Today was an exhausting day.
I made the half hour trek on foot to the recycle center again (same place I got all that XT stuff) and this time I was once again rewarded richly. I found an AT clone in a horribly bent up case (marked "goof box" for whatever reason - huh), so I removed all of the parts and ditched the case, it being too heavy to carry back anyway. There were some pretty cool parts in there, including a Seagate HDD, but I wasn't allowed to take the hard drive because "it might have user data on it". Darn, oh well. I guess I'll stick with floppies for now.
There was also a humongous AT power supply (the fans still spin up when I flip the big red switch - does this mean it will work?) and two floppy drives, one 5 1/4" and one 3 1/2".
I also found two mechanical key keyboards (woo hoo!), one of which has a switch to go between XT and AT mode, so that solves my XT keyboard problem.
Pictures:
The mainboard. The CPU is an Intel 286 8 MHz. I also see an Intel 80287 coprocessor. Can somebody identify this for me? How much memory does it have (I assume the standard 640K, but you never know) and how do I upgrade it with more? For instance, if I want XMS or EMS, is there an add-on card for that? Sorry, but I just have never learned this stuff since I've never worked with pre-Pentium stuff before.
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Now the video card, which is very hard to find on the internet but appears to be something by "Video 7". Question: what is Video 7? Is this EGA-compatible or what? I managed to find information on those DIP-switches, and, assuming that info is correct, the card is set to EGA mode. Apparently one of those RCA connectors is for composite out and the other is for a "light pen", whatever that is.
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And this appears to be some kind of DAC. An audio DAC? I looked up those chips and they're supposed to be 16 bit audio DACs, but this obviously isn't a 16 bit card. What on earth is this?
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And a 16-bit I/O card. This doesn't look like standard IDE so I have no idea what it is, but at least I know how to hook floppy drives to it so I can at least boot the system if and when I get it going.
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And finally, unrelated to all of the above stuff, is the piece de resistance. I literally dipped my hand into a box full of random cables and junk parts, and pulled out this beauty:
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Oh yes! I've wanted one of these for so long, and now I have it. Mwa ha ha ha! This will go into my far-in-the-future planned PIII rig, if and when that happens.
All of this stuff was a royal pain in the rear to haul back up to campus. I managed to stuff as much as I could in my backpack, and put the rest in a file archive box, hauling the whole lot the whole mile and a half back, up a steep hill at the end. Good exercise though 🤣
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.