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A couple questions...

I

im_an_alien

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May 10, 2007
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So first off, does anyone remember me? :p

Anyway, since I was last here, I've gotten a few more vintage computers :) I got another XT.
Mad-Mike said:
That sounds an awful lot like an XT clone chassis I had once, except this one had a flip top that had 2 push buttons on each side that popped the top open like a car hood.
Click to expand...
It's like that ^, 324? MB of ram, HDD, monochrome video card. I got a monitor + keyboard with this one. The keyboard's kinda weird. The ESC is where numlock is on a modern one, capslock is about where right alt is, and control is where capslock should be. I also got a 386, which didn't work. I'm trashing it, but I took out everything that might be useful (it turned on and went to bios but refused to boot).

So, one of the things I took out was an 8-bit sound blaster card. (c) '91. Can I just plug this into one of my XT's and use it, or do I need to set jumpers/install drivers/etc?

Another question: I also took out an IDE HDD. What's the chance that it still works? The computer couldn't find a boot device, even if I put in a boot floppy, so I suspect it might.

Last question: I took the RAM out. Just wanted to know what form factor it is. It's a bit bigger than my index finger, has one, unbroken row of pins on each side where it connects to the mobo, and has 3 chips on it.

ps. The first XT I had, I got it to boot up, then searched for an XT compatible keyboard every time I went to goodwill, which is quite often. It still took me 3+ months... It works great now :D
 
You can use the Sound Blaster in any machine and it will work, just make sure to set the BLASTER environment variable, and also set the IRQ to something OTHER than IRQ 5 because that is most likely your hard drive.
 
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The SB should work without much trouble in your XT. Just set the jumpers on the card accordingly. Though if your XT is 12MHz the SB might not work properly. Sometimes even 10MHz can cause problems, but you won't know until you try. Like Trixter said, all you need to do to get the card working is make sure the BLASTER line is included your autoexec.bat (and set properly) and your software should be able to detect it.

Though, I recommend getting images of the SB 2.0 diskettes so you can enjoy all the useless crap software that "show off" the capabilities of the card...like:

-Diagnostics
-Talking Parrot
-MMDEMO (this one is great)
-FM Organ
-Dr. Sbaitso

There is a chance the IDE drive still works. It's possible that the battery on your 386 motherboard just died and lost the settings for the hard drive. Many of my really old IDE drives are still functioning fine. You can pretty much forget about using it in your XT. There are ways to do it, but it generally isn't worth the trouble.

We can't know what your memory chips are unless you provide a clear photo. It sounds like DIP memory, but there are different package types and densities of DIP memory. It's possible that it might be compatible with your XT motherboard and/or memory expansion cards.
 
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Anonymous Coward said:
The SB should work without much trouble in your XT. Just set the jumpers on the card accordingly.
Click to expand...
Could you provide me with a link for how to set the jumpers?

Unless he has very short index fingers, it sounds like a 72 pin SIMM. I think he means pads instead of pins.
Click to expand...
a) Yeah, my index fingers are kinda short short. I probably should have used something else as a reference.
b) Sure pads, pins, whatever. It's called a xx-pin SIMM, so...
c) It was a 30-pin SIMM. 72-pin SIMM was close enough for me to find it :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMM
 
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