Maverick1978
Veteran Member
Hey, folks... Near the end of May, I won an eBay auction for a 5160 XT where the seller claimed that he couldn't get video out of the machine, but it "sounded" like it was trying to boot correctly. It came with an IBM 5153 monitor and an enhanced keyboard. It was also completely filled with expansion cards, including what appeared to be a mono graphics card, a CGA card, and an ethernet card, a RAM card, and a parallel/serial card. It also had a Miniscribe hard drive in it, and from the auction pictures, appeared fairly clean and not all beat up.
I took a chance, put a $55 bid on it, as shipping was $52, and waited. I won it at $52.50. After a month of waiting and arguing with the seller (who refused to respond to numerous emails and phone calls), I finally shamed the guy into shipping the unit after threatening to ruin his perfect feedback and filing grievances with eBay and Paypal. Two weeks later, he finally shipped it.
I received it this past Wednesday, tore open the packages, and ripped the unit apart. What do you know, but it contained an original Hercules mono card, an IBM CGA p/n 1501981, an 10baseT ethernet card with two banks of dip switches allowing me to select the interrupt I wished to use, a miniscribe MFM controller card, a 10mb Miniscribe drive, a 5160 floppy controller with a Tandon TM-200a floppy drive, an AST SixPack ram board (fully populated), and a generic parallel and serial card (why these were in there, I have no idea - both were redundant).
Reseating all of the cards, I hooked up my 5151 monitor to the Hercules card and the 5153 to the CGA and fired her up. To my delight, the ram counted all the way up to 640k, and a C-prompt appeared soon after! - I was absolutely shocked by this as the computer was shipped from CA to FL, and I'm sure that it was all none too gentle!
DOS 2.1 installed on the hard drive, and chkdsk reports zero bad sectors... I put it in graphics mode and saw output on the 5153 monitor! A quick adjustment, and I was looking around the hard drive (finding a registered version of Pharoah's Tomb from Apogee) and was playing in true CGA colors!
Next up was grabbing a blank 360kb floppy and seeing if it passed the dummy test - yep! I formatted a disk, then wrote to it and read from it... all working!
Yeah. Elatedness abounds
Then I grabbed my XT-IDE (thanks, Hargle!) and started playing around... after reconfiguring the Network card to use interrupt 120h, it was soon recognizing my old 2.1gb IDE from 1997 that's been in retirement since 1999.
Now to hook that drive up in my modern computer, format it to DOS 5, and get the utilities on there I want to verify the Miniscribe drive is 100% error-free before retiring it....
Ah, fun stuff. Only way that it could've been better would be if I'd found it in a recycle bin for free like alot of you guys are doing
Not sure if I'll sell the Hercules card or not (I've another mono card here)... also not sure if I'll keep the dual-head setup going or stay with mono-only or CGA-only. Figure that I'll probably use the 2.1gb drive here for ahwhile, maybe changing to a CF card at a later date. For now, it's just a toy... and a happy one at that, thanks to all the expansion cards in there, and the surprise of a working MFM drive!
(will probably get some pictures up once I finish redoing my office... as "construction" kind've stopped the moment this arrived!)
I took a chance, put a $55 bid on it, as shipping was $52, and waited. I won it at $52.50. After a month of waiting and arguing with the seller (who refused to respond to numerous emails and phone calls), I finally shamed the guy into shipping the unit after threatening to ruin his perfect feedback and filing grievances with eBay and Paypal. Two weeks later, he finally shipped it.
I received it this past Wednesday, tore open the packages, and ripped the unit apart. What do you know, but it contained an original Hercules mono card, an IBM CGA p/n 1501981, an 10baseT ethernet card with two banks of dip switches allowing me to select the interrupt I wished to use, a miniscribe MFM controller card, a 10mb Miniscribe drive, a 5160 floppy controller with a Tandon TM-200a floppy drive, an AST SixPack ram board (fully populated), and a generic parallel and serial card (why these were in there, I have no idea - both were redundant).
Reseating all of the cards, I hooked up my 5151 monitor to the Hercules card and the 5153 to the CGA and fired her up. To my delight, the ram counted all the way up to 640k, and a C-prompt appeared soon after! - I was absolutely shocked by this as the computer was shipped from CA to FL, and I'm sure that it was all none too gentle!
DOS 2.1 installed on the hard drive, and chkdsk reports zero bad sectors... I put it in graphics mode and saw output on the 5153 monitor! A quick adjustment, and I was looking around the hard drive (finding a registered version of Pharoah's Tomb from Apogee) and was playing in true CGA colors!
Next up was grabbing a blank 360kb floppy and seeing if it passed the dummy test - yep! I formatted a disk, then wrote to it and read from it... all working!
Yeah. Elatedness abounds
Then I grabbed my XT-IDE (thanks, Hargle!) and started playing around... after reconfiguring the Network card to use interrupt 120h, it was soon recognizing my old 2.1gb IDE from 1997 that's been in retirement since 1999.
Now to hook that drive up in my modern computer, format it to DOS 5, and get the utilities on there I want to verify the Miniscribe drive is 100% error-free before retiring it....
Ah, fun stuff. Only way that it could've been better would be if I'd found it in a recycle bin for free like alot of you guys are doing
Not sure if I'll sell the Hercules card or not (I've another mono card here)... also not sure if I'll keep the dual-head setup going or stay with mono-only or CGA-only. Figure that I'll probably use the 2.1gb drive here for ahwhile, maybe changing to a CF card at a later date. For now, it's just a toy... and a happy one at that, thanks to all the expansion cards in there, and the surprise of a working MFM drive!
(will probably get some pictures up once I finish redoing my office... as "construction" kind've stopped the moment this arrived!)