VOGONS


First post, by mr.spencer

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Hello everyone,

This is my first post.

I wanted to share a PC/XT motherboard I designed, based on the IBM 5160 and influenced by the many Taiwanese turbo clones of the era. I called it the DubaiXTClone.

The main differences from a standard XT design: 8MHz turbo with runtime speed switching, static RAM (no refresh), reduced IC count, 4-layer PCB, and real-time bus activity LEDs driven by otherwise unused gate outputs.

Fully open hardware under CERN-OHL-W v2 — schematics, PCB and PAL source code all included.

Tested with JUKO 2.31, Turbo BIOS 3.1 and others. SVGA Trident, 3COM, RTC, Floppy, and XTIDE all confirmed working in turbo mode.

As a side note, it also runs LMChat (https://github.com/spencer-uk/LMChat), a chat client that connects the board to a local LLM via LMStudio.ai application - ELKS and MS-DOS, both are supported.

GitHub: https://github.com/spencer-uk/DubaiXTClone/

(in the picture: top board DubaiXTClone, bottom IBM5160 - for comparison)

Happy to answer any questions.

~Spencer

Reply 1 of 5, by rasz_pl

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nice one, should probably also post it here List of open-source PC hardware projects

https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk FM/MFM/RLL decoder
https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module (AT&T Globalyst)
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 ram board
https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS Zenith Z-386 MFM-300 ZBIOS disassembly

Reply 2 of 5, by mr.spencer

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Will do that. Thanks for the feedback rasz_pl, appreciated.

Reply 3 of 5, by CharlieFoxtrot

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This is very cool! I built a Micro8088 with backplane and couple of Kiselev ISA cards couple of years ago and it was extremely fun project. I will definitely check out this in detail and maybe build this one too.

Reply 4 of 5, by BitWrangler

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Intriguing, I'll put it on my list of possibles for the "someday I'll scratch build" list... in the vein of a Jedi builds his own lightsaber.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 5 of 5, by Babasha

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Is your board compatible with 1MB of RAM?
If so - how you made high 384KB adressing/shadowing of other technology of access?

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉