I originally built the 386 computer that sits at my local hackerspace (Heatsync Labs) to run AT&T UNIX System V/386 R4 V2.1 which I brought to Defcon 24 for people to play with. As a result of me throwing hardware at the OS until it booted and was stable every part in there was picked to simply work with the archaic version of the operating system that was originally made to run on a rebadged Olivetti 386SX/16. I ended up with a motherboard with an AMD 386SX/33 onboard, 6MB of ram, a VGA graphics card, a REAL Novell NE2000 network card that I still lack the proper drivers to make UNIX networking function, a HDD/FDD serial combo card that didn't fight with me, and that was it! No soundcard, no frills, it was UNIX! Just last year at BSIDES LV 2018 I jokingly loaded MS-DOS 6.22 on it, and we ended up having a blast playing DOS games. I left it this way when I brought it back home. I then brought it to my hackerspace configured just like that. I picked up a new NiMH battery for the CMOS since while the leaky battery that was on there was plenty good for a few conferences, it would have been detrimental to the health of the computer, and no one but me would know how to input the hard drive parameters every time it needed to be rebooted, no auto-detection on this board!

The first order of business was getting one of my soundcards working on it, I decided on the SoundBlaster 16 as I would be more likely to find a good dos audio player that would work with it. Once that was going I started loading utilities on it. The first order of business was the Audio Player, I ended up with XTC-PLAY for DOS and it worked. No issues there. I then downloaded a program that I had to dig in the internet Archive for called "Make Wav", and the DOS version at that! It needed a sort of real mode dos runtime to go with it, and then it complained that it did not have a Math Coprocessor. I went through my collection of junk thinking I didn't have a 387 that fit the specific socket on the motherboard, and I was almost wrong! I found one, but it had been on a motherboard that had been for one reason or another left outside in the elements for years. I popped the chip out, a Cyrix 387 "Fastmath" 20 coprocessor, didn't think it would work, popped it in the motherboard and the Make WAV program no longer complained.

Mission accomplished. I tried converting a few basic games like Combat and Asteroids to WAV using the utility, however they would not load up on the ATARI when I played them back to the console, just a horrible racket of sound and scrolling screen glitches.

All hope though was not lost, because if I converted the ROM of a real Supercharger game to WAV, it would load as expected. Communist Mutants From Space depicted here. I was using one of my tools wrong, and I found out about that later, but while this was going on I was at a standstill until I figured out if the problem was with the program I was using, how I configured it, or that something to due with the bankswitching was causing this, and then I might need to physically modify the Supercharger hardware to get it to do what I want it to do. This turned out to be a false lead, and no hardware modification was necessary (yet anyway!)