Gary C
Veteran Member
The 5160 has been restored to good health.
The case has finally been filled and sprayed. Pantone 413U seems to be a reasonable match, it has that greenish tinge but seems quite a bit lighter, however after sanding down the case it became apparent that the original paint was very very dirty so it might be spot against a new machine. For the bezel I used some BMW mini pepper white spray and that looks reasonable too.
Due to the extensive damage to the metal case, it lost a lot of the original paint and as such the 'speckled' effect has been lost but with matt paint, it looks ok.
The machine itself only needed a tantalum capacitor replacing (surprised the HD survived the impact that bent the case and snapped the bezel in half) and fired up first time but the Quadram Quadcard had suffered a significant battery acid leak which had eaten away several tracks. I started to run wires but eventually had to admit there was too much damage. This was encouraged by finding a clone quadcard on Ebay for a very reasonable price with no RAM chips. The seller confirmed it had no acid damage but declared the clock worked but the RAM function had not been tested.
Lo and behold, when installed with the chips from the original, the computer still could only see 256K
Using DEBUG I could see that page 5 & 6 could not be written too but pages 7,8,9 & 10 were fine.
The board had been setup according to the Quadboard manual but as the clone card had some differences and no identifying numbers at all, I could not be certain they were right. Using DEBUG and flicking the switches I could see some pages disappearing and reappearing so I kept changing them until pages 5 & 6 started to work and now all pages of memory work perfectly.
The keyboard that came with it was an Opus XT-AT unit which worked but was missing a shift key and was extremely yellowed. By chance I saw what looked like an identical unit, but with virtually no yellowing, given that F type keyboards are really expensive and that the Opus keyboard was what was used when the system was used at Pirelli, it was a good choice. Sold as working but with slightly sticky keys, but actually would not work at all. Quick check on the keyboard controller showed it crashed shortly after starting up. So I thought I could just swap the keycaps and case to the working unit, but no, the new unit used cherry switches and the old unit used some un-named units and the mountings of the keys were different. Fortunately swapping the controller over seems to have worked though I do have one none working key and am not sure if its the key or its not being read by the controller.
I had also bought a Sharp MZ-80K in March that had been held by the seller until I could travel and pick it up. It was 220 miles away, but was actually only 15 miles from my sisters house. So this weekend its been picked up and also came with the expansion unit, but its on hold in the queue until I get round to it.
Starting to plan out the installation of the Multibus 286 card as all the ones I have ever used at work all came set up. Will need to use serial arbitration but still use the iLBX to connect up the memory card. Have also 'found' an installation kit with the standard Intel monitor/development system ROMs so should be able to get it running soon, fingers crossed.
The case has finally been filled and sprayed. Pantone 413U seems to be a reasonable match, it has that greenish tinge but seems quite a bit lighter, however after sanding down the case it became apparent that the original paint was very very dirty so it might be spot against a new machine. For the bezel I used some BMW mini pepper white spray and that looks reasonable too.
Due to the extensive damage to the metal case, it lost a lot of the original paint and as such the 'speckled' effect has been lost but with matt paint, it looks ok.
The machine itself only needed a tantalum capacitor replacing (surprised the HD survived the impact that bent the case and snapped the bezel in half) and fired up first time but the Quadram Quadcard had suffered a significant battery acid leak which had eaten away several tracks. I started to run wires but eventually had to admit there was too much damage. This was encouraged by finding a clone quadcard on Ebay for a very reasonable price with no RAM chips. The seller confirmed it had no acid damage but declared the clock worked but the RAM function had not been tested.
Lo and behold, when installed with the chips from the original, the computer still could only see 256K
Using DEBUG I could see that page 5 & 6 could not be written too but pages 7,8,9 & 10 were fine.
The board had been setup according to the Quadboard manual but as the clone card had some differences and no identifying numbers at all, I could not be certain they were right. Using DEBUG and flicking the switches I could see some pages disappearing and reappearing so I kept changing them until pages 5 & 6 started to work and now all pages of memory work perfectly.
The keyboard that came with it was an Opus XT-AT unit which worked but was missing a shift key and was extremely yellowed. By chance I saw what looked like an identical unit, but with virtually no yellowing, given that F type keyboards are really expensive and that the Opus keyboard was what was used when the system was used at Pirelli, it was a good choice. Sold as working but with slightly sticky keys, but actually would not work at all. Quick check on the keyboard controller showed it crashed shortly after starting up. So I thought I could just swap the keycaps and case to the working unit, but no, the new unit used cherry switches and the old unit used some un-named units and the mountings of the keys were different. Fortunately swapping the controller over seems to have worked though I do have one none working key and am not sure if its the key or its not being read by the controller.
I had also bought a Sharp MZ-80K in March that had been held by the seller until I could travel and pick it up. It was 220 miles away, but was actually only 15 miles from my sisters house. So this weekend its been picked up and also came with the expansion unit, but its on hold in the queue until I get round to it.
Starting to plan out the installation of the Multibus 286 card as all the ones I have ever used at work all came set up. Will need to use serial arbitration but still use the iLBX to connect up the memory card. Have also 'found' an installation kit with the standard Intel monitor/development system ROMs so should be able to get it running soon, fingers crossed.