Something like Anonymous Cowards one? https://sites.google.com/site/misterzeropage/

Yah, that's great, aiming for something pretty similar. Good tips about the HD floppy... maybe that will work with that 16 bit SCSI/Floppy that I think has an 8 bit mode, but not sure it's BIOS is HD floppy bios too or only HDD BIOS.

What is an ST-05? I've never heard of that one before. ST-05X is an XTA hdd controller.
Whatever you have, I hope it's better than an ST-01 or ST-02. Those are a pain in the arse.

I heard some of the Future Domain 16-bit SCSI controllers can work in 8-bit mode, but I never confirmed this.

Yep, it's not an 05, but a lowly 02, guess I got numbers scrambled when trying to remember several part numbers at once.

Recent finds... 300MB internal SCSI HDD, which approaches infinitely large as far as an XT is concerned when software came 360k at a time. External SCSI CD ROM drives, 2 different, they looked like cased internals so one of them might get put inside, or I might pile one on top, see what the aesthetics look like. And a bus mouse turned up, Logitech, but I'm reading here https://www.oldmouse.com/miscellanea/mousebus.shtml that they were cross compatible, though elsewhere saw that you had to use the driver according to the mouse in use, and need an ATI util to enable port on Mach 8.

Still kind of back burnered on low simmer, playing at PIII era at the moment.

Seagate st01/02 doesn’t have an ASPI driver, so I don’t think it’s possible to use a scsi CD-ROM drive with your card.

Really? Huh, I thought they had a non-bootable card with the same chip sold specifically as a CD-ROM card, with RCA jack audio breakouts.

That could be. Do you have a photo of that kit? I looked for quite a few years and never found the driver.

It was a card I had wayyy back in the day and don't have any more, this is a pic I found of one that most closely matches the pic in my head, which isn't very clear...

Which we notice is a future domain not an ST, though I thought adaptec might have been a possibility too.

Future Domain has ASPI drivers, so CD-ROM drive will work.
The Seagate cards apparently licensed the Future Domain chips for their ST-01/02, but there was a customisation made to the silicon swapping two bits around which made them incompatible with Future Domain software. I heard talk it might be possible to patch the drivers, but nothing ever came of it.

Riiight, that's maybe what made me think "same chip" some linux driver discussion in the 90s when I was thinking of using it in a linux box. Funnily enough what killed that adventure was not the crappiness of the card, but the discovery that the external CD ROM drive I picked up for what should have struck me as "suspiciously" cheap, was actually a Mitsumi external and not a SCSI.

Just snarfed some 8 bit goodies Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today so been thinking about this again. Got two Vid cards to choose from now I guess with that PVGA1A rolling in. Mach8 might have more stones but the Paradise might have more custom period stuff to play with. Then the Voyetra OP-4001 card opens up MIDI. The UMC floppy card there has for sure 1.44MB support on XT, no wondering how much system BIOS help you need.

In between times (damn 2 years) I discovered I had the right XT 8 Bit IDE hard drives to replicate a hard card, though I'm not sure if that will go better in the 5155. Oh yah, grabbed some SCSI bits a couple of months back, cable and adapters which may help the cause.

Possibilities stacking up a bit much here, I'm gonna end up needing an expansion chassis 🤣 I do maybe have a riser I could abuse to get 10 slots.

Lemme think, 1 vid, 2 for drives, 2 sound, 1 EMS, 1 NIC, 1 par/ser ... that's if the board takes a full 640 or a bit more, otherwise I'm out. If the NIC takes an XTIDE BIOS with floppy support, then maybe 16 bit i/o card in there with floppy, par, 2 ser. Though I'm reading some other places that other 8 bit SCSI don't "do" CDROMs either, but definition of working is hard to nail down if it's ppl who are unaware that booting CD was not a ubiquitous feature until late 90s. No ASPI is pretty clear nogo.

I think I have the same PVGA1A card. I've only ever tested it to see if it worked (it does).
Is there anything special about it? I've been using VGA Wonders for years, and never had an issue with them.
The way I see it, if you want to play crappy CGA games then just get a CGA card.

Oooh yeah - Super XT 2023! Settled on the motherboard yet? Thought about hot-rodding with an open-source XT BIOS (GLaBIOS, etc)?

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-05-29, 14:23:

I think I have the same PVGA1A card. I've only ever tested it to see if it worked (it does).
Is there anything special about it? I've been using VGA Wonders for years, and never had an issue with them.
The way I see it, if you want to play crappy CGA games then just get a CGA card.

There was a couple apps, games and demo known that had special Paradise mode 800x600x16, but I think they have been patched to work on other cards now so no longer unique.

FrankieKat wrote on 2023-05-31, 19:48:

Oooh yeah - Super XT 2023! Settled on the motherboard yet? Thought about hot-rodding with an open-source XT BIOS (GLaBIOS, etc)?

2025 maybe, I move at speeds that make glaciers look sporty 🤣 Yah, still got a box of motherboards unfound, think it's at back of a double stack somewhere.

XT board located in less than ideal circumstances (shed collapse) Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread. maybe means this project is ON this winter after mucho board restoration.

That board needs more work than I thought. I think it could still be restored, no interlayer stuff, just fiddly crap on nearly every square inch. It is probably going to get left until last board to repair, not getting large blocks of time to marathon it in hyperfocus. So only doing stuff right now I can snatch an hour here and there on.

Anyway, that pivots this project a bit, shunts it onto another track...

I am wanting to get my 5155 going, but since everything specific to it is rare as hell, I don't want any card and device experiments damaging it, and it is not ideal to "tinker" with because everything is a little tight in there. I was gonna do it 100% original, but now I think I want more of a restomod to maybe the "working state" that some owners might have had late eighties, but no mods that won't revert. Anyway, not really dragging that into this thread, but would be handy to have a...

Testbed! Yah, gonna work with another board for testbed reasons, want to verify operation of 8 bit and 8088 stuffs, outside of the 5155 and as sanity checks so I know for sure I've got working cards when I'm trying to fix up that other board, flaky board and flaky cards at same time is not ideal.

So, in order to make progress on both of those, I am going to use a different XT PC board... I have a 5150 board... I think it's the late one that shares BIOS with XT. Anyway, it's not so super unique as the 5155 and I am not trying to kill it or anything. So this is now project Super IBMPC I guess. I dunno if this will turn out temporary or permanent. i.e. find it's very own configuration at the end, the 2nd choice parts from working Super XT and 5155, or there will be unrecoverable faults with clone XT board such that that is the only Super build.

5 slots only! Urgh, we gonna have to get creative to get outside your ancient IBMPC 256kb and floppies early specs. What I am figuring on so far.

Graphics card... I've got maybe 7 or 8 that might go through this as we go along, original MDA, original CGA, herc/cga clone boards, nice featurey ATI boards, to 16bit VGA hanging 8 over the edge.

Multi I/O... it needs at least a floppy, original floppy cards and HD floppy cards might get tested, but those are only convenient when you have 3 whole extra slots to waste, so again 16bit card dangling some digits over. Thus we get Floppy, 2 Serial, Parallel, maybe game, IDE that might be coaxed to work with special XTIDE configs.

RAM, I am fairly sure I am going to need a RAM card, might look at getting more onboard, but also need to test RAM cards.

Network card, gotta have an EPROM socket somewhere, also may do something useful, like network.

Original XT HDD controllers, to test, IDE and MFM cards.

That's the core of stuff I want to go through for XT and 5155, some of which might be retained by this board in the end. Thoughts on other things include the very very interesting and ingenious PicoMem... but it's going to feel like cheating for the 5155, and possibly for the Super XT... if this 5 slotter remains it's own build though it might be real tempty to just roll with it.