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New to the forums, "vintage" machines

E

ewige

Member
Joined
Mar 11, 2011
Messages
28
Location
Ohio/USA
Greetings! Another lurker-turned-tinkerer here.

Well, I finally gave in and got ahold of an IBM 5155. My last experience with this computer was when it wasn't so "vintage" and I was just a kid, playing with my father's work computer.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure where to start. My short term goal is only to get the thing working with DOS, playing old games like PC Moria and Wizardry V. I would like to get some sort of storage on the machine, and I recently read about some adventures with an iomega parallel zip drive, but I'm not sure that's the answer I'm looking for. I have some old hard drives, but I don't know what would be compatible with the machine or what sort of card I would need to put in the machine to make this work.

On the plus side: I have the machine and it seems to be in working order. It POSTs, it checks the RAM (256k woo!) and then it sees there's no floppy and goes to the BASIC ROM. I am unsure where to get any software for this thing, or how to transfer it from a modern machine to it (I'd have to get some transfer software onto a 5.25 floppy before I could transfer things to it... sorta a chicken-egg thing there) so I'm open to suggestions from folks who have done this a hundred times before :)
 
We tend to have multiple machines.

You can ask around locally on freecycle for a Windows 95/98 machine for free. Make sure it has a network card to connect to either the internet or your main machine that has internet service (to get images). I picked Windows 9x because it still has built in DOS support and you can connect 5.25" floppy drives to it and the BIOS will work with them. Then you need some utilities like Winimage (shareware) for images of disks you want to dump back to floppies, and pkunzip for DOS for the older archives.


http://www.computerhope.com/software/pkutil.htm <== DOS and Windows versions of Pkunizp

http://america.winimage.com/download/winima80.zip <== older version of the 32bit Win9x Winimage

Either here or ebay you can get a 5.25" floppy drive, if it is 1.2MB you will need to learn the commands to format a 360K disks in a 1.2MB floppy drive so the older 5.25" disks are readable on that old PC.

Find a DOS 3.x manual so you know your way around DOS.
 
One solution is to purchase the XT-IDE card (if still available) which will allow you to use a modern IDE hard
drive in the 5155. This is probably the best solution because of the increased capacity, reliability, and lower
power requirements. I have a 20MB Seagate ST-225 running on an MFM controller in my 5155. The older
hard drives use more power, so its a concern because the 5155 power supply wasnt really designed to support
a hard drive.

Its also possible to use a compact flash on the XT-IDE.

Contact forum members lynchaj or hargle to see if there are any XT-IDE PCB's left.

You can read about the card here :
http://wiki.vintage-computer.com/index.php/XTIDE_project
 
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Welcome to the forums ewige!

I like Unknown_K's suggestions. A DOS manual is great, and an old P1 with a 5.25 drive is a great machine to interface with old kit - you'll never get stuck. We'll, hardly ever. :)

~ Ole
 
ewige said:
and then it sees there's no floppy and goes to the BASIC ROM.
Click to expand...
A 5.25" DOS boot floppy is a start. Where are you located? There may be someone close to you who may post you one.

ewige said:
I am unsure where to get any software for this thing
Click to expand...
Just do an Internet search using "dos software".

ewige said:
or how to transfer it from a modern machine to it (I'd have to get some transfer software onto a 5.25 floppy before I could transfer things to it... sorta a chicken-egg thing there) so I'm open to suggestions from folks who have done this a hundred times before :)
Click to expand...
Some ideas at http://members.dodo.com.au/~slappanel555/transfer/transfer.htm

The motherboard in a 5155 is a 5160 (XT) motherboard. Assuming that your floppy controller is the standard IBM one that was fitted to those machines, you can connect a 1.44M drive (using appropriate data/power cables) but it will read/write 720K diskettes only.
 
Thanks for the suggestions!

I do know my way around DOS, I should have been clearer that I am new to "vintage" machines, but I've used PCs my whole life... This is just my first foray into actively seeking out older technology :) It was so satisfying to boot to BASIC and bust out the canonical 10 print 20 goto 10 program after all these years. Sigh.

I see from the wiki that they are currently out of the XT-IDES, which is a shame, but I'll definitely check out getting on the waiting list for that. it seems like a really nice solution.

In the meanwhile, I suppose I'll dig through my old machines to see if any have a hope of handling a 5.25 floppy drive without installing an additional controller. I should have some old windows 95 discs lying around for that one. And I'll try to scare up a copy of DOS from ebay or some such.

Thanks again!
 
modem7 said:
A 5.25" DOS boot floppy is a start. Where are you located? There may be someone close to you who may post you one.
Click to expand...

I'm located in Ohio, fyi.

The motherboard in a 5155 is a 5160 (XT) motherboard. Assuming that your floppy controller is the standard IBM one that was fitted to those machines, you can connect a 1.44M drive (using appropriate data/power cables) but it will read/write 720K diskettes only.
Click to expand...

I may resort to this if I can get no other scheme to work, but I'd kinda like to leave both 5.25 drives in place if I can get away with it.
 
A copy of DOS shouldn't be that hard to find, but in the meanwhile you could download FreeDOS. It works really well and you only need the first 3 files anyway - the rest is on Simtelnet and places like that. Anyway, you'll probably want the real thing. I've found PC-DOS v2.0 in a number of places - eBay is probably a good one though.

Edit: Actually you might be interested in this collection: http://cd.textfiles.com/pcblue/
 
Also, note that there are two basic types of 5 1/4" floppy drives and disks. DS/DD disks are for use in the 360K drives like your portable XT has. These drives have ar 48tpi, and use 40 tracks on the disk. Later (more common) High Density PC drives use 96tpi media (DS/HD), and write 80 tracks to the disk. While the newer drives can read the older disks, the head on the new drive is physically narrower, so *writing* to 360k floppies is unreliable.

Also, the media type is important. Never use HD disks in a 360K drive. They don't work - they might appear to at first, but will be really unreliable.

So, you should install a 360k drive in a newer PC - one with a 3 1/2" HD floppy drive - and use that to write your DOS disks. You can very easily download all the older versions of DOS from the internet in the form of disk images, and you can transfer them them with 3 1/2" floppy to the somewhat older machine, and then write them to 360K floppies. The reason for needing a second machine is that most of the very new PC motherboards do not properly support 360K disk drives anymore. If your current PC supports them, then you won't need a go-between.

-Ian
 
ewige said:
...

I see from the wiki that they are currently out of the XT-IDES, which is a shame, but I'll definitely check out getting on the waiting list for that. it seems like a really nice solution.
Click to expand...

That comment on the wiki may be out of date ..... I found a post from lynchaj in early February stating he had reordered
XT-IDE PCBs and that they were in..... This is just the circuit board, you'll need to order the parts separately to build this
if the kits are no longer available.

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?18242-XT-IDE-Ordering-interest-%28Was-Xt-ide/page34
 
I recommend the kit since you get the board plus all the necessary parts you need to build it (except a soldering iron and solder!). To get that you need to get in touch with "jeff at silent dot net". Andrew provides the just the individual circuit boards.
 
Dos stuff

Dos stuff

The Dayton Hamvention is coming up in May and there is always lots of computer junk there. I will be selling their and if you don’t find anything else can bring you a copy of DOS 3.3 with all the utilities, the old MS "menu" program and a bunch of the primitive games like packman and stuff that runs well on a 8080
Ray F.
 
Well it looks like I will be able to secure an XT-IDE, so I've decided to slap an IDE-to-SD adapter in there... After I have all the pieces my next step will be formatting and loading the SD with an OS... I was thinking DOS 6, but now I'm apprehensive because as it stands this beast only has 256k RAM... Would DOS 3 be a better fit?
 
Go with DOS 6 - I don't think RAM will be an issue. You didn't say what you were going to do with the XT.
 
So here's what I'm wondering:

I have the 1.44 MB floppy images for MS-DOS 6.22 on a modern machine (running Win 7). I can open the images using MagicISO to verify their content.

I have an IBM 5155 (with only the 360k floppy drives) and an XTIDE card and an IDE - SD adapter.

If I plug the SD card into the modern machine, what crafty way could I use (without resorting to installing a 1.44MB floppy anywhere, nor using a third computer) to format the SD card in FAT12, boot up the DOS622 image files, and install DOS622 to the SD card so that when I slap it into the XTIDE in the 5155, it will be able to boot up?

Mostly a thought experiment at present. Is it even possible? It seems like it should be, using a virtual machine, but I'm just lacking the technical wherewithal to manage it yet. I may just end up biting the bullet and buying a 5.25 360k drive for one of my old middling machines I can throw 1.44 disks into.
 
You could temporarilly move the XT-IDE controller to the 'modern machine' and then attempt to format the SD after you boot off of one of your floppy's (I have DOS on a CD that boots okay). It might see it or it might not - worth a try I would say. You would have to go into your BIOS and turn off the onboard HD support.
 
MikeS said:
I take it the modern Win7 machine has neither a floppy drive of any size or serial/parallel ports?
Click to expand...

Good guess on the floppy drives... It *might* have a parallel or serial port, I need to double check. Are you thinking to connect the machines (null modem, etc) and use some sort of transfer protocol between them?
 
Agent Orange said:
You could temporarilly move the XT-IDE controller to the 'modern machine' and then attempt to format the SD after you boot off of one of your floppy's (I have DOS on a CD that boots okay). It might see it or it might not - worth a try I would say. You would have to go into your BIOS and turn off the onboard HD support.
Click to expand...

It would likely have to be one of my older new machines, because I don't think my most recent one even has an ISA slot. But yeah, I could see that.
 
ewige said:
Good guess on the floppy drives... It *might* have a parallel or serial port, I need to double check. Are you thinking to connect the machines (null modem, etc) and use some sort of transfer protocol between them?
Click to expand...
Yeah, but you'd still need a way to boot the 5155 to a DOS of some kind; I think your best bet is an intermediate machine with a 5.25" drive, or get a set of physical DOS disks from someone to get DOS running on the XT and an ethernet I/F of some kind, or the IDE-XT/SD card route.
 
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