The first thing I noticed was the RadioShack solder and instantly got sad. I never knew how much I relied on them until they were gone. Rest in spaghetti, never forgetti.
Yeah, I actually like that solder! I have another spool I got from Mouser that's smaller diameter and technically more appropriate for something like this, but it just doesn't work as well. I think it's the flux; the RS solder just has a lot of flux, and it seems like good flux. The other stuff I have also has a flux core but it just doesn't stick unless I manually flux up every surface before soldering. I've been wondering what to buy when my RS solder finally runs out.
RIP Radio Shack. I still have some of that Radio Shack solder and a number of pig tail cable repair parts, switches and adapters. Those days of having a local place to run out to for a part at the 11th hour are sadly gone. Most nostalgic of all, my old and beloved Tandy 286...ahh the memories of my first PC 😢 I'm gonna go give her a boot up just to listen to that lovely loud HDD and PC speaker post tone!
FYI: Several manufacturers did make 8-bit IDE-XT hard drives and interface cards (not to be confused with this XT-IDE card) in the late '80s and early '90s, but there were multiple different proprietary interfaces in use, so an IDE-XT drive from one manufacturer wasn't guaranteed to work with an IDE-XT interface card from another manufacturer. And only one model of these drives (the Seagate ST-351A/X) was also compatible with the "normal" 16-bit IDE (a.k.a. ATA) interface. But nonetheless I do have Seagate IDE-XT drives in several of my Tandy 1000 systems and they work just fine.
I do not recall which card I ended up with, but I did have an 8-bit IDE host adapter in my 1000 TX. Possibly as early as 1990. I also had the 768k ram expansion, a mathco, and I think an RTC. I dug that 'superior' PC Jr. clone of the Tandy.
The 80s were an interesting period in PC hard drive interfaces, in the course of that decade I used MFM, ESDI, SCSI, and IDE driver interfaces in my various PCs. I’m not even sure most of that era even remember the ESDI interface that was an intermediate interface technology between the aging MFM and SCSI/IDE which were still maturing at the time.
The ST-351A/X was also one of the last 40 MB stepper-positioned drives made, too. I don't know if that contributes to their seemingly higher-than-average survival rate, but they do seem to be tough little drives. I've found more of them in 16-bit ATA service than 8-bit XTA service.
That NTSC CGA faux-16 colors remains a fascinating topic. It's really interesting how even John Carmack didn't know about this until he learned from from The 8bit Guy's video on the topic.
I haven't looked into how the PC does it too deeply, but the Apple II and various other computers also used artifact colors, so unless the PC's doing something really different but called the same thing, it seems like it was a pretty common hack at the time. The only reason I can think of it not being widely known on the PC is that most people probably used the official monitor with an RGBi connection - I don't remember ever seeing anyone connecting a PC with a composite connector in the 80's.
Games definitely do, yeah. Text and other apps look a lot worse, though. I had a really hard time even getting the text to a point where I could comfortably read it over composite, whereas over a CGA connection it's 100% clean. Tradeoffs either way. But it's nice that there were options.
@@ModernClassic Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And options are definitely good - Burgertime looked great, for example. Maybe one of the best looking, if not the best looking port. Which is pretty cool for a PC game for the time
I’d love to see more of those 80s business apps! In the early to mid 80s there was a plethora of business apps before a Microsoft essentially took over, and some of them were very innovative.
Yeah, maybe I'll do a video about the most popular ones sometime... at the moment I believe those two are the only ones I have that I'm somewhat familiar with. (The previous owner of this machine also had something called "Sprint" on the hard drive but I have no idea what kind of app it even is.)
Modern Classic Some apps to consider: Lotus Agenda, WordPerfect, WordStar, Harvard Graphics... I recently started a thread on this over at the VCF forums: www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?65158-1980s-productivity-software
Still running WordPerfect X7 on a modern machine of course, and wouldn't trade it for anything else(and believe me I've tried them all). The code reveal is probably the best feature none of the others have.
I used Edia Borland Paradox. And, later, their language compilers. They were the first to add the IDE interface (not the HD bus, but their development interface) to the programs. Heroic times. My original PC had two floppies, but I replaced one of them with a 30 Mb half-height HDD soon later. I liked you video, thank you...
I fell in love with the IDE to CF adapter as soon as I put it in my 486 gateway. It's fast enough that the activity light does not light normally. I do feel bad for the hardcard, it sounds like the spindle motor has dry bearings.
Thanks for the comment on solder. As an Australian, I solder with an L, and found the article you displayed quite interesting, I am reminded, though, of my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1883, and who used to sodder without an L. His English came ultimately from the Cambridgeshire dialect spoken by his father (born 1831). It seems to be one of those words which has various pronunciations, not always defined by country.
For breaking apart the jumper strips I would suggest you score it with an xacto first on both sides - it will increase your odds at breaking it at the right count but also in the center of the gap...
Brian Ullmark Actually, there is no need to score if you use two pairs of pliers, one grasping to either side of the crimped area between pins and then quickly rotate one of the pliers just a fraction of a turn, you will get a clean break every time because you concentrate all the force on the built in weakness between pins (it’s an even more helpful trick with the double pin header strips). Even just securing one side rigidly in pliers and then using your hand for the other half greatly improves the chance of a clean break without having to score the break point, though double pliers is still the more reliable method with the double wide header strips.
I guess each to his/her own - been doing it that way for many years and it works for me anyway. With that said - either way is better than just snapping them apart with your fingers alone.
I use pliers to hold the section that's being broken off, and start with the 2-pin segments, then the 3-pin segments, so you're left with a 10-pin piece to break into half for the two 5-pin segments. Breaking the short ones off first gives you more leverage. But everyone builds kits differently -- cutting with an X-acto knife or snipping them apart with side cutters works, too!
Not sure if someone already mentioned it but a trick I use to have bigger disks under MS-DOS 3.x etc is to use Disk Manager (from Ontrack). Not sure if it runs on an 8088 but I am pretty sure I have used it on one of my XT's once. It splits up your drive and makes one partition in a size that IS supported and installs a special driver on it to allow access to the rest of the drive in the form of D:, E: etc.
Nice video. I remember the artefact from your cga screen, it's called (or we called it) snow. It's there when you PC sends data to the screen when your monitor electron bean moves from the lower right to the upper left corner. Some aoftware programs had an option to prevent this.
Modern Classic : one hobby tip for you when you solder DIP packages. solder pin 1, then solder opposite pin, then reheat each pin while pushing on the component, so the DIP is tighten to the board and then you can solder the rest of the pins. for pin jumpers, have a bunch of jumpers to hold the 2 rows together while soldering. And finally, the top tool for soldering : FACOM 153 Brucelle
Since the ide connector on the adapter board just sticks straight out the back if you ever wanted to reinstall the serial card all you would need to get is one of those straight ide to CF adapter boards and plug it in. It would just internalize the flash and make the formfactor more like the hard drives.
I love soldering, so the kit would be awesome for me :) Been repairing and modding Honda OBD1 ECUs for the past couple months, and its so awesome when you can see your work coming together :D
Hey, that looks familiar! :) Cool to see a video of the assembly process! You can also buy kits and whatnot on Tindie, aside from supporting a cool trading platform largely targeted at open source hardware, some of the stuff is cheaper there due to lower Tindie fees. And, since there's sometimes questions about it, the kit is *significantly* cheaper than the assembled board not only due to assembly/testing times, but because I actively want to promote hobbyists getting DIY kits and soldering them up! There's a manual in the works, it's not done yet. W.R.T. initial bring-up of the card, you need to erase the CF card, and then do the partitioning and formatting on the XT-IDE. The XT-IDE doesn't have to be installed in the target machine for that, you could for example use a Pentium 3 with ISA slots and it'd work just fine. I'm also working on a CF adapter that bolts to any XT-IDE that uses the Keystone 9202 ISA bracket. That'll free up your slot occupied by the CF converter. Since it'll be supplied as a module, like the Slot 8 Support board, I'll be able to offer it with the surface mount soldering done already so that kit builders who don't want to attempt surface mount can still build the main XT-IDE board themselves.
SIR, YOU ARE AWESOME. i bought one of these kits on ebay last year, and i have never opened it because it came without instructions on what to do , and how to solder the damn thing. besides even after soldering everything there are jumpers that i just dont know how to configure for my old IBM pc. With your video i might be able to finish the mod. THERE IS ONE MORE THING, SELLER DID NOT SELL EEPROM FLASHED, SO YOU HAVE TO FLASH IT ON YOUR OWN WITH A METHOD LIKE A NETWORK CARD.
It would be cool, if Glitchworks would actually provide a all-in-one solution - the XT card with memory controller and CF/SD slot on board. It would allow to spare a slot in the motherboard, and be verified out-of-the-box solution for solid storage needs on old machines.
There is such a thing as an XT-CF. But then you're locked in to CF. I just wanted the freedom to be able to use CF, SD or even an IDE hard drive (I never know how I'll feel in a few months). But if you know you only want CF, you can get this or something like it: www.ebay.com/itm/Bootable-XT-CF-ECO-LITE-XTIDE-Lite-8-bit-ISA-2GB-SSD-Hard-Drive/123270191495
Hey! I got one of these!!! and Soldered only the ROM sections, U9, U10, SW2, RP2, R3, R4, C8,C9,C10, and C12. I had a 16 bit and 32 bit controllers and didn't need the 8 bit portion so, left it off! Flashed to r591 and now can config from a floppy. Very happy! Make Retro MODERN again!
I had the same problem when installing DOS 5.0 with a XT-IDE on my Tandy 1000 TX. To get my system to work I partition/formatted a 32 meg CF card with a DOS 3.2 disk and then installed DOS 5.0 to that partition. Then I added a second larger CF card and partition/formatted it with the DOS 5.0 install. So I ended up with a 32 meg C: drive and a 256 meg D: drive
I don't mind just blowing up my current partition to make one big one now that I've backed it up to my modern desktop. My current problem is just that I don't physically have DOS 5.0 and can't easily get it on this machine without just buying a real copy of it on 5.25" disk. I'm not sure what the Tandy 1000TX supported, but the original IBM PC was pretty limited in its storage options, including floppy support, or I'd just use a floppy emulator or make disks on another machine. I'll figure something out, though; I'm still running through my options trying to do it for free with what I have, but if I have to just buy real disks, I'll do it.
Hardcard is not MFM but something proprietary. Fun times I had when I was asked to back up the media from such a card a while back. Luckily those hdds are still "ok" with being opened for a short timespan and it just had the issue of the heads being stuck in the parking position. Used an XT-CF as a replacement. On the IBM 5155 I serviced I had DOS 3.2 as the original system running and a copy of DOS 6.22 just in case. Both were installed on different partitions which could be selected by setting them active. Keep in mind if you use DOS 3.2 with Windows7 or higher, it will detect the FAT12 as a faulty floppy (as FAT12 remained the choice of partition type for pc floppies) and fuck up things.
Every HDD since ST412 has been using MFM read/write method with an RLL encoding. Early drives were using RLL 1,3, later ones RLL 2,7. Only a SD Floppy Drives were using FM instead of MFM which is RLL 0,1. IDE drives also use RLL encoding. In the ST-412/506 times there were technically no difference between MFM (aka RLL 1,3) and RLL (aka RLL 2,7) drives. Some drives were certified as RLL capable, but in practice there was no difference between ST-251 and ST-277R (there was a ST-251R which was a different drive). The capacity and transfer rate were only dependent on the controller used.
As I recall it, some programs marked one or more specific sectors as bad, and if the program was copied it would refuse to run as those bad sectors did not copy. So you are correct in assuming it was some sort of copy protection. :)
Hi All, Nice Video, good to see you got it up and running. I have a P100 with the Dallas RTC chip error, and the 5 "new" and used replacements are all dead, so i just use it with a Goteck USB adapter, most floppy items are fine,but my main boot image has a 16meg memory and i run 4/8meg at times as a ram drive to use as a c-drive. My oldest PC is a Gateway 2--- Pentium 2, this one has just a CF card ( plus Zip 100, SB16 - CDROM, IDE CDROM ), i have 3 CF cards all up, 2 x male ( push into the IDE connector on the mother board ) in different makes, and 1 x female ( plugs into IDE cable ) , but in all the mix and match i have not been able to get a second IDE device to work of the chain that the CF is connected to. I have 2 x 256Meg CF card with just dos 6.22 and all of my floppy images and popular apps and games, the other CD card is 4Gig, it is Partitioned into 2 x 2g with win98, the machine runs perfect in dos mode or straight into Win98. Regards George
I've got repair boards made up for most of the Dallas RTCs at this point. You can find them in the TIndie store linked in the video description. The boards are all open-source.
I too would love to see the Hard Card be restored. Especially so if the components of the hard drive can be repaired. Some time in 1995 I think I had to replace a platter in one of my Seagate MFM drives. And walked to Radio Shack to replace a transistor that had blown on the controller board.
I believe the noise I'm hearing is bearing failure, and I'm not sure there's really any way to fix that. At least, it's probably way beyond my abilities. If it was stiction or something on the controller board, I could probably do it.
Hey guys! Several people have actually commented about the size of the solder I'm using, so I may as well pin my answer. I do have thinner solder that's probably more technically appropriate for this purpose (the spool is behind the flux in the shot when I'm tinning the tip), but I intentionally chose to use thicker stuff. It has a thicker flux core and makes it easier to finish jobs like this quickly, because I don't need to manually flux. And it works. It might not be as pretty as the stuff you've seen working at an electronics company, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have fun making something that works and show you how to do the same, and that was the result here.
That explanation doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, as the amount of flux does not depend on the solder thickness. 2% flux in 0.5mm solder is not too uncommon. Not that you're wrong in using the solder that you happen to like, after all the thin solder you have just might not be very good to work with for a variety of reasons, just poking holes in the logic. I find thin solder to be faster as it will start melting quicker and release the flux very easily. At the end of the day your soldering is perfectly fine, it doesn't look machine made, but there's absolutely no reason to suspect that it will fail.
#sodder Omg! What's wring with your voice?? Why do you make videos whilst chewing a bunch of springs in your mouth? I can't imagine that any human could understand this accent, even if it weren't for all of the hideously mis-pronounced words... if you plan to make a career of this kind of thing, can I suggest you learn a proper English accent? Like everyone else on the planet :oP And annunciate dear boy, Annunciate! xxRj (I hope it's obvious that this is a joke, but I'm going to write this anyway ;o)
Using a bigger gauge for solder isn't an issue; there difference mainly comes to how fast you need to feed the solder to the joint. It can be easier to control the amount of solder with a smaller gauge, but at the same time if you're careful, there's nothing wrong using something bigger.
Great video! On my PC XT, I used a very of Seagate 40mb hard disk drive, as I wanted to preserve the hard disk drive sounds. I had no trouble to install DOS 6 on the machine itself from floppy disks.
On an XT I'd probably get flash storage *and* a real hard drive working, both because XT's typically came with hard drives and also because they have 8 slots to let you do that. Since the original PC never came with a hard drive and my memories of them are of just fan noise, I actually feel like it's more historically accurate to ditch the hard drive in this machine.
PCs through my uncle often had the Prompt command altered to read C:\ - What's next, Chris? - > or similar. I eventually returned it to default due to overly nested subdirectories.
When soldering DIP IC it is recommended to skip every second leg and solder them in second pass. This way there will be less thermal stress. There is good video about it called: Basic Soldering Lesson 7 - "Integrated Circuits: The DIP-Type Package"
I usually find myself being unable to tell the colours apart on resistors unless i use a lot of magnification. Another pet peeve of mine are cheap 1%/2% resistors which are... good, except the spacing is wrong and you can read them from both sides, but only one of two values is correct! I find it best to just measure every single component that can be measured before i mount it, takes a second, faster than reading really.
They Phier mil-spec conformally coated resistors :p But they are a little harder to read. I typically try not to use multiple values with the same starting digits in my kits, so that people don't have to guess.
Would be great if you could SD-Cards, though. I used to have a weird USB 1.0 solution back in the day, where you'd connect two PCs over USB (both had to have the appropriate cards installed, these were *not* standard USB controllers) and one PC would see a folder on the other PC as its own hard drive. I think those were PCI, though.
Nah. Mentioned this in another comment, but I like this solder. I have thinner solder (you can even see it in a few shots) but it's actually harder to control.
You get used to a certain size. I use stuff that looks like it's even thicker than in this video for through hole stuff (and tinning). I've got thinner stuff, but it feels clumsy because I'm not used to it. And I've got some really thin stuff that came with my Chinese soldering station... Just recently started using it, and it does feel nice, but is no good for big joints because it takes miles of it to get anywhere.
I found a hard card in a scrap pile years ago and it lives tied up to the wall in my cubicle. I've never owned a computer that could use it and always have wondered if it still worked and what might be on it... But i know that I've scrapped many of these 15 plus years ago and it honestly makes me sick thinking about it. ...it was freaking awesome to see one in action though.
If you haven't used it in many years, it's almost definitely dead - these drives are known for stiction. Mine was stuck when I got it but it luckily unstuck itself... now, though, it's definitely going through bearing failure, which as far as I know is unfixable.
Nice soldering! You don't need to sacrifice one of your slots. Just buy a "Compact Flash CF to 3.5 Female 40 Pin IDE" on eBay. The adapter can be connected directly to a connector of your XT-IDE card without any cable. The downside of this solution is that the CF card is internal, not accessible from outside, same as your MFM drive.
That's why I bought the adapter that I did; I want access from the outside. In fact, you can see in several shots that I have exactly the CF adapter you're describing (check 9:18) - I just didn't use it.
Don’t forget the RLL’s also. Oh and if you have any that are trash. They have “ONE HELL OF A MAGNET” in them. My most favorite drive to take apart. Well it was. Can’t find them anymore.
3:02 A better camera angle could be from the other side of the table _(so you see the yellow attention label in the left of the frame)_ 4:34 I think the best order of soldering... er SODDERing... a chip is first the first pin, then then last pin. This way the chip is more flush with the circuit board. 8:54 Great SODDERing job. I would have done a far worse job. 16:13 Maybe... just maybe... it stores references to absolute paths. I mean, when you copy _Paradox_ from a drive that once was a C: drive to a subdirectory on a D: drive, it just lost the paths. Maybe it can be fixed by editing some config files. But yeah, where to start... But hey, great video. I don't have old _museum-computers_ laying around. So, I love watching the ones that are recorded and put here on YT!
One thing to keep in mind that made me waste 2 weeks of time soldering and desoldering and replacing the ttl chips. DO NOT reverse the resistor packs, they have polarity. I gave up and sent mine in after working on it two weeks and that's what the problem was.
With ancient drives like that Hard Card or my two ST-225's, the only way I've found to keep them running (at least from a data standpoint, mechanically is another story) is to use SpinRite from Steve Gibson. I have a license for the latest version, and he maintains a back catalog of versions that he will send you for free. The latest version is only about 256K and has even saved my SSD RAID Array once or twice.
I used SpinRite to salvage a few drives. With newer drives the trick was to FDISK then do a FORMAT *without* checking for errors. That was the only way SpinRite could make newer drives do a hot spare swap for truly bad sectors.
My first HD was for my Atari 520STm...cost me a total of ~$580 for the 32MB RLL drive mechanism + drive controller + ACSI-to-drive controller host adapter (ACSI = Atari Computer System Interface) + external HDD enclosure. I remember going to a local ComputerLand store asking if they sold bare drives and after them asking me what I was trying to use one with, they said, "You can't connect a hard drive to an 'Artari'" and that I needed an IBM PC or Mac for that. And that's when my abhorrence of IBM PC/Mac snobs began! ;-)
Oh boy! I *love* watching liquid metal flowing into little holes! :D For real though, nice work! It's always great to see modern solutions to problems like this.
Want it to solder better? Take a toothpick and put some solder flux paste on each pad before you go about soldering it. Then just use some flux cleaner to clean the back of the board when you are done (should do this anyway).
Great video, saw you had a spool of Radio Shack solder. Good show! You did a great job of soldering, everything works and that is what is important. If you want more control over how much solder you put on a part go with a thinner diameter solder. .8 mm or .6 mm diameter solder will improve your results dramatically. You will have to feed more solder to the joint but you can control how much you put on the joint. Also, I saw the old dreery "C>" and you should add to your Autoexec.bat file "prompt $p$g" (without the quotes) this will show you what directory you are in on the hard drive as you are moving around in the directories.
@@ModernClassic there is nothing stopping you from adding a 3.5" floppy. I started indtalling one as a regular part in 95 and by 98 3.5 was the main boot drive.
This device is a godsend for XT class machines. Will you ever make a video of using this XT-IDE on your Tandy 1000. I'm a Tandy enthusiast, and I have wondered how well the XT-IDE works on a 1000, especially the newer ones that have a disk controller onboard.
Couple of Notes: PC XTs had MFM *and* RLL drives. Also, there are 8-bit IDE cards, they came out in the late 486 / early Pentium days. While I've never tried an older IDE card/HD in my 8086, I did move the RLL Drive w/ 8 bit controller card into my early Pentium PC and it was able to see it. I wish I knew about this XT-IDE kit, it might have saved me some trouble :) charlescbeyer.com/ccb_wp/5-14-floppy-fun/
I wonder if it could be possible to make some kind of newer hard card with IDE or sata interfaces and using slim drives. I suppose either interface could also mean that you could use SSDs
I recently picked one of these up (pre-assembled) and had the same issues you had. I just gave up because no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to boot directly to the cf card. I even had a DOS 3.2 disk that booted fine, but when I fdisked and formatted the partition and sys'ed it, it still wouldn't boot up. I still haven't figured it out but may get it back out again now that I know this is more than just something I was doing wrong and see if I can get it booting. I salute you for getting it working though!
Try a couple of the things I mentioned in the description, because I don't necessarily know what had an effect and what didn't. Run diskpart and then clean the card fully: knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/005929en Then zero out the MBR using debug: minuszerodegrees.net/ibm_xebec/ibm_xebec_llf_debug.htm I did both of these in the VM. I believe this part, at least, should work the same in a VM as in a real machine. After that, you should be able to fdisk and format. Also try what I did starting the partition at cylinder 1, if you're using DOS 3.2. (From 3.3 on, DOS doesn't ask for cylinders anymore.)
So I still wasn't getting it working, but I did find another IDE to CF adapter that I got for another project and it seems to have worked. I got it to boot to it, but then I tried to install DOS 5.0 and now it's not working again. I have the exact IDE to CF adapter that you have, so it's possible that it is the issue. I'll keep troubleshooting and let you know if that ultimately ends up being the problem. Do you have another IDE to CF adapter model that you could try? Makes no sense why that would be causing the problem, but it did for a moment get the system to boot without altering the geometry via fdisk. I'll post more after further troubleshooting if you're interested.
I did try another IDE-CF adapter; it seemed to do the same things (worked when the other one worked, didn't when it didn't) so I stuck with the one with the external interface. I think your problem may really be that you need to do a diskpart clean and then zero out the MBR with debug. I finally got DOS 5.0 installed on mine (on a full 256mb partition) by making actual DOS 5.0 floppies from the images at WinWorld, but in between this video and doing that I had tried to install it again on a VM, which obviously nuked the card again. When I then tried reinstalling 3.2 using the PC, the card still wouldn't boot. I did the diskpart clean and the zero MBR in debug again, then installed 3.2 again and that fixed it. I did the same thing again just before installing 5.0, just in case. The XT-IDE seems to really want a fully clean card, and to be able to configure it how it wants.
Ok, and also you did the 5.0 install directly on the PC with floppies rather than a VM correct? If so, I'll have to burn myself some 5.0 disks and try that again. It is really strange that it is this difficult to get this working. I haven't had this much trouble on one of these CF conversion kits before...you just get the CF card bootable and it works. Very strange. Maybe it's a 5150-specific thing?
Yes, I did it with actual floppies. I put the disk images on the CF card along with dskimage.exe and made the floppies on the PC under DOS 3.2. Then I booted from the floppies, used fdisk from floppy 2 to delete the existing partition, then I ran diskpart and debug to zero out the MBR again, then went back and formatted and installed DOS 5.0 from the floppies. I've never used the XT-IDE in a different type of computer but I think this is most likely an XT-IDE thing rather than a 5150 thing.
Valiant effort Mr. Old School, sir. I have some old project hardwares around, but not quite that old. Will anyone know how to operate these in 20 years? Or care to? Dunno...fun to tinker with though ;)
I’d like to add one small constructive criticism - you were right to tin the tip of the iron and wipe it clean, that is truly a thing, but it didn’t look like you were re-tinning it before soldering. My dad was a NASA-certified soldering instructor so in a way I’m kind of a drill sergeant’s kid, but for what it’s worth - solder on the tip helps to transfer heat more easily than a bare tip alone. Doesn’t need to have a big glob of soldier on it, just “wet.” My Dad got into the habit of tinning it and then with a quick snap of the wrist, flinging the extra solder off (he typically worked on a piece of scrap or cardboard so he wasn’t ruining his bench). The point is a layer of solder on the tip helps transfer heat to the work. Since you’re correctly heating the work and then melting the solder against it, this might help in the future.
It does if you touch the iron to the work, then push solder into the tip and let it flow onto the work. I just wanted to make the suggestion in case it was helpful; I was not judging. The way I was taught to solder was that having the tip "wet" with solder before it touches the work allows heat to be more easily transferred to the work, and that using the heated work to flow solder makes more effective solder joints than melting it on the tip against the work. I am sorry if I offended.
You are right. It’s good practice to tin the tip before you start working on a project. However the tip will get wet(ter) when you solder a few joints. I always find myself wiping off the solder from the iron when I solder.
When we get those devices as diy kits, the lower price is just an excuse: it's the pleasure of assembly everything, fixing it and seeing it working that matters :). I wonder if there's already an all in one card (ide + cf) to avoid using two slots in those scenarios :)
There is an XT-CF card, but I did want the freedom to use other devices if I chose to at some point, and not be locked in to CF. With this card, I could switch to SD, or an IDE hard drive, or even an SSD if I wanted to.
Interesting, I've gotten an old 386sx going curtesy of a CF card, however XT's are harder as they don't have the bios routines for HDD boot, hence your cards ROM. You've kind of got me interested in digging out an older PC and having a go. As for the sodder/solder thing, I found your pronunciation quite acceptable to my ears, I'm from the soLder side of the world and have just learned to live with it. However I was watching a renovation video the other day and cracked up when they said pergola. As for the composite colour thing, I'm amazed IBM didn't have a way to display the same colour's on their RGBI monitors, it carn't be that hard to make a fudge box. I live in Australia, where we use PAL instead of NTSC, the artifact trick only works with NTSC, so I never knew of it till I saw it on the net.
I'm in the same boat but in reverse - I never knew the NTSC artifact trick *didn't* work on PAL until I was looking up games that I could install to test it out on this PC. I happened across that info by chance; I had just never thought of it before. So I guess you guys just don't have access to seeing those games in 16 colors? I'm still kind of amazed that somebody even figured out that you could use the NTSC signal in that way, and give computers powers that they otherwise wouldn't have.
It's not totally true that there were no 8 bit IDE drives. In fact, there were a few drives that had an 8 bit data bus with an IDE or ATA interface. There must have been a few interface cards made for them, or perhaps some motherboards had the 8 bit IDE interface on them. Maybe one of the Tandy machines? That old drive sounds like someone pissing on a briefcase.
This is exactly the thing I need for my XT clone, I got it working the other day but the harddisk is on the verge of dying (lots of bad sectors). I have a CF card (although it's 16GB which is definitely overkill but might also just not work) but I now need one of these cards. Shame I already spent pretty much my retro budget for this month so I suppose the XT will have to wait until next month or so before I'll be going back to that. Just a question, what CF card are you using? Since with CF the card can actually make the difference between it working in a solution like this or not (since the CF card is the part that should correctly implement the IDE standard and apparently some newer cards don't do this correctly)
This is very interesting, but were not really talking about modern storage, IDE drives and compact flash cards are both profoundly obsolete at this point.
Hey! Glitch Works hasn't had the XT-IDE kit in stock for about a year. At this point I don't think they're going to stock it again. Any ideas how to get one?
Ha! I had a 20 megabyte hard card. I was so disappointed that I couldn't fit Windows 3.11 on it. I was convinced that Windows would perform better on its own hard card.
This was an extremely useful video to me, as I was just struggling with trying to get XT-IDE card working with my CF Adapter, I even used the same CF adapter! It's annoying that I have to find an original copy of DOS for it to work, but I guess its always interesting to have the physical disk. Also, do you know what the power input on the CF adapter is for? I thought that it must be necessary for the card to work, but given that you didn't need to use it, I assume that it must just be for if you plan to use a slave drive.
The power input is there for controllers that don't supply it via pin 20. One of the jumpers on the XT-IDE is actually to set that. So if you have a CF adapter that can't take power that way, you can change that jumper, and likewise on the CF adapter, the port is there if the controller doesn't support it. Luckily in this case both do.
Possible fix to using 2 slots. since the IDE card is oriented for XT/AT/ISA, and the CF adapter is oriented for PCI, could you get away with not using the bracket on the IDE card, and seating the CF adapter in the same slot?
Sarreq Teryx If he did not mind the CF card being internal (and less accessible) then there are other options as well, such as plugging an adapter into the IDE connector or modding the rear of the chassis with a slot for the CF card and eject button and just mounting the CF card adapter to an open area on the rear of the chassis. Or even spinning a version of the ISA adapter that includes an onboard CF or SD Card slot (though CF is much easier to interface with IDE since CF Cards are just a miniaturized IDE device).
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The first thing I noticed was the RadioShack solder and instantly got sad. I never knew how much I relied on them until they were gone. Rest in spaghetti, never forgetti.
Yeah, I actually like that solder! I have another spool I got from Mouser that's smaller diameter and technically more appropriate for something like this, but it just doesn't work as well. I think it's the flux; the RS solder just has a lot of flux, and it seems like good flux. The other stuff I have also has a flux core but it just doesn't stick unless I manually flux up every surface before soldering. I've been wondering what to buy when my RS solder finally runs out.
RIP Radio Shack. I still have some of that Radio Shack solder and a number of pig tail cable repair parts, switches and adapters. Those days of having a local place to run out to for a part at the 11th hour are sadly gone. Most nostalgic of all, my old and beloved Tandy 286...ahh the memories of my first PC 😢 I'm gonna go give her a boot up just to listen to that lovely loud HDD and PC speaker post tone!
AMEN!
Being new to DIY electronics and don’t know if I should use solder with or without lead. Any tips? Thank you in advance! 👍
Don't feel so sad, the smaller "mom and pop" radioshacks are still around
FYI: Several manufacturers did make 8-bit IDE-XT hard drives and interface cards (not to be confused with this XT-IDE card) in the late '80s and early '90s, but there were multiple different proprietary interfaces in use, so an IDE-XT drive from one manufacturer wasn't guaranteed to work with an IDE-XT interface card from another manufacturer. And only one model of these drives (the Seagate ST-351A/X) was also compatible with the "normal" 16-bit IDE (a.k.a. ATA) interface. But nonetheless I do have Seagate IDE-XT drives in several of my Tandy 1000 systems and they work just fine.
I do not recall which card I ended up with, but I did have an 8-bit IDE host adapter in my 1000 TX. Possibly as early as 1990. I also had the 768k ram expansion, a mathco, and I think an RTC. I dug that 'superior' PC Jr. clone of the Tandy.
The 80s were an interesting period in PC hard drive interfaces, in the course of that decade I used MFM, ESDI, SCSI, and IDE driver interfaces in my various PCs. I’m not even sure most of that era even remember the ESDI interface that was an intermediate interface technology between the aging MFM and SCSI/IDE which were still maturing at the time.
Indeed, it was common to see SCSI systems with an ESDI drive and a SCSI to ESDI converter board bolted to the drive.
The ST-351A/X was also one of the last 40 MB stepper-positioned drives made, too. I don't know if that contributes to their seemingly higher-than-average survival rate, but they do seem to be tough little drives. I've found more of them in 16-bit ATA service than 8-bit XTA service.
The ST=351 A/X was a pretty snappy drive for what it was too. Loved em
That hard drive sound during it spinning down made my skin crawl. lol
Great video.
cb meeks Bad ball bearings scraping within their races never sounds pretty!
it is fixable with a bit of effort..................
WD-40 and DuctTape!! tsk tsk
My Hardcard was like that already in the mid 90s
That NTSC CGA faux-16 colors remains a fascinating topic. It's really interesting how even John Carmack didn't know about this until he learned from from The 8bit Guy's video on the topic.
I haven't looked into how the PC does it too deeply, but the Apple II and various other computers also used artifact colors, so unless the PC's doing something really different but called the same thing, it seems like it was a pretty common hack at the time. The only reason I can think of it not being widely known on the PC is that most people probably used the official monitor with an RGBi connection - I don't remember ever seeing anyone connecting a PC with a composite connector in the 80's.
Right? And it makes games look *so* much nicer than standard CGA
Games definitely do, yeah. Text and other apps look a lot worse, though. I had a really hard time even getting the text to a point where I could comfortably read it over composite, whereas over a CGA connection it's 100% clean. Tradeoffs either way. But it's nice that there were options.
@@ModernClassic Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And options are definitely good - Burgertime looked great, for example. Maybe one of the best looking, if not the best looking port. Which is pretty cool for a PC game for the time
And I had *no idea* it looked that good before this, because I have only ever played this version on RGBi.
I love that people are figuring out how to add modern storage to old comuters.
I’d love to see more of those 80s business apps! In the early to mid 80s there was a plethora of business apps before a Microsoft essentially took over, and some of them were very innovative.
Yeah, maybe I'll do a video about the most popular ones sometime... at the moment I believe those two are the only ones I have that I'm somewhat familiar with. (The previous owner of this machine also had something called "Sprint" on the hard drive but I have no idea what kind of app it even is.)
Modern Classic Some apps to consider: Lotus Agenda, WordPerfect, WordStar, Harvard Graphics... I recently started a thread on this over at the VCF forums: www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?65158-1980s-productivity-software
Haha I did all my homework on WordPerfect back in the day. Word at the time just didn't have the same feature set, even if it did some things better.
Still running WordPerfect X7 on a modern machine of course, and wouldn't trade it for anything else(and believe me I've tried them all). The code reveal is probably the best feature none of the others have.
I love kits because of the enjoyment of the build and then the results of your work
I used Edia Borland Paradox. And, later, their language compilers. They were the first to add the IDE interface (not the HD bus, but their development interface) to the programs. Heroic times.
My original PC had two floppies, but I replaced one of them with a 30 Mb half-height HDD soon later.
I liked you video, thank you...
I fell in love with the IDE to CF adapter as soon as I put it in my 486 gateway. It's fast enough that the activity light does not light normally. I do feel bad for the hardcard, it sounds like the spindle motor has dry bearings.
Conjuring arcade magic out of dusty plastic and metal, pure enchantment
Yay, a new Modern Classic! Couldn't have clicked this video any faster.
I love watching people solder stuff, it's like those oddly satisfying videos but for computer nerds!
I recently put one of these in my Tandy 1000 SX. I love it. They really give new life to an old computer.
I may end up getting another one for my Tandy 1000 RL/HD. That drive's probably not long for this world either.
Thanks for the comment on solder. As an Australian, I solder with an L, and found the article you displayed quite interesting,
I am reminded, though, of my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1883, and who used to sodder without an L.
His English came ultimately from the Cambridgeshire dialect spoken by his father (born 1831).
It seems to be one of those words which has various pronunciations, not always defined by country.
For breaking apart the jumper strips I would suggest you score it with an xacto first on both sides - it will increase your odds at breaking it at the right count but also in the center of the gap...
Brian Ullmark Actually, there is no need to score if you use two pairs of pliers, one grasping to either side of the crimped area between pins and then quickly rotate one of the pliers just a fraction of a turn, you will get a clean break every time because you concentrate all the force on the built in weakness between pins (it’s an even more helpful trick with the double pin header strips). Even just securing one side rigidly in pliers and then using your hand for the other half greatly improves the chance of a clean break without having to score the break point, though double pliers is still the more reliable method with the double wide header strips.
I guess each to his/her own - been doing it that way for many years and it works for me anyway. With that said - either way is better than just snapping them apart with your fingers alone.
I use pliers to hold the section that's being broken off, and start with the 2-pin segments, then the 3-pin segments, so you're left with a 10-pin piece to break into half for the two 5-pin segments. Breaking the short ones off first gives you more leverage. But everyone builds kits differently -- cutting with an X-acto knife or snipping them apart with side cutters works, too!
i can hear all nearly 300 of us wearing headphones cringing when that hard drive spun down...
I'm one of them :)
Great video as always! I love how determined and serious you look in the monitor reflections lol
Not sure if someone already mentioned it but a trick I use to have bigger disks under MS-DOS 3.x etc is to use Disk Manager (from Ontrack). Not sure if it runs on an 8088 but I am pretty sure I have used it on one of my XT's once. It splits up your drive and makes one partition in a size that IS supported and installs a special driver on it to allow access to the rest of the drive in the form of D:, E: etc.
Excelent, we need more stuff like this to make old machines usable again.
The video is PC Hardware Retro Extreme for PC Nerds
I like it :D
Nice video. I remember the artefact from your cga screen, it's called (or we called it) snow. It's there when you PC sends data to the screen when your monitor electron bean moves from the lower right to the upper left corner. Some aoftware programs had an option to prevent this.
Modern Classic : one hobby tip for you when you solder DIP packages. solder pin 1, then solder opposite pin, then reheat each pin while pushing on the component, so the DIP is tighten to the board and then you can solder the rest of the pins. for pin jumpers, have a bunch of jumpers to hold the 2 rows together while soldering. And finally, the top tool for soldering : FACOM 153 Brucelle
Since the ide connector on the adapter board just sticks straight out the back if you ever wanted to reinstall the serial card all you would need to get is one of those straight ide to CF adapter boards and plug it in. It would just internalize the flash and make the formfactor more like the hard drives.
I have a CF adapter like that; I just want to have external access, which is why I'm using the one in the video.
❤️ the soldering pronunciation disclaimer 👍🏼
I love soldering, so the kit would be awesome for me :) Been repairing and modding Honda OBD1 ECUs for the past couple months, and its so awesome when you can see your work coming together :D
Hey, that looks familiar! :) Cool to see a video of the assembly process! You can also buy kits and whatnot on Tindie, aside from supporting a cool trading platform largely targeted at open source hardware, some of the stuff is cheaper there due to lower Tindie fees. And, since there's sometimes questions about it, the kit is *significantly* cheaper than the assembled board not only due to assembly/testing times, but because I actively want to promote hobbyists getting DIY kits and soldering them up! There's a manual in the works, it's not done yet.
W.R.T. initial bring-up of the card, you need to erase the CF card, and then do the partitioning and formatting on the XT-IDE. The XT-IDE doesn't have to be installed in the target machine for that, you could for example use a Pentium 3 with ISA slots and it'd work just fine.
I'm also working on a CF adapter that bolts to any XT-IDE that uses the Keystone 9202 ISA bracket. That'll free up your slot occupied by the CF converter. Since it'll be supplied as a module, like the Slot 8 Support board, I'll be able to offer it with the surface mount soldering done already so that kit builders who don't want to attempt surface mount can still build the main XT-IDE board themselves.
SIR, YOU ARE AWESOME. i bought one of these kits on ebay last year, and i have never opened it because it came without instructions on what to do , and how to solder the damn thing. besides even after soldering everything there are jumpers that i just dont know how to configure for my old IBM pc. With your video i might be able to finish the mod. THERE IS ONE MORE THING, SELLER DID NOT SELL EEPROM FLASHED, SO YOU HAVE TO FLASH IT ON YOUR OWN WITH A METHOD LIKE A NETWORK CARD.
It would be cool, if Glitchworks would actually provide a all-in-one solution - the XT card with memory controller and CF/SD slot on board. It would allow to spare a slot in the motherboard, and be verified out-of-the-box solution for solid storage needs on old machines.
There is such a thing as an XT-CF. But then you're locked in to CF. I just wanted the freedom to be able to use CF, SD or even an IDE hard drive (I never know how I'll feel in a few months). But if you know you only want CF, you can get this or something like it: www.ebay.com/itm/Bootable-XT-CF-ECO-LITE-XTIDE-Lite-8-bit-ISA-2GB-SSD-Hard-Drive/123270191495
Working on this. It's just gotten pushed down in the project queue for other things.
Hey! I got one of these!!! and Soldered only the ROM sections, U9, U10, SW2, RP2, R3, R4, C8,C9,C10, and C12. I had a 16 bit and 32 bit controllers and didn't need the 8 bit portion so, left it off! Flashed to r591 and now can config from a floppy. Very happy!
Make Retro MODERN again!
I never thought I would see a hard card in the wild! I saw them in BYTE or something when I was a kid and thought it was a neat idea.
I had the same problem when installing DOS 5.0 with a XT-IDE on my Tandy 1000 TX. To get my system to work I partition/formatted a 32 meg CF card with a DOS 3.2 disk and then installed DOS 5.0 to that partition. Then I added a second larger CF card and partition/formatted it with the DOS 5.0 install. So I ended up with a 32 meg C: drive and a 256 meg D: drive
I don't mind just blowing up my current partition to make one big one now that I've backed it up to my modern desktop. My current problem is just that I don't physically have DOS 5.0 and can't easily get it on this machine without just buying a real copy of it on 5.25" disk. I'm not sure what the Tandy 1000TX supported, but the original IBM PC was pretty limited in its storage options, including floppy support, or I'd just use a floppy emulator or make disks on another machine. I'll figure something out, though; I'm still running through my options trying to do it for free with what I have, but if I have to just buy real disks, I'll do it.
Hardcard is not MFM but something proprietary. Fun times I had when I was asked to back up the media from such a card a while back. Luckily those hdds are still "ok" with being opened for a short timespan and it just had the issue of the heads being stuck in the parking position. Used an XT-CF as a replacement.
On the IBM 5155 I serviced I had DOS 3.2 as the original system running and a copy of DOS 6.22 just in case. Both were installed on different partitions which could be selected by setting them active. Keep in mind if you use DOS 3.2 with Windows7 or higher, it will detect the FAT12 as a faulty floppy (as FAT12 remained the choice of partition type for pc floppies) and fuck up things.
It's actually an MFM drive with an RLL controller, which is one reason why they're so unreliable.
Every HDD since ST412 has been using MFM read/write method with an RLL encoding. Early drives were using RLL 1,3, later ones RLL 2,7. Only a SD Floppy Drives were using FM instead of MFM which is RLL 0,1. IDE drives also use RLL encoding. In the ST-412/506 times there were technically no difference between MFM (aka RLL 1,3) and RLL (aka RLL 2,7) drives. Some drives were certified as RLL capable, but in practice there was no difference between ST-251 and ST-277R (there was a ST-251R which was a different drive). The capacity and transfer rate were only dependent on the controller used.
As I recall it, some programs marked one or more specific sectors as bad, and if the program was copied it would refuse to run as those bad sectors did not copy.
So you are correct in assuming it was some sort of copy protection. :)
Hi All, Nice Video, good to see you got it up and running. I have a P100 with the Dallas RTC chip error, and the 5 "new" and used replacements are all dead, so i just use it with a Goteck USB adapter, most floppy items are fine,but my main boot image has a 16meg memory and i run 4/8meg at times as a ram drive to use as a c-drive. My oldest PC is a Gateway 2--- Pentium 2, this one has just a CF card ( plus Zip 100, SB16 - CDROM, IDE CDROM ), i have 3 CF cards all up, 2 x male ( push into the IDE connector on the mother board ) in different makes, and 1 x female ( plugs into IDE cable ) , but in all the mix and match i have not been able to get a second IDE device to work of the chain that the CF is connected to. I have 2 x 256Meg CF card with just dos 6.22 and all of my floppy images and popular apps and games, the other CD card is 4Gig, it is Partitioned into 2 x 2g with win98, the machine runs perfect in dos mode or straight into Win98.
Regards
George
I've got repair boards made up for most of the Dallas RTCs at this point. You can find them in the TIndie store linked in the video description. The boards are all open-source.
Thanks for showing the old business apps.
I too would love to see the Hard Card be restored. Especially so if the components of the hard drive can be repaired.
Some time in 1995 I think I had to replace a platter in one of my Seagate MFM drives. And walked to Radio Shack to replace a transistor that had blown on the controller board.
I believe the noise I'm hearing is bearing failure, and I'm not sure there's really any way to fix that. At least, it's probably way beyond my abilities. If it was stiction or something on the controller board, I could probably do it.
This is pretty cool. I have a few 386 machines that I should add this into. I'm sure those drives won't last long. They're already old.
Hey guys! Several people have actually commented about the size of the solder I'm using, so I may as well pin my answer. I do have thinner solder that's probably more technically appropriate for this purpose (the spool is behind the flux in the shot when I'm tinning the tip), but I intentionally chose to use thicker stuff. It has a thicker flux core and makes it easier to finish jobs like this quickly, because I don't need to manually flux. And it works. It might not be as pretty as the stuff you've seen working at an electronics company, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have fun making something that works and show you how to do the same, and that was the result here.
That explanation doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, as the amount of flux does not depend on the solder thickness. 2% flux in 0.5mm solder is not too uncommon. Not that you're wrong in using the solder that you happen to like, after all the thin solder you have just might not be very good to work with for a variety of reasons, just poking holes in the logic. I find thin solder to be faster as it will start melting quicker and release the flux very easily. At the end of the day your soldering is perfectly fine, it doesn't look machine made, but there's absolutely no reason to suspect that it will fail.
I always use 1mm flux core solder, and never had a problem, perhaps your thin solder wire isn't good, or is an older spool that isn't good anymore...
0.5mm too small you'll use it all up 1.0mm is the way to go
#sodder Omg! What's wring with your voice?? Why do you make videos whilst chewing a bunch of springs in your mouth? I can't imagine that any human could understand this accent, even if it weren't for all of the hideously mis-pronounced words... if you plan to make a career of this kind of thing, can I suggest you learn a proper English accent? Like everyone else on the planet :oP
And annunciate dear boy, Annunciate! xxRj
(I hope it's obvious that this is a joke, but I'm going to write this anyway ;o)
Using a bigger gauge for solder isn't an issue; there difference mainly comes to how fast you need to feed the solder to the joint. It can be easier to control the amount of solder with a smaller gauge, but at the same time if you're careful, there's nothing wrong using something bigger.
I use one of these cards paired with a IDE to SD card adaptor, works great!
1:02 Actually there are 8bit ISA IDE back in a day but there are very rare! :)
Great video! On my PC XT, I used a very of Seagate 40mb hard disk drive, as I wanted to preserve the hard disk drive sounds. I had no trouble to install DOS 6 on the machine itself from floppy disks.
On an XT I'd probably get flash storage *and* a real hard drive working, both because XT's typically came with hard drives and also because they have 8 slots to let you do that. Since the original PC never came with a hard drive and my memories of them are of just fan noise, I actually feel like it's more historically accurate to ditch the hard drive in this machine.
FYI, when soldering DIPs and sockets, skip a few pins when soldering to allow the board to cool properly
Oh I skipped many pins. You didn't see it through the magic of editing :)
Modern Classic glad to hear.
Anyone else like the "prompt $p$g" better? C:\> instead of C>
PCs through my uncle often had the Prompt command altered to read C:\ - What's next, Chris? - > or similar. I eventually returned it to default due to overly nested subdirectories.
When soldering DIP IC it is recommended to skip every second leg and solder them in second pass. This way there will be less thermal stress. There is good video about it called: Basic Soldering Lesson 7 - "Integrated Circuits: The DIP-Type Package"
I usually find myself being unable to tell the colours apart on resistors unless i use a lot of magnification. Another pet peeve of mine are cheap 1%/2% resistors which are... good, except the spacing is wrong and you can read them from both sides, but only one of two values is correct! I find it best to just measure every single component that can be measured before i mount it, takes a second, faster than reading really.
They Phier mil-spec conformally coated resistors :p But they are a little harder to read. I typically try not to use multiple values with the same starting digits in my kits, so that people don't have to guess.
Would be great if you could SD-Cards, though.
I used to have a weird USB 1.0 solution back in the day, where you'd connect two PCs over USB (both had to have the appropriate cards installed, these were *not* standard USB controllers) and one PC would see a folder on the other PC as its own hard drive. I think those were PCI, though.
BTW, if it hasn't been mentioned already, you should really use thinner solder. You will have an easier time controlling the flow.
Nah. Mentioned this in another comment, but I like this solder. I have thinner solder (you can even see it in a few shots) but it's actually harder to control.
You get used to a certain size. I use stuff that looks like it's even thicker than in this video for through hole stuff (and tinning). I've got thinner stuff, but it feels clumsy because I'm not used to it. And I've got some really thin stuff that came with my Chinese soldering station... Just recently started using it, and it does feel nice, but is no good for big joints because it takes miles of it to get anywhere.
I found a hard card in a scrap pile years ago and it lives tied up to the wall in my cubicle. I've never owned a computer that could use it and always have wondered if it still worked and what might be on it... But i know that I've scrapped many of these 15 plus years ago and it honestly makes me sick thinking about it. ...it was freaking awesome to see one in action though.
If you haven't used it in many years, it's almost definitely dead - these drives are known for stiction. Mine was stuck when I got it but it luckily unstuck itself... now, though, it's definitely going through bearing failure, which as far as I know is unfixable.
Small to big is a smart way of soldering. :D
Nice soldering!
You don't need to sacrifice one of your slots. Just buy a "Compact Flash CF to 3.5 Female 40 Pin IDE" on eBay. The adapter can be connected directly to a connector of your XT-IDE card without any cable. The downside of this solution is that the CF card is internal, not accessible from outside, same as your MFM drive.
That's why I bought the adapter that I did; I want access from the outside. In fact, you can see in several shots that I have exactly the CF adapter you're describing (check 9:18) - I just didn't use it.
You know the face you make when biting into an lemon; thats the one I had when hearing the drive spinn down.
Its cool how you can make your own computer cards a one time
Don’t forget the RLL’s also. Oh and if you have any that are trash. They have “ONE HELL OF A MAGNET” in them. My most favorite drive to take apart. Well it was. Can’t find them anymore.
great intro. short and to the point. max content for the video. i wish everyone on you tube did this.
Ohh I'm so happy I had found your channel, great information. Thanks for your work!
3:02 A better camera angle could be from the other side of the table _(so you see the yellow attention label in the left of the frame)_
4:34 I think the best order of soldering... er SODDERing... a chip is first the first pin, then then last pin. This way the chip is more flush with the circuit board.
8:54 Great SODDERing job. I would have done a far worse job.
16:13 Maybe... just maybe... it stores references to absolute paths. I mean, when you copy _Paradox_ from a drive that once was a C: drive to a subdirectory on a D: drive, it just lost the paths. Maybe it can be fixed by editing some config files. But yeah, where to start...
But hey, great video. I don't have old _museum-computers_ laying around. So, I love watching the ones that are recorded and put here on YT!
SODDERING with solder... tsk tsk
Nice. Just use the CF adapter plate on the card itself. You should be able to make or buy little L-brackets to mount it to the holes in the PCB.
Quattro Pro & Paradox, programs I used to use but forgotten about.
One thing to keep in mind that made me waste 2 weeks of time soldering and desoldering and replacing the ttl chips. DO NOT reverse the resistor packs, they have polarity. I gave up and sent mine in after working on it two weeks and that's what the problem was.
the solder you're using is way to thick for something like this, you should use 0.5mm solder at the very least
I loved the heath kits build your own televisions or radios and the like
With ancient drives like that Hard Card or my two ST-225's, the only way I've found to keep them running (at least from a data standpoint, mechanically is another story) is to use SpinRite from Steve Gibson. I have a license for the latest version, and he maintains a back catalog of versions that he will send you for free. The latest version is only about 256K and has even saved my SSD RAID Array once or twice.
I used SpinRite to salvage a few drives. With newer drives the trick was to FDISK then do a FORMAT *without* checking for errors. That was the only way SpinRite could make newer drives do a hot spare swap for truly bad sectors.
My first HD was for my Atari 520STm...cost me a total of ~$580 for the 32MB RLL drive mechanism + drive controller + ACSI-to-drive controller host adapter (ACSI = Atari Computer System Interface) + external HDD enclosure. I remember going to a local ComputerLand store asking if they sold bare drives and after them asking me what I was trying to use one with, they said, "You can't connect a hard drive to an 'Artari'" and that I needed an IBM PC or Mac for that. And that's when my abhorrence of IBM PC/Mac snobs began! ;-)
Oh boy! I *love* watching liquid metal flowing into little holes! :D
For real though, nice work! It's always great to see modern solutions to problems like this.
Want it to solder better? Take a toothpick and put some solder flux paste on each pad before you go about soldering it. Then just use some flux cleaner to clean the back of the board when you are done (should do this anyway).
See my pinned comment :)
Looks good. Get some smaller diameter solder. Itll make these jobs a lot easier.
Great video, saw you had a spool of Radio Shack solder. Good show! You did a great job of soldering, everything works and that is what is important. If you want more control over how much solder you put on a part go with a thinner diameter solder. .8 mm or .6 mm diameter solder will improve your results dramatically. You will have to feed more solder to the joint but you can control how much you put on the joint. Also, I saw the old dreery "C>" and you should add to your Autoexec.bat file "prompt $p$g" (without the quotes) this will show you what directory you are in on the hard drive as you are moving around in the directories.
Thanks - I do know about prompt $p$g but was not bothering to work on the autoexec.bat file until getting DOS 5.0 installed. It's in there now.
That is good to know. Glad to see you got 5.0 installed. Curious, Why not 6.22?
No 5.25" version of DOS 6.22 that I know of.
@@ModernClassic there is nothing stopping you from adding a 3.5" floppy. I started indtalling one as a regular part in 95 and by 98 3.5 was the main boot drive.
maybe you want to go left-right-left-right while soldering those DIL chips. makes the job a little easier.
Given the CF to IDE adapter is mounted on the other side of the bracket, it might be possible to merge them into one single card slot.
This device is a godsend for XT class machines. Will you ever make a video of using this XT-IDE on your Tandy 1000. I'm a Tandy enthusiast, and I have wondered how well the XT-IDE works on a 1000, especially the newer ones that have a disk controller onboard.
Couple of Notes:
PC XTs had MFM *and* RLL drives.
Also, there are 8-bit IDE cards, they came out in the late 486 / early Pentium days.
While I've never tried an older IDE card/HD in my 8086, I did move the RLL Drive w/ 8 bit controller card into my early Pentium PC and it was able to see it.
I wish I knew about this XT-IDE kit, it might have saved me some trouble :)
charlescbeyer.com/ccb_wp/5-14-floppy-fun/
Your videos are of very high quality. I can almost smell the solder.
Thanks!
You're welcome!
I'd be curious to see how this would work (if at all) inside of an IBM PC 5161.
This video make me wonder whether I could in theory DIY small hard drive.
I worked with Paradox 3.5 from 1994 to 1995. First job as software developer.
I wonder if it could be possible to make some kind of newer hard card with IDE or sata interfaces and using slim drives. I suppose either interface could also mean that you could use SSDs
I recently picked one of these up (pre-assembled) and had the same issues you had. I just gave up because no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to boot directly to the cf card. I even had a DOS 3.2 disk that booted fine, but when I fdisked and formatted the partition and sys'ed it, it still wouldn't boot up. I still haven't figured it out but may get it back out again now that I know this is more than just something I was doing wrong and see if I can get it booting. I salute you for getting it working though!
Try a couple of the things I mentioned in the description, because I don't necessarily know what had an effect and what didn't. Run diskpart and then clean the card fully: knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/005929en
Then zero out the MBR using debug: minuszerodegrees.net/ibm_xebec/ibm_xebec_llf_debug.htm
I did both of these in the VM. I believe this part, at least, should work the same in a VM as in a real machine.
After that, you should be able to fdisk and format. Also try what I did starting the partition at cylinder 1, if you're using DOS 3.2. (From 3.3 on, DOS doesn't ask for cylinders anymore.)
So I still wasn't getting it working, but I did find another IDE to CF adapter that I got for another project and it seems to have worked. I got it to boot to it, but then I tried to install DOS 5.0 and now it's not working again. I have the exact IDE to CF adapter that you have, so it's possible that it is the issue. I'll keep troubleshooting and let you know if that ultimately ends up being the problem. Do you have another IDE to CF adapter model that you could try? Makes no sense why that would be causing the problem, but it did for a moment get the system to boot without altering the geometry via fdisk. I'll post more after further troubleshooting if you're interested.
I did try another IDE-CF adapter; it seemed to do the same things (worked when the other one worked, didn't when it didn't) so I stuck with the one with the external interface.
I think your problem may really be that you need to do a diskpart clean and then zero out the MBR with debug. I finally got DOS 5.0 installed on mine (on a full 256mb partition) by making actual DOS 5.0 floppies from the images at WinWorld, but in between this video and doing that I had tried to install it again on a VM, which obviously nuked the card again. When I then tried reinstalling 3.2 using the PC, the card still wouldn't boot. I did the diskpart clean and the zero MBR in debug again, then installed 3.2 again and that fixed it. I did the same thing again just before installing 5.0, just in case. The XT-IDE seems to really want a fully clean card, and to be able to configure it how it wants.
Ok, and also you did the 5.0 install directly on the PC with floppies rather than a VM correct? If so, I'll have to burn myself some 5.0 disks and try that again. It is really strange that it is this difficult to get this working. I haven't had this much trouble on one of these CF conversion kits before...you just get the CF card bootable and it works. Very strange. Maybe it's a 5150-specific thing?
Yes, I did it with actual floppies. I put the disk images on the CF card along with dskimage.exe and made the floppies on the PC under DOS 3.2. Then I booted from the floppies, used fdisk from floppy 2 to delete the existing partition, then I ran diskpart and debug to zero out the MBR again, then went back and formatted and installed DOS 5.0 from the floppies. I've never used the XT-IDE in a different type of computer but I think this is most likely an XT-IDE thing rather than a 5150 thing.
Valiant effort Mr. Old School, sir. I have some old project hardwares around, but not quite that old. Will anyone know how to operate these in 20 years? Or care to? Dunno...fun to tinker with though ;)
I’d like to add one small constructive criticism - you were right to tin the tip of the iron and wipe it clean, that is truly a thing, but it didn’t look like you were re-tinning it before soldering. My dad was a NASA-certified soldering instructor so in a way I’m kind of a drill sergeant’s kid, but for what it’s worth - solder on the tip helps to transfer heat more easily than a bare tip alone. Doesn’t need to have a big glob of soldier on it, just “wet.” My Dad got into the habit of tinning it and then with a quick snap of the wrist, flinging the extra solder off (he typically worked on a piece of scrap or cardboard so he wasn’t ruining his bench). The point is a layer of solder on the tip helps transfer heat to the work. Since you’re correctly heating the work and then melting the solder against it, this might help in the future.
I tinned the tip at least 25 times that I didn't show in the video.
The tip gets tinned when you solder something with it ;-)
I apologize for mentioning it then.
It does if you touch the iron to the work, then push solder into the tip and let it flow onto the work. I just wanted to make the suggestion in case it was helpful; I was not judging. The way I was taught to solder was that having the tip "wet" with solder before it touches the work allows heat to be more easily transferred to the work, and that using the heated work to flow solder makes more effective solder joints than melting it on the tip against the work. I am sorry if I offended.
You are right. It’s good practice to tin the tip before you start working on a project. However the tip will get wet(ter) when you solder a few joints. I always find myself wiping off the solder from the iron when I solder.
Norton Utilities for DOS may fix the errors on the Harddrive card.
When we get those devices as diy kits, the lower price is just an excuse: it's the pleasure of assembly everything, fixing it and seeing it working that matters :). I wonder if there's already an all in one card (ide + cf) to avoid using two slots in those scenarios :)
There is an XT-CF card, but I did want the freedom to use other devices if I chose to at some point, and not be locked in to CF. With this card, I could switch to SD, or an IDE hard drive, or even an SSD if I wanted to.
To check the harddisk for errors, you should use chkdsk /f
these vids are so inspirational to me! love em!
in my language it`s called soldeer and when you solder it`s solderen (dutch)
Interesting, I've gotten an old 386sx going curtesy of a CF card, however XT's are harder as they don't have the bios routines for HDD boot, hence your cards ROM. You've kind of got me interested in digging out an older PC and having a go.
As for the sodder/solder thing, I found your pronunciation quite acceptable to my ears, I'm from the soLder side of the world and have just learned to live with it. However I was watching a renovation video the other day and cracked up when they said pergola.
As for the composite colour thing, I'm amazed IBM didn't have a way to display the same colour's on their RGBI monitors, it carn't be that hard to make a fudge box. I live in Australia, where we use PAL instead of NTSC, the artifact trick only works with NTSC, so I never knew of it till I saw it on the net.
I'm in the same boat but in reverse - I never knew the NTSC artifact trick *didn't* work on PAL until I was looking up games that I could install to test it out on this PC. I happened across that info by chance; I had just never thought of it before. So I guess you guys just don't have access to seeing those games in 16 colors?
I'm still kind of amazed that somebody even figured out that you could use the NTSC signal in that way, and give computers powers that they otherwise wouldn't have.
It's not totally true that there were no 8 bit IDE drives. In fact, there were a few drives that had an 8 bit data bus with an IDE or ATA interface. There must have been a few interface cards made for them, or perhaps some motherboards had the 8 bit IDE interface on them. Maybe one of the Tandy machines?
That old drive sounds like someone pissing on a briefcase.
I'd love to get one of these, but not needing an adapter to work with my Tandy 1000 EX.
This is exactly the thing I need for my XT clone, I got it working the other day but the harddisk is on the verge of dying (lots of bad sectors). I have a CF card (although it's 16GB which is definitely overkill but might also just not work) but I now need one of these cards. Shame I already spent pretty much my retro budget for this month so I suppose the XT will have to wait until next month or so before I'll be going back to that. Just a question, what CF card are you using? Since with CF the card can actually make the difference between it working in a solution like this or not (since the CF card is the part that should correctly implement the IDE standard and apparently some newer cards don't do this correctly)
This is very interesting, but were not really talking about modern storage, IDE drives and compact flash cards are both profoundly obsolete at this point.
Not sure you're getting the point here.
I prefer a copper soldering iron.
With one hand I hold the part, another soldering iron with a drop of solder.
Bent pins difficult to solder
Hey! Glitch Works hasn't had the XT-IDE kit in stock for about a year. At this point I don't think they're going to stock it again. Any ideas how to get one?
Ha! I had a 20 megabyte hard card. I was so disappointed that I couldn't fit Windows 3.11 on it. I was convinced that Windows would perform better on its own hard card.
I might get one of these for my 5150.
This was an extremely useful video to me, as I was just struggling with trying to get XT-IDE card working with my CF Adapter, I even used the same CF adapter! It's annoying that I have to find an original copy of DOS for it to work, but I guess its always interesting to have the physical disk. Also, do you know what the power input on the CF adapter is for? I thought that it must be necessary for the card to work, but given that you didn't need to use it, I assume that it must just be for if you plan to use a slave drive.
The power input is there for controllers that don't supply it via pin 20. One of the jumpers on the XT-IDE is actually to set that. So if you have a CF adapter that can't take power that way, you can change that jumper, and likewise on the CF adapter, the port is there if the controller doesn't support it. Luckily in this case both do.
Ahh, my CF adapter is the same brand as yours but mine has no pin 20, that is what was confusing me. Thanks.
I have a XT-IDE Rev 4.1. Is it possible to flash the bios on a modern PIII-500MHz? because my PIII won't start with the card inserted.
Thank you for this video. Very cool stuff.
Is there a combo card, ide with cf slot onboard for such things where a cf card could be used as master and a drive connected the header set to slave?
Abandon software: winworldpc.com/library
Also vetusware.com
Possible fix to using 2 slots. since the IDE card is oriented for XT/AT/ISA, and the CF adapter is oriented for PCI, could you get away with not using the bracket on the IDE card, and seating the CF adapter in the same slot?
Sarreq Teryx If he did not mind the CF card being internal (and less accessible) then there are other options as well, such as plugging an adapter into the IDE connector or modding the rear of the chassis with a slot for the CF card and eject button and just mounting the CF card adapter to an open area on the rear of the chassis. Or even spinning a version of the ISA adapter that includes an onboard CF or SD Card slot (though CF is much easier to interface with IDE since CF Cards are just a miniaturized IDE device).
When it comes to ICs.
Use IC sockets so you can remove the ICs and replace with ease