First post, by Jed118
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hello all,
So I got a JUKO NEST board, practically NIB with an NEC V30 fitted (so it is the 8086 version of the board) only because I needed a true XT board to test out a real Model F keyboard. This is a nice board, it's clean, came with the utilities and a decently photocopied manual. I already made a copy of the software, I'll upload it to the drivers site soon (not too sure how to do that ATM but will look into it tomorrow).
It also came with a NIB 8087-1, sealed with the original receipt from 1988 or so.
Turns out, this board supports 44256 chips, which I had lying around, so I contacted the seller and I picked it up today. After swapping in some 80NS parity chips (the board came with 100NS ones) and filling it with 1024k of RAM, I cobbled together an ATI VGA Wonder (after setting it to EGA mode, 8 bit bus) and an IO card on which the IDE didn't work anyhow and set the jumpers. Initially a Keyboard Locked error appeared, but the manual had a jumper I could set to unlock the keyboard (J4 I think) so I did that.
Won't boot. I tried different cables, different drives and controller cards (5.25 and 3.5, all HD but used 360k and 1.2Mb diskettes in them, as well as 1.44Mb) with different DOS versions as well as original DOS 5 diskettes and nothing but PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK INTO A AND PRESS ANY KEY. I even tried an AT keyboard (this BIOS seems to not care what's plugged in) and it kept asking for the boot disk. It does try to seek something in the drive each time, but I think it doesn't like what it's finding, or it thinks something else is present - the selection of number of floppy drives ranges from 1 to 4(!) but nothing about drive types/densities.
However, I was able to test the model F in a roundabout way, as each time I pressed a key, the drive would start up and then re-prompt me to insert a system disk. I pressed each key and I was able to test them all except for shift, caps, num lock. ALT and CTRL were tested with the DEL key. So, in conclusion, the XT motherboard served its very limited purpose. However, since it's all hooked up and I have the manual, I would like to see it boot and get some diags working, comparing it to a real XT and perhaps a 5150, or some other AT machines (or my own 386 SX/16)
Let me guess - I need a low density drive for that, huh?
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