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Expansion possibilities for 5150 (Was: Curious!

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bettablue

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OK, most of you know the battles I've had getting my IBM 5150 working properly. :crutch: So now that I have the issues all nailed down to what I originally thought the problem was, the floppy drives, one of which has finally been replaced; the computer is working great! :happy4:

I am now thinking about what expansion cards are available for the system and what they are typically used for. :computer:

My 5150 currently has the following hardware:

1. Original 83 key PC/XT keyboard
2. CGA video card and display
3. 2 - 360 K floppy drives - (still awaiting one to replace me secondary drive) There is no hard drive, and I don't want one installed. For me, that ruins the experiance of using this computer the way it was meant to be used.
4. 640 K RAM card
5. Parallel port card

As you can see, there aren't a lot of updates installed in this machine. :roadwork: I am curious now; what expansion cards are available for the system and what are they typically used for. What add-ons would you recommend, and finally, what additional functionality can I expect from them?

Here are some of the things I am interested in:

1. Connect the computer to my primary Windows 7 computer, either through the cassette port (similar to what is currently being done with Apple ll systems, although I don't know of a way to convert disk images to wav files for use with the Windows 7 computer's sound card, .) or through my network by way of my Belkin wired/wireless router. :arrow:
2. Communications, ( I was actually thinking about using an acoustic coupler, simply to expand on the geek facor.) There are still a few BBS's and services out there I can dial into. :phone:
3. File sharing and storage - see #5 :danceparty:
4. Printing (I will probably be getting an original IBM branded "graphics" printer in the next few weeks) :yinyang:
5. Mass storage (Here, I have a 100 Meg zip drive, and thanks to modem7, a Laplink 3 parallel cable.) to access a very large collection of vintage DOS programs and games. :grab:

I know there are a lot of things I haven't though about. :confused: I would love to hear your ideas, comments, and recommendations.
Thanks again everybody. :bow2:
 
For the sake of those of us who read a lot of posts, please come up with better titles. "Curious!" tells me nothing about what I am about to read, and will make it harder for people to find this thread if they need to in the future.

Come up with a better topic and post it here - one of the admins will edit the thread for you.


Mike
 
Glad to hear you got it working. A better title would be, "Curious about my 5150s future," or something along those lines. And a little less bling, please. The smilies can rock to the DJ later.:)
 
So yes, if you have a parallel port you could try finding an older version of the iomega guest app and see if you can get the a parallel zip drive to work on the system. That would provide a slow hard drive interface but take some RAM overhead. Alternatively (I recall it supported lpt ports not just serial) you could try interlnk and intersrv with another dos system and share a hard drive that way.

Personally I would add a hard drive controller and drive. One of the best improvements over the system was experiencing the difference in load time of a game or application from a hard drive vs floppy. It was an investment back then but I don't think anyone would have regretted the move.
 
barythrin said:
Personally I would add a hard drive controller and drive. One of the best improvements over the system was experiencing the difference in load time of a game or application from a hard drive vs floppy. It was an investment back then but I don't think anyone would have regretted the move.
Click to expand...
Remember, the 5150s power supply was underrated to handle a hard drive. Unless he upgraded the power supply, I'd recommend leaving it alone.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Use an XTIDE with a CF card and you should be fine.
Click to expand...

Yup! Also lets you keep both full-height floppy drives. That was a major reason for switching my Leading Edge Model D to an XT-IDE: it was originally dual-floppy, and was in that configuration when I first started using it to learn BASIC. Having a hard drive is /very/ nice though.
 
OK, now you have me interested... The XT-IDE is something I have read about that provides the connection of the more modern hard drive. Hmmm. And you mention that I won't have to lose my 2 full height floppy disks? I would love to see pics of the internal configuration.


glitch said:
Yup! Also lets you keep both full-height floppy drives. That was a major reason for switching my Leading Edge Model D to an XT-IDE: it was originally dual-floppy, and was in that configuration when I first started using it to learn BASIC. Having a hard drive is /very/ nice though.
Click to expand...
 
Okay, here's a photo of my setup:

attachment.php


I'm using a 4GB CF card on this.
 

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0Now that, I like. How much does something like this cost to build? This also brings up a whole bunch of other questions too. What do I need to do to get my 5150 to boot from it? Because of the DOS limits to disk space, I do have DOS 3.3, and 6.22, what are the partition sizes? I guess, more importantly to me, is there a way to build this so that the CF card can be connected from the rear of the computer so that when it's not connected the computer will only boot to DOS from floppy or to BASIC?

Of course, having an external connection will also allow the CF card to be manipulated easier as well. Once it's disconnected it could be inserted into the card reader on my primary PC for file transfers, updates, and such.



Chuck(G) said:
Okay, here's a photo of my setup:

attachment.php


I'm using a 4GB CF card on this.
Click to expand...
 
Other than the PC board, I bought nothing else--just dug into the depths of my hellbox and put it together. The PCB cost me $14 shipped. I even made the PCB bracket in my shop (note the pop rivets). I used an EPROM instead of an EEPROM because I've got a pile of them. The logic chips are a mixture of 74HC, and 74LS logic (not great design practice, but it works--the design is very forgiving). So basically, I'm cheap. :)

Hargle and Andrew have worked out a new PCB that includes an option for a serial port, so there's a way to get more out of those 5 slots in your 5150. You'll have to ask them about the new unit pricing.

The IDE-to-CF adapters are typical Chinese imports; if you go to eBay, you can get them for about $2 shipped. A 4GB CF card will run about $15 or so, if you don't already have a couple in your camera bag. The XTIDE works fine with older smaller CF cards as well--I've checked it out with a 32MB CF.

You're pretty much restricted to FAT16 partitions on a 5160/5150, so 2GB is the maximum partition size on DOS 6.22, but there older versions of DOS restrict you to smaller partitions. There's nothing to prevent you from installing a boot manager and booting several versions of DOS from different partitions. Of course, DOS 1.x is not one of those, as it has no hard drive support and DOS versions before 3.31 will restrict you to 32MB partitions.
 
bettablue said:
What do I need to do to get my 5150 to boot from it?
Click to expand...
The XT-IDE has an expansion ROM. Therefore the third BIOS revision (chip U33 = 1501476) for the 5150 is required.

The code in the XT-IDE expansion ROM that runs at boot time presents a boot menu. You get to choose what you want to boot from. An XT clone of mine has an XT-IDE fitted with CF attached. The clone also has a MFM controller and drive. At boot time, I get to choose whether to boot from A:, B:, MFM drive or CF card (or ROM BASIC, if my clone had BASIC ROMs fitted). Great stuff.

bettablue said:
is there a way to build this so that the CF card can be connected from the rear of the computer
Click to expand...
See eBay item 250623825988. Of course, that results in consumption of two of the 5150's five slots - one for the XT-IDE card and one for the IDE-to-CF-adapter.

bettablue said:
so that when it's not connected the computer will only boot to DOS from floppy or to BASIC?.
Click to expand...

The boot menu has a selection timeout (configurable), and a default boot device (configurable). If you don't make a selection before the timeout, an attempt will be made to boot from the default boot device. In a machine with only floppy drives, I added an XT-IDE (first generation, with BIOS revision 1.1.4) fitted with CF card attached. The XT-IDE was configured so that the default boot device was device 80h (first hard drive). As expected, when I didn't make a selection at the boot menu, the machine booted from the CF card. I powered off the machine, removed the CF card, then powered on the machine. Then, because the XT-IDE could not find the CF card, it presented a boot menu that only contained the floppy drives (well, actually ROM BASIC as well). I could see from the boot menu that the default boot device was now A: drive (device 00). After the selection timeout, it booted from A:

Of course, if you're in front of the computer at boot time, why wait for the timeout - just select what you want to boot from.
 
My 2Cents

Why not first learn to use the computer as it was in its original configuration? Learn about DOS 2.1, 360K disks and what a person could do with the computer without a hard drive or SD card, etc attached. Even better try writing a few programs in BASIC and saving to cassette. You can learn a lot from this process.

I can't help but think that you're cheating yourself by jumping ahead to the end of the game.

In short, use the IBM PC for what it was, don't try to make it into a modern PC.

If you're stuck without much software, see if you can find a computer with both a 5 1/4" and 3.5" drive so that you can copy disks to 360K format 5 1/4" that will work on the PC.

Some here may disagree with me, and I totally understand the desire to connect the system to a modern PC. I have my Commodore 128 attached to my Win 7 box via an ethernet cable (MMC64/RR-Net). For this particular person however, I get the impression that he would benefit from the experience of an as-is IBM PC.

Bill

P.S. What's with the emoticons?
 
Let's be fair.

The unvarnished 64K 5150 was not terribly useful in its base configuration (one 160K disk drive). That disk drive was the first thing to go in favor of a pair of 360K drives. At the time, my programming involved MASM 1.0--a hideously bug-ridden program that came in two versions--a "brain dead" version for 64K machines and a somewhat better version (I think it implemented macros) for 96+K systems. It was very, very slow.

I couldn't put up with it and turned to doing my assemblies on a cross-assembler running on 8-bit CP/M on a system with a hard drive.

When MS-DOS 2.0 came out with installable device drivers, I didn't wait for a hard drive to be available--I grabbed a Shugart SA-1000 4MB 8" drive and WD1001 controller and worked up an ISA card to interface to it. By that time, my system was up to 384K, so things weren't too bad--MASM 2.0 was better, but was still buggy. I also wrote a device driver for a 96 tpi drive so I could keep 720K on a 5.25" floppy. I was actually able to run Lattice "C" on the system.

At work, we bought a CMS expansion box to use with our 5150 that included a hard drive.

Really, unless you were just playing games, the base configuration wasn't all that useful. Somewhere, I seem to recall that Microsoft used cross-assemblers for early versions of DOS. I know that Sorcim did for SuperCalc, SuperWriter, SuperProject, etc.--they had some CompuPro S100 boxes with hard drives and a VAX 11/730. I don't think their PC was used for anything but preparing the final media and testing.
 
billdeg said:
In short, use the IBM PC for what it was, don't try to make it into a modern PC.
Click to expand...

Yea. People have different reasons for collecting. Some people collect old gear just for the fun of souping them up. That's a perfectly valid reason for the hobby if that's what rings your bell.

However, for myself, I'm more with Bill. I like my models in the configurations that were typical in the day. The limitations are part of the charm, which is why I'd never add a hard drive to my 5150. I've got my 5160 and 5170 for that experience.

Tez
 
Instead of XT-IDE, a CF adapter, and then trying to find a CF card that works as an IDE device, how about something like this?

xtidemod-flash.jpg

That piece of handiwork is from Glitch, and the full page is here:




The device is known as 'Disk on Module'. They come in sizes from 32MB to 8GB and are designed to be drop-in replacements for IDE hard drives. No adapters needed, and no worrying about if your particular CF card supports "true IDE" mode. (A lot of the newer ones don't.)


Mike
 
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