• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Can I beef up my 5150?

strollin said:
One thing you can do to "beef" up your 5150 is to replace the 8088 CPU with an NEC V20. The V20 is a clone of the 8088 and is slightly more efficient so it runs a few % faster, 10-12% or so. Don't know of a source for them off hand.
Click to expand...

You're lucky if you see 10% on a typical mix; subjectively it's usually barely noticeable. However, you can run some 286-only programs using it as it supports the non-privileged 80286 instructions.

At any rate Jameco has 'em for $10.
 
strollin said:
One thing you can do to "beef" up your 5150 is to replace the 8088 CPU with an NEC V20. The V20 is a clone of the 8088 and is slightly more efficient so it runs a few % faster, 10-12% or so. Don't know of a source for them off hand.
Click to expand...
I had a quick look, and there's 4 of them on eBay for $8 apiece + S/H. I double-checked the part number, and they're just plain old V20s, no microcontroller components or anything.

Chuck(G) said:
However, you can run some 286-only programs using it as it supports the non-privileged 80286 instructions.
Click to expand...
Not to mention that, from the Wikipedia article, the V20 can emulate the Intel 8080, and apparently someone put together a CP/M emulator for DOS based on that feature.
 
I think you're missing the point. Use and configure the pc for what it is. Explore the software of the era, the good studf and the failed off-shoots. It will give you a better perspective. That's my opinion,but regardless if you agree I hope it works out for you.
 
Chuck(G) said:
You're lucky if you see 10% on a typical mix; subjectively it's usually barely noticeable. However, you can run some 286-only programs using it as it supports the non-privileged 80286 instructions.

At any rate Jameco has 'em for $10.
Click to expand...
Small boost for sure, but for my purposes, the V20 is head and shoulders more noticeable boost than a math co-processor. Have never seen any difference between my machines that do and do not have a math co-processor.
 
billdeg said:
I think you're missing the point. Use and configure the pc for what it is. Explore the software of the era, the good studf and the failed off-shoots. It will give you a better perspective. That's my opinion,but regardless if you agree I hope it works out for you.
Click to expand...

Right on Bill. Nowadays we can get all the fancy chips and cards that weren't affordable back then. Putting it all together in one box for minimal performance boost seems to me as not very "vintage" and certainly not historically correct. Regardless, I can understand why someone would want to play with the stuff from back then. :)
 
Agreed, Ole and Bill. I gave up mentioning the V20 8080 emulation when it became clear that a 486 running software emulation was a lot faster. At the time, it was kind of cool, but that was life at 4.77Mhz. It's a little sobering to consider that speeds are edging toward 4.77GHz on modern systems--three orders of magnitude.

Also consider that, for the first couple of years until third-party vendors showed up, almost all 5150s were floppy-only systems.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Agreed, Ole and Bill. I gave up mentioning the V20 8080 emulation when it became clear that a 486 running software emulation was a lot faster. At the time, it was kind of cool, but that was life at 4.77Mhz. It's a little sobering to consider that speeds are edging toward 4.77GHz on modern systems--three orders of magnitude.

Also consider that, for the first couple of years until third-party vendors showed up, almost all 5150s were floppy-only systems.
Click to expand...

For compatibility and history purposes, I'm going to leave the 8088 in there. The NEC thing might not run as expected... and I don't really like NEC that much anyhow.

And the coprocessors supported better floatpoint operations did they not? They would improve gaming as most games rely on floating point stuff.

But all in all, performance variances would be so little in regards to the processor. Maybe if you were able to get 10 Mhz, then there would be a huge difference. But then it wouldn't be a 5150.
 
I think that you'll find that most 5150-era games didn't use the 8087 NDP. The first project I remember working that incorporated NDP support was a spreadsheet package.
 
EverythingIBM said:
And the coprocessors supported better floatpoint operations did they not? They would improve gaming as most games rely on floating point stuff.
Click to expand...
That largely depends on the game in question. Some games would definitely benefit from an 8087; I expect flight simulators or other detail-oriented 3D titles would take advantage of it. A lot of games, though, either don't use floating-point operations much, or in the case of some games (Wolfenstein, for example, I think) were structured so as to avoid them altogether because of their slowness. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have one.
 
commodorejohn said:
That largely depends on the game in question. Some games would definitely benefit from an 8087; I expect flight simulators or other detail-oriented 3D titles would take advantage of it. A lot of games, though, either don't use floating-point operations much, or in the case of some games (Wolfenstein, for example, I think) were structured so as to avoid them altogether because of their slowness. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have one.
Click to expand...

I do know that John Carmack's "Quake" used floatpoint operations extensively: one reason why Pentiums ran it fast, whereas integer-geared processors like Cyrix's had horrible performance.
 
Cyrix had some of the best/fastest 387 chips out there but few people bothered to buy them. By the time the FPU mattered Cyrix had not done much R&D to improve theirs while Intel did (with the Pentium) and then Quake came out actually using it in a very popular machine selling game. Timing is everything with computer hardware.

I love collecting vintage high end hardware to try them out, but you do find that very little of the software made during the era actually used that hardware outside of special hard to find custom packages. And while you might find that hardware, the software and drivers needed can be impossible to find.
 
And while you might find that hardware, the software and drivers needed can be impossible to find.
Click to expand...

Yeah, tell me about it. I have this nice MPEG2 encoder/decoder for EISA bus, and it's unlikely I'll ever find the software/drivers for it.
 
Sorry skipped over a lot of this thread, but I do remember running Windows 3.0 on an 8086 (Tandy 1000SL specifically) with a hard disk and 576KB RAM. Which was horrid - really, completely unusable. And it took up almost the entire disk. The only purpose it would serve would be Solitaire basically.

Tandy's DeskMate might be worth a look though.
 
commodorejohn said:
I've actually run DOS 5.0 on a 5150 with no performance issues, myself. As far as Windows goes, it's technically possible to run up to Windows 3.0 on an 8086 machine, but (A) it sounds like there's very little software that would run on real-mode Windows, and (B) it's not likely to be fast enough to be worth the trouble. (And BTW, pre-3.0 versions of Windows are extremely sub-par.) If you just want a GUI, you might consider one of the graphical shells for DOS - I understand GEM's still got a following, though you'll want to find one of the old versions rather than the newer, heavy-duty remake.

As far as hardware goes, I've got a combination CGA/Hercules card I'm not using, if you want it.
Click to expand...



DOS 6 works fine, I used it for years on a 5150 back in the day. Heck DOS 7 will work, but I'm not sure there's any point aside from saying you did it.
 
EverythingIBM said:
I do know that John Carmack's "Quake" used floatpoint operations extensively: one reason why Pentiums ran it fast, whereas integer-geared processors like Cyrix's had horrible performance.
Click to expand...


I'm not aware of any 8088 games that make use of a math coprocessor. The only apps that used that sort of thing were spreadsheets and CAD software. Those are some of the earliest uses of expanded memory and fancy graphics cards as well.

Carmack's games in the 486-Pentium era are the first I know of to make use of it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top