Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I am interested in playing around with a 10MHz system, and I was wondering if any of you guys have a recommendation on a specific motherboard, and where I might be able to find one. I am hoping to find one with a Phoenix BIOS if possible. 0WS would also be rather nice.

Guest

avoid the dtk boards, many of the others are ok.
phoenix 2.27 and 2.52 were the newer popular versions.

don't expect support for 12 function keys.
read the silk screening and if it says 256k don't buy it
some ol;d board were only 256k max, you could plug in
2 rows of 64k and 2 rows of 256k chips and it will clock up to 640k
but will screw up with some programs.
many times with a 10 mhz board and 640k installed, the amout of ram switches mean nothing. or even some 8 mhz boards.

ID hint: many 8 mhz boards had many rom (bios) sockets

pich an older 16 bit vga card and be sure not to short the extra pins and you can use a vga monitor. ( set switches to ega or NONE) for video.

you likely will need a mfm drive and controller. ide xt cards and drives were rare.

A 1.44 floppy will work as a 720k floppy for dos 3.30.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I think I'm fairly prepared for my move to a clone board. I use an ATi VGA Wonder for display, an 8-bit SCSI card with BIOS for the hard disk, and a high desnity floppy controller to use a 1.44meg floppy as an actual 1.44meg floppy. I hope they will all work well at 10MHz.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

There are several JUKO Super Turbo XT motherboards for sale on ebay at the moment. They can operate at 12 and 15?!?! MHz. They come with V20 CPUs already installed. I bought one as I am very interested in seeing if I can get the thing working at 15MHz. Also, these boards support up to 1MB of memory, though I think that must be only with monochrome graphics.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I have decided to go with the JUKO board that has a V30 CPU on it. I wonder how much faster it will be than the V20. I do believe that the V30 has 16-bit access to DRAM.

Guest

the v-30 was a 8086 replacement
not as common as a v20 or 8088.
most non ibm boards ( add-on boards)
will work at 8 or 10 mhz.
remember that the 8088 archtecture has fewer interrupt available that even a 286,
and since there is no PnP care must be taken when putting in cards,
you cannot load one up nearly as much as a newer system
there are strange incompatibilities.
like video cards and keyboards.

if possible test in a simple configuration first.

the helps and bios warnings are about non-existant.
a power supply should have all the wires present.
some later power supplies. were missing one wire one in from the edge.
this worked only with some 286 boards.

this also means that a xt or clone could be made in a typical tower pentium AT formfactor case.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Does anyone see any reason why a model M keyboard which works perfectly find on a real IBM motherboard would not function on an XT-clone motherboard? I suspect that the board has problems, but the eBay seller is being stubborn. I don't have other keyboards around for testing. He claims he tested it before he sent it to me, but I think it's pure BS because when it arrived there was a jumper cap hot glued over the keyboard lock jumper.

Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 5:09 am

I have an idea...

XT-class machines need XT-class keyboards. IME, most model M's don't support XT-class keyboards. If you've got an 8088 around, chances are the keyboard for it will work. Also, if there's switches on one of your keyboards, try switching them.

If you need it, I've got a XT/AT switchable keyboard or two that I haven't even plugged in in a long time. I wouldn't mind trade, even if it's just for a floppy disk or something that has a neat game on it.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I'm using the model M that shipped with the 1985/86 version of the XT (the one without LEDs). So, it should do XT scancodes. Infact, I thought all model Ms can automatically translate XT scancodes. All of the model Ms I've tried on my XT seem to work. Anyway, I will have access to a real IBM 83-keyboard this weekend when I return home. I appreciate the offer, but I'm affraid I can't adopt anymore keyboards.

Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 7:20 pm

Hope you get it to work. : - )

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I appreciate the offer, but I'm affraid I can't adopt anymore keyboards.

Should see my pile Shocked

(somewere around 50 keyboards)

Joined: 22 Oct 2005 Posts: 61 Location: sunny AZ

keyboards aren't the problem....computers and monitors are the problem....

Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:34 am

I've got three letters for you jforb: KVM.

That is, if you have enough of the same type to work with Smile

Guest

many kb of that era were auto-switch
meaning no switches
if you have an older kb try it and if there are no errors good luck
if it works at all , it;s ok.

some kb had the dip switched hidden in the kb legs!

a kb despite 10 or 12 function keys --many 12 function keys will work on xt's, but f11 and f12 will not be functional.
I chased that by buying a new bios and it did not make a difference.
tandy had 12 function keys on 8088 machines but tandy was in another world on many things.

I gave "night vision pinball" to a tandy 100 owner and he reported back in a week " i finally figured out all the keys"
it was a self- booting ( no os or dos) game and the tandy was not truly compatible

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

So do you know what's pretty weird? The high density floppy controller I couldn't get going on my IBM PC/XT motherboard seems to work just fine on the V30 motherboard. What could be the reason for this? Is it possible that the BASIC chips are taking up a memory address needed by the controller?