Very nice system. I especially like the EGA card, that's pretty rare these days. What's on the circuit to get line level output? A cap to sort out any ground loops and a resistor to limit the voltages ?
Thanks! That's exactly what it is - it's the first "Tony Duell" circuit on this link: www.oldskool.org/guides/speakerrecording I was going to start there and try out some of the more sophisticated ones listed on that page, but to be honest it worked just fine for my needs so I stopped at that one!
There are VGA cards that will work in a 5150. My first "PC" was a Compaq Deskrpo. It had EGA. It was a huge improvement over CGA but fell victim to being followed up rapidly by VGA. Not many of them about these days.
I bought my IBM 5150 in the UK with a view to preserving the computer in its original condition as much as possible. I like the idea of having an original, unmodified machine - a very different philosophy to yours! :-)
Hi Edward, thanks for watching. It's fun to see how far we can take these things but I also appreciate the importance of preservation, of course. With that in mind I haven't really done anything here that isn't reversible - well, I suppose the holes for the buttons, but I put them well out of the way on the back of the machine. I even have the original CPU and other bits carefully stored away. Perhaps I'll revert it to stock one day, particularly as I now have a 5162 that I can use for some of the later CGA / EGA games.
@@ctrlaltrees The NEC processor would perhaps be the most minor deviation from original or time period correct hardware here. As it existed back in the 1980s iirc. Your overclock card seems to be using the old original intel-ICs as well. It's worse with NAND-flash storage! That kind of stuff *_really_* didn't exist back in the 1980s...🤔😇
I've had to explain this before, but the Adaptive Tile Refresh scrolling routine was not invented by John Carmack, although Carmack is credited with being the first to adapt it to the EGA standard which allowed it to happen in hardware. The routine has its origin in the mid 1970's, I believe it either is or was patented by Sinclair, it originally was used in those giant Jumbotron type scrolling displays, Later on when Micheal Abrash coded games in the early 1980's he adapted it to many graphics standards, and left his information and code examples online, in a tutorial that John Carmack studied and later adapted for a game he called "Dangerous Dave" aka. Commander Keen... past the Sinclair connection, I have never found the name of the programmer who initially invented Adaptive Tile Refresh in the 1970's (I doubt it was Sir Clive). This is a shame, because although I found the Sinclair patent connection, The programmer who invented should be named, because he literally gave us gaming, his routine after being adapted to many standards and set down as silicon chips for consoles gave us every scroller from 1984 to now. Every Pc, Nintendo, Sega, Insert game system here... owes him the recognition he is due. One thing we can assume it was a programmer/hardware engineer who worked for Sinclair and his cleverness is probably what made the Sinclair Spectrum so elegant, efficient and smooth. One thing we know, there is rarely anything new under the sun, only incremental evolution adding another step to paths that were initiated by others... Original is Jesus level rare. Disclaimer for Carmackers: I am not taking anything away from your War Daddy, he is one of my Top 10 favorite programmers.
EGA Commander Keen was the first game I ever played on my 286. I've also never seen an AUI dongle before, I always figured they were some mysical device that didn't really exist. A bit like joystick port MIDI cables...
Great job! So much info squeezed in. Nice to see all the comparisons too. Such a great looking machine love to have one one day when I have the space. Sticking with handhelds for a while.
Great video! I have two videos very similar to this, one showing the 'full length' setup process for getting networking operational, as well as one that I show all the upgrades I made, most of them the same as you. I didn't do a pc-sprint as I got an Orchid Tiny Turbo card that gives me an 80286-6 via ISA bus. It would be interesting to see what works faster, the sprint or the 286! Keep up the good work for 2021!
Oh nice, that Orchid Tiny Turbo card looks great! I'll definitely have to look into those. Although it does mean I won't have an excuse to buy yet another PC... 😉
@@ctrlaltrees oh come now, Ctrl-alt-Rees always has a chance to make another video! Therefore purchase is always just around the corner 😁. If you ever want to collab on a video though, let me know. Might mutually save us some money from not buying things!
Star Control ran at a snail's pace on my 8088 machines, and I was always envious of the 8086 PS/2 machines at school which ran it smoothly. This probably would have been perfectly capable of doing so as well.
Wow this is a really good upgrade and mantainance of a pc xt. This is the most complete one I saw. If only where some audio card that does not slow down the pc. I have the rest of mine on pieces, I don't even know where to start. I love the sturdy chasis but I lost it along a Hercules monitor with the moving.
Beautiful machine, Rees! The CGA in that machine can be wired up with a DIN to work with one of your ST Monitors. The EGA might work also of course if the monitor can show it.
I love this mod, thanks for sharing. I ended up using an accelerator card breakthru 286 the 12 MHz version really boosted my XT and I love how software switching on the fly with a keyboard shortcut give me flexibility to use speed sensitive games and boost other games.
If you're interested, a few games have been known to take advantage of the 8087 coprocessor, including MS Flight Simulator, SimCity, Stunt Car Racer, and Vette. I'm sure there are a few more.
Very well spotted! Yes, this is the GOG release so came packaged up with DOSBox - I thought I'd deleted all of the non-essential files but somehow missed that one (and a random README I think). It's just the DOSBox config so not required to run it on the IBM. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees Did it generate a new configuration file locally upon opening Keen, by chance? I’m curious how PC-DOS would have named it. I developed an eye for catching these things back when I used pkunzip on Windows NT, where similar long file names would often collide. Version 2.50 of pkzip knew how to deal with long file names on Windows 95/98, but not on NT-based Windows. This was only an issue with zip files I’d download, as everything else worked fine from ftp. I also had ftp software for Windows 3.1, but it would politely truncate non-8.3 filenames (.html would become .htm and so on.)
No, it doesn't generate a new file. Keen4.conf is the DOSBox config file for the GOG.com packaged version so not used by / created by the original game running on original hardware.
You may already know this, but that AST Six Pak Plus card has a parallel port and a game port header. The parallel port can be used with a standard 2x13 to DB-25 adapter, but the game port requires those two sockets to be filled with an NE558 and 74LS244 and a 2x8 to DA-15 adapter to enable the game port.
Love the vid thanks! Re: EGA on CGA it was great for my 286/12 back in the day. The 286 ran POP well on EGA as did Stunts :-) I never could find a suitable windows 3.0 driver for the lower res ega mode but GEM had one :-)
@@herrbonk3635that comment was a while ago looking at my handle but i was referring to using an ega graphics card with a cga monitor. You could run all of the low resolution ega modes.
This would have completely blown my tiny teenage mind! Please, please, please, show a simple basic program working from the built-in BASIC, and a cassette deck. People don't believe me when I say it used to be possible to load games from cassettes on PCs. Lol Happy New Year!!!
This is a great overview of hot-rodding an 8088-based system. You're all set to capture some output nearly as accurately as possible. (Trivia: Our video capture setups are identical, even down to the Startech device! That said, I'll be exploring the RGBItoHDMI project soon.)
Hi Jim, thanks for the comment! It took a while and a few missteps to finally settle on this setup but I'm very happy with it. The RGBtoHDMI looks ideal, it's something I'm meaning to check out.
I went from CGA to EGA back in the day, and I missed the composite TV output that you had with CGA. Not sure if EGA cards had anything like that, but with CGA, playing composite aware games on a big screen was pretty cool - 16 colors although with lesser video quality. Later I got a VGA card but actually had to use a TV adapter because I didn't have a VGA monitor for a while.
I wonder if such pc sprint exsists for clone pc's. I have an Atari PC3 XT (4,77Mhz and 8Mhz if turbo on). It has 2 crystals, one for the 4,77Mhz and one for the 8Mhz mode. Replaced the cpu (desolder job, yuck) with a socketed Nec V20 and replaced the 24Mhz crystal with a 30Mhz one. Runs just fine at 10Mhz now but I think a pc sprint solution would be healthier in the long run. Is is notably faster now than before and the NEC cpu can be clocked to 16Mhz without overclocking so it's not even getting warm at 10 Mhz. I don't seem to find the clock chip though. Most chips are Goldstar, Motorola or Siemens branded in this machine.
Would you be able to share the specs and design of the pc speaker to line level adapter you've made? I've been looking for clear instructions on how to achieve this for some time. Being able to capture pc speaker audio would be fantastic.
Of course! I should have put it in the video, although I did link to it in the description (buried among the hundreds of others). It's the first "Tony Duell" circuit on this link: www.oldskool.org/guides/speakerrecording I was going to start there and try out some of the more sophisticated ones listed on that page, but to be honest it worked just fine for my needs so I stopped at that one.
Yeah, there were some games requiring over 600KB free ram. The max I remember is 613KB, but it's been a while so I could be a bit off. One of the reasons I hated DOS for games. Well, not the games, but having to fiddle with the system before some of them would be fully playable. Long live QEMM. Good video man.
bullshit. it's all just a matter of setting emm386 and himem.sys up properly once. load the whole netware stack and odipkt, mouse driver, whatever. and all games still just run fine without ever changing it again. (just use loadhigh on basically everything at that... and dos=high,ems or whatever it was ;) can't remember ever having to 'change things' to get 'stuff to run' so if that was the case probably your initial configuration was crap to start with. ofcourse that stuff only came around with version 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 but hey.
seriously can't remember -anything- not running without modifying config.sys and autoexec first. ever. and most of them shit games also ran fine with an emulated cd drive if they 'required the cd-rom to be present' or on drive D: instead of X: or something over netware lol.
it's a solid operating system. that simply does what it's told to do. lol. unlike all that backdoored modern shit that does all kinds of shit you don't want it to do. lol. and -most- versions do so -forever- after turning it on (and never turning it off again ;) actual memory leaks and such are rare. lol.
maybe nowadays you would consider 'dos' to be less of an operating system and more of an int 21 api call library like the bios is too :P LOL. but hey. it works fine. it doesn't do a lot of stuff but what it does it usually does without bugs. and in most cases that's all it needs to do. lol.
While you can't use the 16-color high resolution 640x350 mode on your 5153 color monitor, which depends on the RAM expansion (without the expansion, you get a 4 color mode instead that is supported by nearly no software), you do get a larger video buffer that can be used for scrolling around. For example the classic games "Crystal Caves" and "Secret Agent" distributed by Apogee use 320x200 in 16 colors (which can be displayed fine on your monitor), but have the whole level in video RAM, and just move around what piece of the video RAM gets displayed. A 64K EGA card can only have 2 screenfulls of 320x200 in RAM, whereas the EGA card with all 256K equipped can manage 8 screenfulls. Crystal Caves and Secret Agent need and use this extra space. So the RAM expansion is not as useless as you make it seem to be at 11:45.
Thanks for the information, I wasn't aware of any games specifically coded to take advantage of the extra video RAM. It would be interesting to see how they perform both with and without the expansion fitted. A good excuse to check out Crystal Caves too, a game I've been meaning to take a look at.
I know that Commander Keen 4 will not show graphics properly without a full upgraded EGA card, visual glitches will be shown in random places about the screen due to the way it buffers video. Similar games like Crystal Caves/Secret Agent may also be affected.
15:29 in fact, I tried the oldest DOS which can be executable on IBM PC (0.90 - pre 1.0 version) and didnt have any problem with 2022 year in date setting :)
I built the PC Sprinter for my Original Tandy 1000 with a V20 chip. I ended up getting the 22mhz crystal and I have been having issues with it crashing. Sometimes when I boot it will say "Memory: None". I'm going to try the 21.47mhz crystal and see how that works.
Nice video, i'm in the UK also and have been looking for a sensibly priced IBM AT or XT with monitor on and off now for quite a while. I know what you mean about prices, I never seem to see them going for 'sensible' prices! I also wanted to see if I could get the same PC as I had for my first one when I was in my teens which was an Olivetti PCS86, but even they seem to be quite pricey when they come up! The PCS86 had the NEC V30 chip as it happens (it had VGA but 640k only, I put an 8-bit Soundblaster in it), it did run a good few of the games I tried on it although some stuff I tried needed a 286. Maybe i'll pick up a PCS286 instead if I can find one!
Thanks! Yes, even after shipping it over (ebay Global Shipping Program) it was cheaper than buying a UK model. I think the 5170 was a little bit more common over here, so you might have more luck there. It's also a more useful machine if I'm being entirely honest.
@@ctrlaltrees DId the monitor get shipped from the USA as well? Can you recommend any other models of early IBM's, I agree that i should be able to do a bit more with the 5170, i just want an early iconic machine.
Yes, monitor is a US model as well, I run the whole thing on a 110V stepdown transformer. There's the PS/2 range of machines as well, they're pretty iconic but for me this original design is where it's at.
Upgrading the CPU to a NEC V20 will add even more performance. Many people in the day did this for a 20% speed improvement without even touching the clock. Add the PC Speed and it will be even faster.
@@ctrlaltrees Hi Cool - suggestions How about Feb being Fin-client month :) My first PC was a Commodore PC10 with TTL graphics - it was a strange ATI ( famous brand anyway ) card i believe and you could set dip switched for TTL / Hercules and CGA - it even should about 4 or 5 shades of green so you could "distinguish colours" Anyway that PC went i i upgrade to XT Turbo with CGA card and CGA screen - that lasted 3 month and kept giving me headaches due to the CGA snow- at work we had the same issue and they upgraded CGA cards and i was fornutate enough to be given one of the older cards - it nor rained slightly rather than slow heavily. A few months later all the machines at work ( about 6 of them ) were upgraded to EGA and NEC Multisync monitors, as i was unofficial PC caretaker and dot matrix printer machine cleaner and seterupperer i was given a spare EGA card and monitor to keep in the cupboard behind me, i done the unboxing and there were 2 ega cards, when i saw the IT rep a while later i told him and he said "dont care you want it to take it home - have a present for the support work you have done" cool - but i needed a screen - this became the yearly upgrade Eventually i bought a factory second or shop display generic EGA monitor ( 2 months overtime ) and that lasted 5 years until wolf3d was release - i still believe to today that game was responsible for more hardware updates than the entire win 3 / win 95 update process Regards George
I heard Intel was going to come out with a 4.7 GHz 8088 so that people who still had the early IBM could upgrade the CPU without having to get rid of the rest of the system.
As computers got smaller, from room sized, the manuals and software guides and magazines got bigger, so you needed a room for the documentation instead
Thanks for the feedback! I'd say that replacing the PC's clock generation circuit with an external, faster one qualifies as an overclock, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I hope this oversight did not ruin your enjoyment of the video.
Your IBM EGA card has some bad or marginal RAM, I see blue, green and gray dots in random places on Commander Keen 4 in your video where they should not be. I had the same problem with my fully upgraded IBM EGA card and a very difficult time tracking the cause of the random dots down because software video memory tests were not finding bad RAM. Replacing all the RAM on the daughterboard solved the problem for me, see here for more information : th-cam.com/video/nLb0Wjnfw4M/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for the info, that's very helpful. It's kind of intermittent but I've never managed to fully pin it down. I'll definitely investigate the RAM on the EGA card! 👍
Very nice system. I especially like the EGA card, that's pretty rare these days. What's on the circuit to get line level output? A cap to sort out any ground loops and a resistor to limit the voltages ?
Thanks! That's exactly what it is - it's the first "Tony Duell" circuit on this link: www.oldskool.org/guides/speakerrecording
I was going to start there and try out some of the more sophisticated ones listed on that page, but to be honest it worked just fine for my needs so I stopped at that one!
I remember seeing a 5150 in an old junk shop back in the early 90's for about £50 and I thought "who would want that?" - if only I knew.
There are VGA cards that will work in a 5150. My first "PC" was a Compaq Deskrpo. It had EGA. It was a huge improvement over CGA but fell victim to being followed up rapidly by VGA. Not many of them about these days.
I bought my IBM 5150 in the UK with a view to preserving the computer in its original condition as much as possible. I like the idea of having an original, unmodified machine - a very different philosophy to yours! :-)
Hi Edward, thanks for watching. It's fun to see how far we can take these things but I also appreciate the importance of preservation, of course. With that in mind I haven't really done anything here that isn't reversible - well, I suppose the holes for the buttons, but I put them well out of the way on the back of the machine. I even have the original CPU and other bits carefully stored away. Perhaps I'll revert it to stock one day, particularly as I now have a 5162 that I can use for some of the later CGA / EGA games.
@@ctrlaltrees The NEC processor would perhaps be the most minor deviation from original or time period correct hardware here. As it existed back in the 1980s iirc. Your overclock card seems to be using the old original intel-ICs as well. It's worse with NAND-flash storage! That kind of stuff *_really_* didn't exist back in the 1980s...🤔😇
Do You have a BIG GUARD DOG ? I loved the IBM 515 and the MODEL F keyboard!
I've had to explain this before, but the Adaptive Tile Refresh scrolling routine was not invented by John Carmack, although Carmack is credited with being the first to adapt it to the EGA standard which allowed it to happen in hardware. The routine has its origin in the mid 1970's, I believe it either is or was patented by Sinclair, it originally was used in those giant Jumbotron type scrolling displays, Later on when Micheal Abrash coded games in the early 1980's he adapted it to many graphics standards, and left his information and code examples online, in a tutorial that John Carmack studied and later adapted for a game he called "Dangerous Dave" aka. Commander Keen... past the Sinclair connection, I have never found the name of the programmer who initially invented Adaptive Tile Refresh in the 1970's (I doubt it was Sir Clive). This is a shame, because although I found the Sinclair patent connection, The programmer who invented should be named, because he literally gave us gaming, his routine after being adapted to many standards and set down as silicon chips for consoles gave us every scroller from 1984 to now. Every Pc, Nintendo, Sega, Insert game system here... owes him the recognition he is due.
One thing we can assume it was a programmer/hardware engineer who worked for Sinclair and his cleverness is probably what made the Sinclair Spectrum so elegant, efficient and smooth.
One thing we know, there is rarely anything new under the sun, only incremental evolution adding another step to paths that were initiated by others... Original is Jesus level rare.
Disclaimer for Carmackers:
I am not taking anything away from your War Daddy, he is one of my Top 10 favorite programmers.
Great video, so nice to see these older machines maintained and upgraded. I'm sure your proud of this one
Hi, Rees! That is a really nice stuff you have on your channel! Always a pleasure to watch!
All the best in 2021!
An excellent setup! I must get on with my 5160! Inspiring stuff to start 2021!
Thank you for the nostalgic look look back, as it brought back a flood of memories.
Comments like this are the reason I keep making these videos. Thanks for taking the time to share. 😊
Very well put together rees!
EGA Commander Keen was the first game I ever played on my 286. I've also never seen an AUI dongle before, I always figured they were some mysical device that didn't really exist. A bit like joystick port MIDI cables...
What can I say, I own many such mysterious devices and hope to cover them all on my channel in due course 😁
It’s 1am, Jan 1st. You missed it 😂
Hey! Us Brits invented Greenwich Mean Time so it's 2021 when we say it is - and not a moment sooner! 😝
Not in the UK.
Great job! So much info squeezed in. Nice to see all the comparisons too. Such a great looking machine love to have one one day when I have the space. Sticking with handhelds for a while.
Great video! I have two videos very similar to this, one showing the 'full length' setup process for getting networking operational, as well as one that I show all the upgrades I made, most of them the same as you. I didn't do a pc-sprint as I got an Orchid Tiny Turbo card that gives me an 80286-6 via ISA bus. It would be interesting to see what works faster, the sprint or the 286!
Keep up the good work for 2021!
Oh nice, that Orchid Tiny Turbo card looks great! I'll definitely have to look into those. Although it does mean I won't have an excuse to buy yet another PC... 😉
@@ctrlaltrees oh come now, Ctrl-alt-Rees always has a chance to make another video! Therefore purchase is always just around the corner 😁. If you ever want to collab on a video though, let me know. Might mutually save us some money from not buying things!
Star Control ran at a snail's pace on my 8088 machines, and I was always envious of the 8086 PS/2 machines at school which ran it smoothly. This probably would have been perfectly capable of doing so as well.
Great video, nice insight for those wanting to upgrade their own too :)
Beatiful overclock.. IBM 5160...
Great video! #doscember helped me to discover your channel. Looking forward to watching more content from you!
Wow this is a really good upgrade and mantainance of a pc xt. This is the most complete one I saw. If only where some audio card that does not slow down the pc.
I have the rest of mine on pieces, I don't even know where to start.
I love the sturdy chasis but I lost it along a Hercules monitor with the moving.
Beautiful machine, Rees! The CGA in that machine can be wired up with a DIN to work with one of your ST Monitors. The EGA might work also of course if the monitor can show it.
Very nice looking machine. Love what you have done with it.
Yes! This will be a nice video for my coffee break! Happy new year @
ctrl-alt-rees! :)
Thanks! Happy new year to you too! All the best for you and your channel in 2021 - I see you're going from strength to strength! 😊
@@ctrlaltrees I really appreciate that, thank you! 😊
I love this mod, thanks for sharing. I ended up using an accelerator card breakthru 286 the 12 MHz version really boosted my XT and I love how software switching on the fly with a keyboard shortcut give me flexibility to use speed sensitive games and boost other games.
VERY clean system. Nice! (And I really love your Demolition Man poster... heheh)
It's actually a laserdisc in one of those vinyl frames! And thanks! 😁
If you're interested, a few games have been known to take advantage of the 8087 coprocessor, including MS Flight Simulator, SimCity, Stunt Car Racer, and Vette. I'm sure there are a few more.
You got a new subscriber! Freakin sweet machine!
Thanks! Hope you enjoy the channel. Yes, I'm rather fond of this one myself! 😁
18:54 keen4.conf was the one file that didn’t copy, as it didn’t comply with 8.3 filename standards of PC-DOS.
Very well spotted! Yes, this is the GOG release so came packaged up with DOSBox - I thought I'd deleted all of the non-essential files but somehow missed that one (and a random README I think). It's just the DOSBox config so not required to run it on the IBM. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees Did it generate a new configuration file locally upon opening Keen, by chance? I’m curious how PC-DOS would have named it.
I developed an eye for catching these things back when I used pkunzip on Windows NT, where similar long file names would often collide. Version 2.50 of pkzip knew how to deal with long file names on Windows 95/98, but not on NT-based Windows. This was only an issue with zip files I’d download, as everything else worked fine from ftp. I also had ftp software for Windows 3.1, but it would politely truncate non-8.3 filenames (.html would become .htm and so on.)
No, it doesn't generate a new file. Keen4.conf is the DOSBox config file for the GOG.com packaged version so not used by / created by the original game running on original hardware.
Glad I wasn't the only one to notice that :D
You may already know this, but that AST Six Pak Plus card has a parallel port and a game port header. The parallel port can be used with a standard 2x13 to DB-25 adapter, but the game port requires those two sockets to be filled with an NE558 and 74LS244 and a 2x8 to DA-15 adapter to enable the game port.
That AUI to RJ adapter is interesting, I didn't realise they existed. I used a network hub that has both RJ and BNC as a convertor on my setup.
I keep my old hub with AUI, BNC, and RJ-45 for emergencies.
Great video - i like your mods.
My PC had a SOTA (state of the art technologies) 386 card which plugged into the 8088 chip socket. Extra 1 MB Ram, seen as EMS by PCXT bios.
Love the vid thanks!
Re: EGA on CGA it was great for my 286/12 back in the day. The 286 ran POP well on EGA as did Stunts :-)
I never could find a suitable windows 3.0 driver for the lower res ega mode but GEM had one :-)
I guess you mean CGA on EGA?
@@herrbonk3635that comment was a while ago looking at my handle but i was referring to using an ega graphics card with a cga monitor. You could run all of the low resolution ega modes.
@@techdistractions Ok, I was thinking CGA resolution (mode) on EGA video card.
This would have completely blown my tiny teenage mind! Please, please, please, show a simple basic program working from the built-in BASIC, and a cassette deck. People don't believe me when I say it used to be possible to load games from cassettes on PCs. Lol
Happy New Year!!!
I would, but VWestlife covered that very recently and I wouldn't want to step on his toes! Here's the link: th-cam.com/video/G_8CXyF5M1Q/w-d-xo.html
@@ctrlaltrees oh wow, thank you.
This is a great overview of hot-rodding an 8088-based system. You're all set to capture some output nearly as accurately as possible. (Trivia: Our video capture setups are identical, even down to the Startech device! That said, I'll be exploring the RGBItoHDMI project soon.)
Hi Jim, thanks for the comment! It took a while and a few missteps to finally settle on this setup but I'm very happy with it. The RGBtoHDMI looks ideal, it's something I'm meaning to check out.
Any chance you could share the name of the Epidemic song you used around 5:45? 😁
Of course! It's "Cool Kitty Street" by Martin Klem. I've used it in a few videos now, I love it. 😄
A fine taste in music and PCs indeed! Cheers!
did u ever run ram dubbler on it
I can not find the packet driver for the 3com 3c503 card that you have. Is there anyway you can send me a link to that? Thanks!
I actually just found a link. Thanks anyways!
Glad you managed to find it! 😁
Great information. You have a new subscriber.
I went from CGA to EGA back in the day, and I missed the composite TV output that you had with CGA. Not sure if EGA cards had anything like that, but with CGA, playing composite aware games on a big screen was pretty cool - 16 colors although with lesser video quality.
Later I got a VGA card but actually had to use a TV adapter because I didn't have a VGA monitor for a while.
i recently built myself a pc-sprint board for the 5150
Very interesting video!
I wonder if such pc sprint exsists for clone pc's. I have an Atari PC3 XT (4,77Mhz and 8Mhz if turbo on). It has 2 crystals, one for the 4,77Mhz and one for the 8Mhz mode. Replaced the cpu (desolder job, yuck) with a socketed Nec V20 and replaced the 24Mhz crystal with a 30Mhz one. Runs just fine at 10Mhz now but I think a pc sprint solution would be healthier in the long run. Is is notably faster now than before and the NEC cpu can be clocked to 16Mhz without overclocking so it's not even getting warm at 10 Mhz. I don't seem to find the clock chip though. Most chips are Goldstar, Motorola or Siemens branded in this machine.
Would you be able to share the specs and design of the pc speaker to line level adapter you've made? I've been looking for clear instructions on how to achieve this for some time. Being able to capture pc speaker audio would be fantastic.
Of course! I should have put it in the video, although I did link to it in the description (buried among the hundreds of others). It's the first "Tony Duell" circuit on this link: www.oldskool.org/guides/speakerrecording
I was going to start there and try out some of the more sophisticated ones listed on that page, but to be honest it worked just fine for my needs so I stopped at that one.
I really need to get working on my 5160
Yeah, there were some games requiring over 600KB free ram. The max I remember is 613KB, but it's been a while so I could be a bit off. One of the reasons I hated DOS for games. Well, not the games, but having to fiddle with the system before some of them would be fully playable. Long live QEMM.
Good video man.
bullshit. it's all just a matter of setting emm386 and himem.sys up properly once. load the whole netware stack and odipkt, mouse driver, whatever. and all games still just run fine without ever changing it again. (just use loadhigh on basically everything at that... and dos=high,ems or whatever it was ;) can't remember ever having to 'change things' to get 'stuff to run' so if that was the case probably your initial configuration was crap to start with. ofcourse that stuff only came around with version 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 but hey.
seriously can't remember -anything- not running without modifying config.sys and autoexec first. ever. and most of them shit games also ran fine with an emulated cd drive if they 'required the cd-rom to be present' or on drive D: instead of X: or something over netware lol.
it's a solid operating system. that simply does what it's told to do. lol. unlike all that backdoored modern shit that does all kinds of shit you don't want it to do. lol. and -most- versions do so -forever- after turning it on (and never turning it off again ;) actual memory leaks and such are rare. lol.
maybe nowadays you would consider 'dos' to be less of an operating system and more of an int 21 api call library like the bios is too :P LOL. but hey. it works fine. it doesn't do a lot of stuff but what it does it usually does without bugs. and in most cases that's all it needs to do. lol.
@@CB3ROB-CyberBunker Learn to read. I am blocking you as I cant' stand morons.
I'll have to check out the PC sprint for my XT as the stock 4.77 is just painfully slow.
While you can't use the 16-color high resolution 640x350 mode on your 5153 color monitor, which depends on the RAM expansion (without the expansion, you get a 4 color mode instead that is supported by nearly no software), you do get a larger video buffer that can be used for scrolling around. For example the classic games "Crystal Caves" and "Secret Agent" distributed by Apogee use 320x200 in 16 colors (which can be displayed fine on your monitor), but have the whole level in video RAM, and just move around what piece of the video RAM gets displayed. A 64K EGA card can only have 2 screenfulls of 320x200 in RAM, whereas the EGA card with all 256K equipped can manage 8 screenfulls. Crystal Caves and Secret Agent need and use this extra space. So the RAM expansion is not as useless as you make it seem to be at 11:45.
Thanks for the information, I wasn't aware of any games specifically coded to take advantage of the extra video RAM. It would be interesting to see how they perform both with and without the expansion fitted. A good excuse to check out Crystal Caves too, a game I've been meaning to take a look at.
I know that Commander Keen 4 will not show graphics properly without a full upgraded EGA card, visual glitches will be shown in random places about the screen due to the way it buffers video. Similar games like Crystal Caves/Secret Agent may also be affected.
15:29 in fact, I tried the oldest DOS which can be executable on IBM PC (0.90 - pre 1.0 version) and didnt have any problem with 2022 year in date setting :)
Good to know! IBM were certainly forward thinking 🙂
I built the PC Sprinter for my Original Tandy 1000 with a V20 chip. I ended up getting the 22mhz crystal and I have been having issues with it crashing. Sometimes when I boot it will say "Memory: None". I'm going to try the 21.47mhz crystal and see how that works.
Nice video, i'm in the UK also and have been looking for a sensibly priced IBM AT or XT with monitor on and off now for quite a while. I know what you mean about prices, I never seem to see them going for 'sensible' prices! I also wanted to see if I could get the same PC as I had for my first one when I was in my teens which was an Olivetti PCS86, but even they seem to be quite pricey when they come up! The PCS86 had the NEC V30 chip as it happens (it had VGA but 640k only, I put an 8-bit Soundblaster in it), it did run a good few of the games I tried on it although some stuff I tried needed a 286. Maybe i'll pick up a PCS286 instead if I can find one!
Just under the wire for DOScember.
Really nice video. I like how you get to the point and explain everything thoroughly and tersely. New sub!
Thanks for the kind comment - and the sub!
@@ctrlaltrees you're welcome! keep em coming!
But can it play crisis? 😛
I appreciated the 640K joke lol
EURO-PC V20 XT CGA/Hercules
TANDY 1000RL/HD
286/8 VGA BB Amiga2000
That's how I drive the "lowEnd" ;)
Very nice system, im in the uk and would like to get a 5150 or maybe a 5170, did you find yours in USA on ebay?
Thanks! Yes, even after shipping it over (ebay Global Shipping Program) it was cheaper than buying a UK model. I think the 5170 was a little bit more common over here, so you might have more luck there. It's also a more useful machine if I'm being entirely honest.
@@ctrlaltrees DId the monitor get shipped from the USA as well?
Can you recommend any other models of early IBM's, I agree that i should be able to do a bit more with the 5170, i just want an early iconic machine.
Yes, monitor is a US model as well, I run the whole thing on a 110V stepdown transformer. There's the PS/2 range of machines as well, they're pretty iconic but for me this original design is where it's at.
Upgrading the CPU to a NEC V20 will add even more performance. Many people in the day did this for a 20% speed improvement without even touching the clock. Add the PC Speed and it will be even faster.
I've never seen a video showing how DOS was used on a stock 5150, without HDD, as internal HDD was added only with XT. Maybe next DOScember.
Great suggestion! I'll pass it on to the Retro TH-cam Illuminati 😉
@@ctrlaltrees Hi Cool - suggestions
How about Feb being Fin-client month :)
My first PC was a Commodore PC10 with TTL graphics - it was a strange ATI ( famous brand anyway ) card i believe and you could set dip switched for TTL / Hercules and CGA - it even should about 4 or 5 shades of green so you could "distinguish colours"
Anyway that PC went i i upgrade to XT Turbo with CGA card and CGA screen
- that lasted 3 month and kept giving me headaches due to the CGA snow- at work we had the same issue and they upgraded CGA cards and i was fornutate enough to be given one of the older cards - it nor rained slightly rather than slow heavily.
A few months later all the machines at work ( about 6 of them ) were upgraded to EGA and NEC Multisync monitors, as i was unofficial PC caretaker and dot matrix printer machine cleaner and seterupperer i was given a spare EGA card and monitor to keep in the cupboard behind me, i done the unboxing and there were 2 ega cards, when i saw the IT rep a while later i told him and he said "dont care you want it to take it home - have a present for the support work you have done" cool - but i needed a screen - this became the yearly upgrade
Eventually i bought a factory second or shop display generic EGA monitor ( 2 months overtime ) and that lasted 5 years until wolf3d was release - i still believe to today that game was responsible for more hardware updates than the entire win 3 / win 95 update process
Regards
George
wait, where is Linus with those tech tips?
I heard Intel was going to come out with a 4.7 GHz 8088 so that people who still had the early IBM could upgrade the CPU without having to get rid of the rest of the system.
As computers got smaller, from room sized, the manuals and software guides and magazines got bigger, so you needed a room for the documentation instead
The longer cards were phased out...
Man, have you *seen* a modern GPU?
@4:20 you mean 180K/360K I think
Ironically I saw this on a tablet pc that uses Intel chips.
We need Novellember.
It's technically not an overclock, when the V20 is designed to function with higher clock speeds.
Thanks for the feedback! I'd say that replacing the PC's clock generation circuit with an external, faster one qualifies as an overclock, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I hope this oversight did not ruin your enjoyment of the video.
Your IBM EGA card has some bad or marginal RAM, I see blue, green and gray dots in random places on Commander Keen 4 in your video where they should not be. I had the same problem with my fully upgraded IBM EGA card and a very difficult time tracking the cause of the random dots down because software video memory tests were not finding bad RAM. Replacing all the RAM on the daughterboard solved the problem for me, see here for more information : th-cam.com/video/nLb0Wjnfw4M/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for the info, that's very helpful. It's kind of intermittent but I've never managed to fully pin it down. I'll definitely investigate the RAM on the EGA card! 👍
But without RGB and water cooling it's nothing
Dude its not a collector item anymore. The mods that are done is the problem. I have an og pc that i will be passing down.