I finally formatted 4/4 MFM Miniscribe 3425 drives, but one had an issue. I do have 3 working. I now have two of them in the case. My next issue is a case that has the micro atx mounts so that I can use all 8 slots, but that'll be hard to find. Going to have to mod this case. But it is working out nice, so far. It's been about a month and have gone far with this project.

Next up is the OPL2 kit and XT-CF-Lite. Wish the XT-IDE Rev 4 wasn't so sparse, I'd like that. May have to get the board manufactured and order parts seperately. Don't see kits, and the assembled kits are not I want. I built this sucker from scratch, I'm gonna do the rest that way. With cat claws, and badgers, and ....

I've used this case for so many things, now it's gone back to an XT build, haha. Very versatile.

The XT IDE CF Lite works like a charm. Most important task I had to do after removing the non dos partitions was execute “FDISK /MBR” after creating the primary and making sure it was active. Loaded a bunch of programs to it and King’s Quest was in all of its glory, haha. I plan to assemble the OPL2 and Micro 8088 later. Right now, I’m figuring out an enclosure for this beast.

One topic I’ve scoured Vogons, retrowbrew, vcfed and everywhere else, is how UMB is to work. I remember having a Laser 386 and it had 1mb ram soldered to the board. I mowed lawns to buy such small memory modules to upgrade ram. It was a 386, but there is an option to turn reserved memory space to ram for an 8088. What I haven’t seen clear,is if it is through the bios, because it reports findings, or through a driver. Switches SW2.1 to SW2.7 are all on for me so all addresses are mapped to ram. My current vga adapter has its address starting at A000000. Just can’t seem to use the extra address space the SRAM provides.

All VGA are at A000h. So there is no chance to move that. I have no experience with UMBs on XTs. Only on ATs. But did you try to simply do a DOS=UMB in your config.sys and try to DEVICEHIGH and LH some drivers and programs?

umb will present itself as ram in the c000 to efff space. you can use a driver to map it.

This driver should work:

https://github.com/monotech/NuXT/blob/master/ … OS/USE!UMBS.ZIP

Thank you Bloodycactus and Root42. I found the tool I needed! Utilizing v2.2 of USE!UMBS from http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread. ... a-XT/page3 and DOSMAX21, I was able to use C800-F000 and use upper memory.

Congratulations! Now you can even run Windows 3.0 on it with some useful amount of RAM! 😀

Hi,

I just finished my Xi 8088 build.
Does anybody know where i can find a POST code overview?
thanks
Peter

peda126 wrote on 2020-04-01, 23:17:

Hi, […]
Show full quote

Hi,

I just finished my Xi 8088 build.
Does anybody know where i can find a POST code overview?
thanks
Peter

Hello Peter,

Look at POST checkpoint codes

Sincerely,

William

root42 wrote on 2020-03-09, 06:40:

Congratulations! Now you can even run Windows 3.0 on it with some useful amount of RAM! 😀

Greetings,

Not only that! After adding the HardMPU from ab0jt, it's rockin' like a hurricane. It's been a joy playing midi data through it to the Roland SC-55 for the last 5 or so hours with no hiccups. It soothes the brain while assembling the Micro 8088 board. Current setup pictures are attached. I went the way of Scott Baker's Mountain Mod's tray. Drilling some 7/64 holes and tapped some holes for the mounting studs helped secure it and enable the use of 7 slots. It is a bit more stable rather than in a Micro-ATX case where only 4 slots could be utilized because of the layout.

8088 Domination's Badapple and Triton's Crystal Dreams demos run.

Upon further inspection, my initial population of the peripheral IC's for the Xi 8088 didn't include the all of the modern IC's ordered. I'm going to repopulate them one at a time as there are some 5MHz only IC's populated. After that, I'll install the Micro 8088. It isn't fully populated, but I'll show a picture of that anyways.

Sincerely,

William

The Xi-808088 has most peripheral ICs swapped with part numbers having higher specs. Since then, I've been using the Micro 8088 with no hiccups.
CPU Clock Frequencies 4.77, 7.16 and 9.55 work without a hitch. 9.55 really screams with this beast at 2.45x better than a plain jane XT.

Up next is to take some time and start measuring and drilling holes for the keystone brackets. I did find one issue with the OPL-2. The POT knob doesn't really fit in the middle of the keystone, It's kinda all the way to the top when the card is straight vertical and not one side to the other. Seems like the hole for that keystone is gonna not work too well. I used the same POT in the BOM 91A1A-B24-D15L

Perhaps the board is a bit off alignment with the standoffs, but most of the other boards are vertical and fit well.

Greetings!

ISA Super VGA on the way. Took about 10 rounds inspecting with a jewler's loop. It is looking great. Had a couple snags, but my MacGyver buff ability gave me some help. Hoping to have the Super VGA going today. Hand soldering is a bit tedious when there are hiccups. The most useful tools were some SMD rework tools and a soldering wick. Don't use so much solder, keep it light and use flux. It'll help a lot.

warm the broken pins and push one of them out and move a good pin over, but is that for to socket 4 pin crystal oscillator chip?

Cheers,

Wahooo! I’ve completed the Xi 8088 build. Have windows 3.0, too. Up next is Scott Baker’s ISA additions. The vga card didn’t work at first. The BIOS always hung at 11. I reflowed all the pins and then it worked. Wahooooooo!

That's so cool. I have a handful of FE2010A floating around. I think sometime this year I will order a batch of 3 PCBs and start a Micro8088.

root42 wrote on 2020-04-29, 14:32:

That's so cool. I have a handful of FE2010A floating around. I think sometime this year I will order a batch of 3 PCBs and start a Micro8088.

Greetings root42,

I did get some backup FE2010A IC's for the heck of it. So far, the whole build is stable. I got SMBaker's Flash/EMS board completed, and have 2MB EMS whenever needed. It won't be often.

For the whole build, some parts are real tedious, so I just listened to music or caught up on some shows to listen to while I did that. That was mainly during the Micro ATX backplane and Xi8088 pcb. Lots of solder joints there. I'm still hesitant to reel out the drill press and Dremel and work on the keystones for the Xi8088, Micro 8088, OPL2 and CF cards. I guess I'll just hunker down one day with the calipers and get it going.

The rest wasn't too bad. I thought that was torture, this is my next project:

Single Board Relay Computer "Trainer" Haha. I'm a glutton for punishment. By the way, if anyone builds Scott Baker's Flash/EMS board, you'll need to manually crawl through the original LTEMM (from Lo Tech EMS driver source) and his changes cause the patch won't apply cleanly. I created a decent diff to use, and have the executable if interested. If enough interest, I could post it.

I've cloned Scott Baker's and added the executable and updated diff from the latest LTEMM source. https://git.berzerkula.org/sbems/about/
The DIP switches are set for Page Frame E000 and base port address 260h. Be careful how you orientate the DIP switches. If upside down, will match Scott's. If proper, will be opposite. Haha.

Sergey has a panel for the Micro 8088, wouldn't take much for the Xi 8088 here: https://github.com/skiselev/micro_8088_case

I decided to take one PCB and test it and figure out any kinks I may encounter. The next PCB, I'll perfect it a bit to my liking as far as components used. Turned out well. All functions work well.
Still deciding on an enclosure. Right now, it's out in the open. Haha!

Greetings,

Had some free time and took the Dremel to a keystone and voilà. The adapter will be more secure. My first one. Not too shabby.

Hi everyone
I am just waiting for the last part of Sergey's XT to arrive (the boards themselves - I am in the UK) but I am totally confused with which versions of BIOS are needed on what.

I am planning to use these Sergey boards:

• Micro ATX ISA Backplane – the 8 x ISA slot version

• Xi 8088 PCB -CPU board

• ISA Floppy Disk and Serial Controller

• ISA OPL2 – Adlib compatible sound board.

• XT-CF-Lite – Compact Flash Board.

I didn't like the look of the surface mounting on Sergey's VGA card so am planning to try a Trident TVGA9000C which I already have instead.

The Xi 8088 board needs a BIOS obviously, but there are two flavours I can install from Sergey (with or without XTIDE) - or three if I use Stu's 0.9.1 version (+xtidel).
The ISA Floppy board can also have a BIOS, but Sergey's instructions says not needed if I am using Xi 8088 board?
The XT-CF-Lite also has a BIOS which I have assumed to be the latest version which is XTIDE_Universal_BIOS_v2.0.0_beta3.

If OK so far, which BIOS should I burn for the Xi 8088, Floppy card, and/or XT-CF-Lite so that the XT boots, the floppy disk (1.44) works and the CF card works as a "hard disk"? BUT I want to use the floppy controller with just backplane and CPU first, before I connect the CF board.

Oh my head! Any guidance appreciated.

Did bloody cactus, keenerb or smbaker ever get their xi 8088 stable? I'd like to build one but after reading this thread I'm hesitant