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Old computers


~Slideways~

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Spent some time on the IBM 5155 ‘pc portable’, if almost 14kg is portable lol.

The 2nd floppy drive seems to be shorting the power supply now, hoping it’s just another capacitor like the motherboard was. Unplugged the power from the FDD and it starts up again.

I’ll order some and try replace any I find, can’t hurt since they are 35 years old.

But the HDD wouldn’t read again... so took it apart and found the head stuck again. This time I put a tiny bit of crc on the sliding part.

It’s been reading fine since.

I wanted to try put some other games on it but neither FDD works, they are supposed to be 360kb ones and I only have 1.2mb ones that work. Tried an few plugged in sitting loose on the top but it won’t recognise them at all.
 

There is no bios just jumpers and I don’t think it was ever meant to work with 1.2mb drives.

So I took the HDD out which sits on its own ISA card, the short 8bit type. Tried fitting it into the 386 which just has the long 16bit ISA slots. It fouls on the frame of the card but it does JUST make contact on the pins. 
 

And it works on the 386 board! But no matter what I do with the bios it won’t read the original HDD. So I resorted to writing to Floppy disks to transfer a few games from the 486 to the 386 to the IBM HDD.

 

This bios menu is amazing, someone thought this colour scheme was the perfect combination:

IMG_5519.jpg.3ddaa26eb08ad550c327c6836da2ccc0.jpg

 

Testing FDD drives:

IMG_5521.jpg.4aa9145bc3fba5f2b30eb254d6f5d9c8.jpg

 

SOPWITH 2 on a amber monochrome tiny 9"monitor running on 1984's best 4.7mhz cpu:

IMG_5525.jpg.664476d006e55fd2b493a38e0294c763.jpg

Hard to get a close up photo it looks much more crisp than this but the photo looks washed out and too bright:

IMG_5526.jpg.191a08ccab57520aab070d35e6b926d5.jpg

 

Turned the monitor brightness down to try but it makes it look wrong too:

IMG_5528.jpg.6b23bd3343808106441ea16ec20caf24.jpg

 

It runs well until you blow up a building then it slows down a bit... 4.7mhz mtherfkcer.

 

Also put PACMAN on, surprisingly it works well even though it meant to be a vga game. The 5155 outputs Monochrome and CGA at the same time, I don't have a cable to try the CGA output. Would be cool to try Space Quest on this with CGA output.

I did put SQ1 on the HDD but it says 256kb ram is not enough. There is an memory expansion card but its also shorting the power, so maybe I'll buy bulk capacitors and try my luck fixing the memory expansion and both FDD's.

Tantalum Capacitors seem to be the main failure on these old IBM's.

 

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On 13/12/2019 at 12:54, HighLUX said:

Used to love hooning this on the primary school computers

the-incredible-machine-4.png

I remember playing this about 15 years ago at work - always seem to live in the past, for some reason. Then we had some computers hooked up on private LAN and played CS 1.6 & CS:S during lunch time. Speaking of which, I had a go at CS:GO the other day as it's free to play, (I had to upgrade the graphics card first) it turned out that I can't handle the jandal any more...

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14 hours ago, chris r said:

http://www.graemetorckler.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MegaVintageSale?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

 

For the inventory. 

Pickup is onehunga. 

 

I'll be going back for another barry around one evening this week if anyone wants stuff 

I would have been keen on a IBM Model M keyboard but it sounds like they are all gone except the ones you can only use on a terminal (has all the function keys etc).

Also would have been keen on an IBM XT or AT or something but again it sounds like they are too expensive. That guy on Twitter bought an XT for $400 and it doesn't work.

It's more fun finding them cheap.

 

....hmmm maybe a cool old AT desktop case though... wonder how much they'd be?

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29 minutes ago, ~Slideways~ said:

I would have been keen on a IBM Model M keyboard but it sounds like they are all gone except the ones you can only use on a terminal (has all the function keys etc).

Also would have been keen on an IBM XT or AT or something but again it sounds like they are too expensive. That guy on Twitter bought an XT for $400 and it doesn't work.

It's more fun finding them cheap.

 

....hmmm maybe a cool old AT desktop case though... wonder how much they'd be?

I'll ask will go back tonight 

The terminal model m can be used with a adapter Like this

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