Have a Matrox G400 MAX on the way for $14 shipped.

Anybody know what the latest Win98 and XP drivers are and a good place to get them? I know the early drivers OpenGL performance was horrible. I hope that's been fixed in later drivers.

XT Motherboard for this case: (going to build an XT as well)

Only have to look for some 8-bit cards and 1.2mb floppydrive and MFM harddisk..

4 ISA graphics cards , total cost €18 including shipping

Top left : OAK OTI037C
Top right : ?
Bottom left : Western Digital WD90C00-JK
Bottom right : Trident TVGA9000i

I did a quick test and the only the bottom two work .
Hopefully it's just a bad connection that can solved with some rubbing alcohol .

You can find the drivers for the Matrox G400 MAX (I still have mine, bought it as soon as it was released) on the Matrox website: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/latest/

They also have drivers online for Windows 3.x and OS/2. BIOS updates for their graphics card can be downloaded as well.

@robin4
thats REALLY cool AT board you have there! (XT had 5 slots) If you need more help there is a website that caters to the 8 bit systems: http://www.vintage-computer.com They are "serious" about their collecting. Hell, even mentioning 486's is considered taboo and Pentiums are right out. That being said, theya re good people, just not into gaming or 32 bit systems. Also, if the board you have is the one in the picture, you may have a NEC V## processor. Which is basically a "super" 8088. These tend to be rare, so be careful!

@memsys
cool haul! Can you give us any better pictures of the top right card? Also, what connectors does it have? if it has a male and female db-15 connection it is probably a TV tuner that would super impose the video on whatever part of the screen it was told to.

Also with the top left card, there are jumper settings for that card that you may need to change. that looks like a VGA/EGA card and it may be set to EGA. http://www.vintage-computer.com can help you out there too with jumper/switch settings.

CHiLL72 wrote:

You can find the drivers for the Matrox G400 MAX (I still have mine, bought it as soon as it was released) on the Matrox website: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/latest/

They also have drivers online for Windows 3.x and OS/2. BIOS updates for their graphics card can be downloaded as well.

How is OpenGL with the latest drivers?

@ Luckybob
I made some more photo's

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luckybob wrote:

@robin4
thats REALLY cool AT board you have there! (XT had 5 slots) If you need more help there is a website that caters to the 8 bit systems: http://www.vintage-computer.com They are "serious" about their collecting. Hell, even mentioning 486's is considered taboo and Pentiums are right out. That being said, theya re good people, just not into gaming or 32 bit systems. Also, if the board you have is the one in the picture, you may have a NEC V## processor. Which is basically a "super" 8088. These tend to be rare, so be careful!

Yeah it was not expensive also!. Paid 43 euros for it included shipping!! And its still new. Has an NEC V20 processor on it.. Maybe change it to AMD 8088. But first i want to know how fast this board is.. Need to wait 3 weeks before it arrive here.. And then see how its looks in real life..

My case i want to use have 6 expension slots.. But its very hard to find an 6 slots motherboard for it.. This one i can also use, but only the 2 above slots will be covert with the PSU above it.. But thats not a problem for me..

I only need to find some ram for it..

I don`t know the name and type of this board.

But i looks like an JUKO ST clone.. on ebay they sell them for 125 - 190 dollars.

AT can't really be defind by the number of slots...

Has an NEC V20 processor on it.. Maybe change it to AMD 8088.

Unless you really want a genuine 8088 machine, I wouldn't change it. There's not really any disadvantage to the V20, and the speed boost is quite nice. And it's not like it's 'wrong' for that sort of machine anyway... it was a common upgrade for XT-class machines back in the '80s.

As for RAM, it looks like the easiest (or rather, cheapest) method would be 8 44256-equivalent chips and just disable parity. That'd give you 1MB RAM, and the BIOS should support using the >640KB memory as EMS. If you want to add parity, you'll need an additional four 41256 chips. (Old Trident 8900 VGA cards are a good source of 44256 chips, BTW, if you can't find a good deal on loose ones.)

And I'd personally want to stay away from MFM... it does have kind of a 'cool factor,' but other than the interesting noises the old MFM drives make, it's not particularly fun to deal with, and the drives don't tend to sell cheap. And especially if you plan to use the thing a lot, a 25 year old hard drive may not be the best investment reliability-wise... you might want to consider the XTIDE card instead.

I think the biggest problem may be finding an 8-bit HD floppy controller... they're not exactly common, given that XTs had mostly gone by the wayside by the time the HD formats gained traction.

luckybob wrote:

thats REALLY cool AT board you have there! (XT had 5 slots)

Er... It's called AT form factor, but the XT had 8 slots same as the AT. The original 5150 PC had 5 slots.

@ old thrashbarg

I red in the online manual thats possible to put it back in normal 8088 mode a 10mhz. In v20 mode it will do 12mhz.

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AU … -XT-BXM-12.html

I ordered also the memory you recommanded. Is hard to get those 4164 ramchips for 640kb.. So i go for 1mb now.
I ordered 8 of those 44256 DRAM PIN chips..

Whats the purpose of that parity??

For the rest of those cards i will search for. And may take no MFM at all.. They are indeed expensive, noisy, to much bad sectors on in.. I will try to find an XT ide card. Otherwise i will go for scsi..

If you wanted to run the V20 at 10mhz, just change the speed jumper. Likewise, you could run an 8088 at 12mhz, if you had a chip that could handle it. The reason it lists two different speeds for the two different chips is that the 8088 wasn't officially available at >10mhz, while the V20 was, that's all.

Parity is basically to help detect memory errors, sort of the precursor to ECC RAM. It's not really necessary in a retro machine, though, since you're not really going to be doing any critical work on it.

This is the XTIDE I was referring to. They do a new run of the PCBs from time to time, you'd just need to get ahold of the guy in charge of it and put your name in for one.

SCSI on an XT opens up a whole other can of worms... there are really only two 8-bit SCSI cards that I'd consider worth messing with, the Trantor T-130B, and the Future Domain TMC-850. Neither is easy to find. The Trantor has some quirks... it requires a V20 to be bootable, and it seems not to much care for drives over about 650MB or so. The Future Domain is overall less troublesome, but only certain BIOS versions will work with an XT, and many came without a boot ROM at all, so even if you found one you'd likely need access to an EPROM programmer in order to get a usable BIOS onto it.

Ill go for the scsi option.. because i bought an scsi controller few months ago for my 386s computer to connect a cd-rom player to it.. So i dont think that ill need a bios for that.. Now it come very handy with this XT computer build.. Its an Future domain TMC-850 card as you mentioned. I bought it then for about 5 euros. 🤣

Its 8-bit, so its very compatible with XT computers..

Parity is maybe not needed, but think of buying those extra 4 mem chips.

Argh! Where do you guys find these old cases? I've seen *one* come up for sale on Ebay UK in the last couple of months! (that wasn't crazy money, like £99 B.I.N)

Ill go for the scsi option.. because i bought an scsi controller few months ago for my 386s computer to connect a cd-rom player to it.. So i dont think that ill need a bios for that.. Now it come very handy with this XT computer build..

It's not quite so easy as that... your card has the v8.40 BIOS, which is not bootable in an XT. You need the v8.2 BIOS. I've attached a copy of the v8.2 ROM file, you'd just need to find somebody with an EPROM programmer to burn it onto a 27128 chip for you.

megatron-uk wrote:

Argh! Where do you guys find these old cases? I've seen *one* come up for sale on Ebay UK in the last couple of months! (that wasn't crazy money, like £99 B.I.N)

Eagle eyes, local digital market and hoping you find someone who doesn't know these are hard to find these days.

Currently I'm not on the lookout for more, partially because I'm out of cash. Still got some chips to ship to me which will take all my spendable money for the next month or 2 😵

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Ill go for the scsi option.. because i bought an scsi controller few months ago for my 386s computer to connect a cd-rom player to it.. So i dont think that ill need a bios for that.. Now it come very handy with this XT computer build..

It's not quite so easy as that... your card has the v8.40 BIOS, which is not bootable in an XT. You need the v8.2 BIOS. I've attached a copy of the v8.2 ROM file, you'd just need to find somebody with an EPROM programmer to burn it onto a 27128 chip for you.

Isnt it possible to buy an new eeprom, and flash it with that older bios..

Then i could use this new bios on a other card..

Is it possible to backup that 8.40 bios on my card?

Well, I did a purchase the other day in a local second hand store. Bought a motherboard Socket A which I hoped had a Barton chip in it. Alas, it was a 2400+. But I also bought a Rage XL PCI with driver disk...which turned out to have a driver for Radeon so it was newer then I'd hoped. Luckily both weren't very expensive, total was just €7.50 so worth a lil gamble 😜

Grabbed this new sealed Righteous 3D for just $10 off ebay. Really surprised that no one else bid on it...

Wow man that's awesome. Steal of a price, and easily worth way way more. If the auction title didn't contain Voodoo or 3DFX, then I wouldn't be surprised that no one noticed it, because usually the stuff just gets passed over unless it states that specifically.