent majority" principle.
There were a lot of users with outdated hardware that never had been added to the official numbers.

You can't really look this up, of course, but it becomes evident from experience in real life at the time, I think.

Heck, there were new Amiga and C64 users in early 90s, even, despite both platforms being declared dead. 😃
I've read a few of such stories on the internet in past years. I had a hard time to to believe it.

Edit: Speaking of XTs, they had still been a thing in early 90s.
Those little pocket computers running MS-DOS 5 had been based on 8088/NEC V20 processors.
The Palmtop PCs HP 100LX, HP 200LX or the Poqet PC were popular and could run CGA graphics software and Windows 3.0 in Real-Mode.
Journalists and other groups loved these little PCs, I think.

Edit: No offense, though. It is true that 80286 had been laughed at in the 90s.
According to the PC magazines of the time, only fast 386/486s were good enough for Windows 3.x.
Because, after all, the generally accepted knowledge was that Windows 3.x was a lame, sluggish thing! A 286 was unbearable, thus!

So it's only understandable that modern PCs were recommended only.
Back then, though, the most important thing was often “forgotten”.:
Namely that Windows as a modular graphical environment needs sufficient memory to work
and that swapping to disk in Enhanced Mode was very slow.

This progressive way of thinking was probably too high or inconvenient for the boomers at the magazines at the time.
Looking back, I can't explain the false information in the relevant PC magazines any other way. 🤷‍♂️

Jo22 wrote on 2025-01-23, 17:26:

This progressive way of thinking was probably too high or inconvenient for the boomers at the magazines at the time.
Looking back, I can't explain the false information in the relevant PC magazines any other way. 🤷‍♂️

Are you saying that the PC magazine writers were false? Interesting. Perhaps they just had a different opinion to a subjective question? Maybe?

It was my opinion that running Windows 3.1 on a computer slower than 16 Mhz was not pleasant, and few 286 computers >= 16 Mhz were sold in my area, so from my limited view point, pleasant use of Windows 3.1 implied 386. Maybe it was different in your area.

Going back a year, I was shopping for a PC in the second half of 1991. I looked at the fast 286 computers in the ads that still existed in the back black and white pulp pages of computer shopper, but I went with a 386sx 20 with a 64kb cache. Why? Very similar price, but I could use upper memory blocks for DOS drivers and I could also pre-emptively multitask DOS programs in Windows 3.0 with memory protection. Both were things that were not really possible on a 286.

All three. But its hard to find 5.25 Floppies and Software on today
So I would say get a Fast 8x or Higher CDROM drive and 3.5 Floppy.
8mb of RAM
SVGA 1mb video card
Sound Blaster 16 or Compatible
386-33 or 40mhz.
Math-co processor

Your Priority should be Good DOS game play
And good performance for programs
Easy repair and Reliability

Period correct Hardware is NOT a good way to go because that would cripple your computer with Slow components

Also get a Compact Flash card to use as a Hard Drive.
This should be your #1 upgrade.
Use the CF drive made by Startech.

Don’t go Cheap quality but use good components.

“Build the Best Computer and Don’t Settle for anything less”

douglar wrote on 2025-01-23, 19:47:

Are you saying that the PC magazine writers were false? Interesting. Perhaps they just had a different opinion to a subjective question? Maybe?

Hi, I've read a few article of the time and I'm thinking that they were a bit shortsighted and arrogant, at least.
They grew up with C64, CP/M, DOS etc and have never seen a real OS like Unix or OS/2.

Otherwise they wouldn't have written such utter nonsense at times and
had realized that running Windows on an 80286 /w 1MB RAM and MFM HDD
wasn't slow because of the processor itself, but the lack of RAM, the bus and the HDD.

Obviously, none of their test computers with 2MB or 4MB of RAM and IDE or SCSI HDDs had been 286 PCs.
That noble hardware was reserved to their holy 386 PC. Or 486, if they already had one in 1990.

And that's a matter that continued in the following years, too.
RAM had been seen as something, um, binary - on/off or either sufficient/not sufficient.
Program fits in memory or not.

That there's a relationship to memory fragmention,
swap file usage and bus traffic/overhead apparently wasn't obvious.
But that's what sets Windows, GEOS or OS/2 apart.
They're running multiple programs and memory gets allocated/unallocated.

And the swap file usage in an AT with ISA bus is not only slowed down by the hard disk,
but also because of the bus hogging.
The VGA graphics card can't get its data in time if the hard disk is
supplying Windows in 386 Enhanced Mode with virtual memory all the time.
The whole system becomes slow and sluggish.

But that was the problem, really.
If these PC magazine writers had done their job correctly,
then they would have tested performance of each system components independently.

An IBM PS/2 with 80286 and MCA bus shows that it's not the 80286 itself that's the problem at heart.

It's rather the slow and small RAM in older AT compatibles that was to blame.
An 120n access time, wait states and an MFM/RLL HDD with poor interleave factor turn any AT into an XT, speedwise.

An "normal" 286 PC from 1988 onwards with 10 or 12 MHz, 4MB RAM (60 or 70ns), zero waitstates,
10 or 12 MHz ISA bus (in sync with CPU), 16-Bit VGA card
and an 80MB 40 MB Conner IDE HDD is quite different to an Model 5170 from 1984.

But such a testing probably wasn't even done.
When these testers used an "286 PC", then it probably was some random,
torn down mid-80s model with Hercules graphics (slow!),
1MB DIL or SIPP RAM, an 20 MB 5,25" MFM HDD with 200 KB/s,
no 64KB sector cache and no HDD software cache - because lack of RAM.
SmartDrive needs an extra MB of XMS/EMS to work.

If these testers at the PC magazines had been wise,
hen they would have tested 286 platform with proper computers that were OS/2 savy, too.
OS/2 had needed 4 MB of RAM in 1988 already, to run smoothly.
And since Windows 3 had been treaded as an OS/2 alternative all the time, that would just have been fair.

Anyway, that's just my point of view here. 😅 I don’t mean to disagree what you said, either.
What you wrote doesn't conflict with the popular opinion of the time, after all.

Edit: Formatting fixed.

Edit: Again, I don’t mean to anger anyone. It's just that I had been a long time 286 user in the 90s.
And I see parallels here to running, say, Windows XP on a Pentium II/III with 64MB of RAM/2 GB bigfoot HDD and then reading a statement that either the Pentium II/III or XP are slow. 🥲

Jo22 wrote on 2025-01-23, 22:44:

Edit: Again, I don’t mean to anger anyone. It's just that I had been a long time 286 user in the 90s.
And I see parallels here to running, say, Windows XP on a Pentium II/III with 64MB of RAM/2 GB bigfoot HDD and then reading a statement that either the Pentium II/III or XP are slow. 🥲

Oh I used OS/2 2.0 on my 386sx and ran Windows 95 on 486 for quite a while. A lot of people didn’t think that would have been a pleasant experience but with enough RAM and a mach 32 video card, it wasn’t so bad.

After talking this though with you, maybe it would be more correct to say that the inability to load device drivers into upper memory blocks in DOS make things tough for 286 computers in 1992, especially when MS DOS 5 arrived and people added a CD ROM to their home system or loaded network drivers on theiroffice system.

Interesting results. So it seems that the general opinion then is that 5.35" is more period correct, but will see little use, as I have only one disk and its hard or expensive to find more.

CD on the other hand isn't period correct for a 386, but it would be useful now, because of 386-era games that were re-released on CD. Those are easier to find.

So, what I think I may do is buy a 5.25" floppy drive just to read that disk I have (no images for it on archive.org). Then once done I will sell it and put a CD in it. If I pay a sensible price for the drive then I don't think I should lose much money in the process.

Hope the disk still reads...

I recently tried my floppies from the 90's just to see if they read - none do.

With the stiffies it was more of a hit and miss, some are fine with no bad sectors while others read mostly fine with a read error here and there while others refuse to read or format.

Some of the broken ones develop a see-through stripe on the media, where they seem to shed the oxide layer down to the see-through plastic.

douglar wrote on 2025-01-24, 02:05:

After talking this though with you, maybe it would be more correct to say that the inability to load device drivers into upper memory blocks in DOS make things tough for 286 computers in 1992, especially when MS DOS 5 arrived and people added a CD ROM to their home system or loaded network drivers on theiroffice system.

Hi, thanks for your understanding. ^^

I must admit that, though, that just two years later by 1994 the IT landscape was totally into 32-Bit everywhere.:
The Windows 95 Beta program (Chicago), Windows for Workgroups 3.11, WinG API, Win32s applications etc.

A year before in 1993, 32-Bit had been slowly taking over already, I suppose.

By 1994, the 286 platform was basically dead as far as multimedia was concerned.
Things like Xing MPEG Player needed DCI drivers, 386 Enhanced Mode and so on.

Users with a 286 could still run normal Win16 applications, though.
Such as AOL 3, CompuServe WinCIM, MS Works for Windows v2 and so on.

Most programs compiled with Borland compilers or Visual Basic still ran on plain Windows 3.1 in all modes.

Back in 1992 32-Bit was merely on the rise, but 16-Bit still dominated.
16-Bit OS2 was still on sale, too: OS/2 1.3 was still sold when OS/2 2.0 was released.

And OS/2 2.0 in 1992 still used 16-Bit graphics drivers from OS/2 1.x, even, before there was a 32-Bit patch.

Most OS/2 programs were 16-Bit still, some had been created using WLO runtime (can run custom Win 3.0 Real-Mode apps on OS/2 1.2 and up).

Willow (WLO) 0.9 or 1.o itself wasn't out before 1991, even.
https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Windows_Li … raries_for_OS/2

But maybe that's all nitpicking really, who knows. 🤷‍♂️
I just think that 1992 was the last "hurray" for 80286 or 16-Bit computing in general.

The Tandy VIS console w/ 80286 and a custom Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, still, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Video_Information_System

Fact is, somwhen on the road torwards 1994, 32-Bit computing was beginning to be all the rage.
If it was 1992 or 1993 exactly is debatable, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

Roughly 1992-1994 was the shortlived time in which OS/2 had been a success,
before Windows 95 took everything by storm (sigh).

Edit: About memory-managment, yes, that's true. Good point.

On a plain 286, there's merely XMS and HMA available. EMS via chipset, optionally.
Around 560KB to 580KB are free on MS-DOS 6.x, I think, without using any tricks.

Disabling SmartDrive, Setver.exe, Ansi.sys, Keyboard.sys, Mode and so on will free enough memory to run the average DOS applications.

A mouse driver and a CD-ROM driver+MSCDEX still fit,
a tiny national keyboard driver from MS-DOS 2 can be used (2KB) - such as KEYBGR, KEYBFR, KEYBIT etc.

Loss of SmartDrive can be compensated by a more modern HDD with built-in sector cache (my Conner HDD had one).
Lucky 286 users with chipset EMS could use SmartDrive in EMS mode.

As a last resort, DR DOS or Novell DOS 7 could be used.
It's smaller than MS-DOS 6.2x and had 286 chipset support for Himem.sys.

Edit: About UMB support.. There was this trick of using the 64KB EMS page frame.
So the memory-managment unit in the 286 chipset didn't do anything, but 64KB page frame was read/writeable. Like an UMB.

I remember it because of a discussion with keropi from a few years ago! 😁
Headland HT12/A 286 chipset: UMB driver?

I've made a few videos about it, because it impressed me so much!
https://www.youtube.com/@dreambyte7926/search?query=ht12

But again, that's probably not something the usual 286 user had done.

Personally, I too rather had been thrown out all unnecessary drivers on DOS or used smaller substitutes.
That way, I got those 560 to 580KB of free DOS memory, with the CD-ROM drivers loaded.
It wasn't much, but close to the magical 600KB line.

Running Norton Commander with NCSMALL utility helped, but sometimes I had to quit it and run the program from command line.

I'm not sure how big the trantor SCSI driver was, though. MSCDEX was the one from MS-DOS 6.2 or Windows 3.1, not sure. 🤷‍♂️