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Something Old And Something New - my take on a Turbo XT hot-rod

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First post, by Jolaes76

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Up till recently, I was not particularly excited about building such a slow retro rig before, but now that I had an excellent base for free, I thought I would give it a chance.

I don't post regularly about my builds and experiments either, but this last one proved quite a challenge... so I thought I make a few photos as this thing actually works. Thanks goes to Carlostex, Alexanrs, Great Hierophant, Anonymous Coward here and Trixter and other veteran members of VCF for their informative posts and the inspiration.
Special thanks to keropi for sharing his XT-IDE BIOS build (man, what an ordeal was to find out the double bit swap at the end of the binary file for 3c503 compatibility 😀

Well, it befell that shortly before last Xmas I received a gift - a new-old-stock XT clone motherboard...
As a teenager, I worked and played around with 286s but never used XTs (though I met them in rundown offices, already being already phased out, these strange looking Methuselahs...)

This present was a modest 256 kb board, so I had to order the necessary memory chips (two different types!) to get that whopping 640 kb. Smooth sailing so far.
Then I run through my oldest boxes and found some cards: a Hercules, a CGA and two EGA cards (but I do not have such monitors) and an 8 bit Intel VGA (pictured) plus over a dozen Trident 8900s which I knew would work (from VCF forum).
I also found a 40 mb NEC MFM HDD on a 16 bit WD controller, and 3 8bit MFM controllers that can drive the NEC although not at full capacity.
After some thinking and considering the cometing price of MFM stuff, I dropped the idea of using real spinners as storage and settled with an XT-IDE Bios in a NIC + CF-cards solution.

The baby AT tower case is currently under RetroBright treatment...

More pics coming soon.

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Almost all initial components (motherboard, CF adapter, 3c503 NIC + AUI-RJ45 adapter, AT/XT keyboard, NOS 360kb 1.2 floppy drive, Gotek floppy emulator, Goldstar Prime XTA !!! capable multi I/O controller, GW 202 baby I/O card with RTC battery)
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PIM TB10 Turbo XT motherboard, here without ROM BASIC
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10 Mhz math coprocessor added
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GW 202 close-up
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Goldstar Prime 2 multi I/O controller close-up
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Last edited by Jolaes76 on 2016-03-24, 14:06. Edited 1 time in total.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 1 of 7, by Jolaes76

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NOS 360kb 1.2" floppy drive
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3COM 3c503 8-bit ISA NIC + AUI to RJ45 adapter
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IDE-CF adapter and NEL Electronics 8-bit VGA
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A working system - Mike Brutman's ftp server up and running :)
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Internals currently - dual (internal and external) CF adapters, VGA changed to Trident 8900C for better CGA compatibility, a rare SB Pro (dual OPL2) clone card added
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Last edited by Jolaes76 on 2016-03-21, 10:32. Edited 2 times in total.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 2 of 7, by Jolaes76

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Mini tower case (386 era)
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Of course, only the 8 bit MFM controller (lower) works in the XT... but the NEC drive is error-free, so I decided not to use it.

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A historically correct option for storage - finally dropped in favour of silent CF cards, for prolonging its life
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Last edited by Jolaes76 on 2016-03-31, 12:37. Edited 2 times in total.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 3 of 7, by Skyscraper

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This seems to be a very nice build! I hope you will have much fun with your new old system. 😀

One day I will also build a XT system, I think I have everything needed exept for a motheboard with CPU.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 4 of 7, by keropi

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Another great XT build!!! It seems the older we get the older machines we enjoy... I too did not have XT experience in my youth, only 286 and upwards 😀
I like that 8bit vga, never saw a CHIPS one before... What are you thinking about sound? AdLib? SB?

🎵 🎧 ⏳ ⚡ PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 5 of 7, by Jolaes76

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Thanks! My efforts still cannot match the guys' research and advice I followed.

I have not decided on the final configuration yet. The current sound card is SB 1.0 compatible for DIGI and SB Pro 1 compatible for music (dual OPL2). Most games, however, suppose that you have a real SB Pro or 100% compatible when you select SB Pro - these cannot provide stereo OPL music to this hybrid card.
Yet, there are a few games that can be setup for mono 22 khz SB speech/SFX but dual OPL2 music. Cobra Mission music and SFX, for example, sound just like my real CT1330A cards.
My hybrid SB Pro clone card needs recapping and some home-made shielding, though... An other option is a nice 8 bit Aztech card (SB 1.0 compatible afaik)

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 6 of 7, by carlostex

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Great build!!!

A word of advice. You are using a Gold Star Prime controller and a GW202. Beware that the floppy header cannot be disabled via jumper on the GW202 card so it could be that it conflicts with the Goldstar card. By default almost all I/O cards put the floppy at IRQ6 DMA2. You can't use the GW202 controller with HD floppy drives, the UMC 8397 controller does not support HD commands.

Luckily for me i have a similar card that has a socketed 8397 chip, so i pulled the chip off and now everything works with no conflicts.

Reply 7 of 7, by Jolaes76

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Yes, I am using the GW 202 for the timer function only. No conflicts here yet with the floppy drives on the Prime 2 card. In case of issues, the Prime 2 can disable its floppy port via jumper for a swap...
Fortunately, I have 360k boot floppies if need arises (unlikely) so having a HD floppy BIOS for booting is not really a concern to me. I just load 2M-XBIOS when I use HD floppies. For my purposes it is perfect 😀

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

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