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Advice needed on add-on purchases for Commodore PC-10 8088

S

sgifanatic

Experienced Member
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Sep 11, 2014
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I just bought a Commodore PC-10 8088 system from eBay. It hasn't arrived yet, but here are some pics from the listing:

$_57 (5).jpgx_57.jpg

The details were fairly scarce, but I think I got it for a good price, and most importantly, the seller reports that the system powers up and operates.

The insides are fairly bare. From a picture, I was able to figure out that the graphics card is an ATI Hercules board. Specifically, this one:

ATi Graphics Solution Rev 3
Chipset: ATI CW16800-A
Supports: Hercules Graphics Card mode
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus

There appears to be a RAM expansion board also, shown below:

$_57 (3).jpg

And in the same picture, you can see that the processor bears the NEC logo, but sadly, it's not a V20. Rather, a D8088D. There's really not much else other than 2x5.25 drives, a 25-pin serial port and a parallel port.

I've ordered a few additional items so that they arrive at about the same time this system does, and I can start to play with it:

1) An Intel 8/16 Etherexpress LAN card. I like this because it can be repurposed in 16-bit ISA systems, and it has an RJ-45 connector.
2) 25-pin female to 9-pin male serial adapter
3) Microsoft serial mouse 2.0
4) 5.25 floppy disks... I had run out!
5) XT-2-PS/2 keyboard adapter

I am looking to add an 8087 and upgrade to a V20. Here are the chips I've found. Are these a good idea? Is a V30 a better idea?

V20 Listing: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1pcs-D70108...ion-DIP-V20HL-V30HL-16-8-16-BIT-/251349355121
8087 Listing: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1pcs-D8087-1-D8087-CDIP-40-Arithm-etic-Processor-INTEL-/181384867819

Also, I want to add a hard drive, a color graphics card (VGA? CGA?) card and a sound card. But all three upgrades appear to be quite pricey, well above $50 each, and in some cases, twice that. Any tips on less expensive options? Specific cards that might be in more plentiful supply, for example?

One of my motivations in getting the XT is so that I can run Trixter's various 8088 demos. However, domination requires a VGA, while mph requires a CGA... do I have to get both? :)

Will share pics and a project log when the system arrives. Thanks in advance for any advice!
 
The PC-10 arrived, along with the XT-2-PS/2 keyboard adapter, the LAN card (Etherexpress 8/16) and a box of floppies.

I had a Commodore 1084 RGB monitor with the necessary cable, so the first step was to try to get that to work. And it did.

Here is the system wired up and POSTing:

WP_20150508_18_24_14_Pro.jpg

You can see that the system faceplate is in decent condition, even though it is quite dirty. I'll be cleaning the whole system soon.

I don't have bootable 360K floppies, and I don't have another 5.25 drive at all in any other system (other than an Apple IIGS), so I'll have to wait to boot it to an OS. I did try connecting up a 1.44MB drive, but the PC-10 BIOS doesn't appear to recognize it and errors out.

The good news is that it does power up, the monitor I had appears to be working fine with the ATI CW16800-A card. This is a Hercules card, but with the monitor I have connected, it appears to be operating as a CGA adapter. No colors have shown up yet, so until the system boots, I guess I won't really know whether 4-color CGA mode is supported by this card. The ATI CW16800-B certainly did, but Wikipedia doesn't explicitly list CGA under the ATI CW16800-A supported mode list.

Next steps are to get a 5.25 drive I can connect with a "modern" PC, get some boot floppies and give this system a whirl.
 
I would suggest getting one of the XT-IDE cards and a VGA/SVGA card. Once you have an XT-IDE card, you can use the SerDrive program with a serial cable connected to your modern system as a virtual floppy drive to boot the system, format the HD, and install the OS. You could also get a virtual floppy drive like the Gotek or a HxC.

*EDIT* A VGA/SVGA card should give you all the lower graphics modes and a sound card is a definite plus.

Good luck!

Heather
 
SkydivinGirl said:
I would suggest getting one of the XT-IDE cards and a VGA/SVGA card. Once you have an XT-IDE card, you can use the SerDrive program with a serial cable connected to your modern system as a virtual floppy drive to boot the system, format the HD, and install the OS. You could also get a virtual floppy drive like the Gotek or a HxC.

*EDIT* A VGA/SVGA card should give you all the lower graphics modes and a sound card is a definite plus.

Good luck!

Heather
Click to expand...

Thank you, Heather. That is sound advice. Am bidding on an XT-IDE on eBay, pricey as they are, hoping I will get my hands on one soon.

I was not aware of the virtual floppy over serial function. That does sound handy.



el_VR said:
Nope :) They're both CGA.
Click to expand...

Thanks for clarifying! It appears 8088mph relies on the composite out and was designed for the original CGA; I am assuming it may work on a VGA card in cga mode, but the colors will likely be off?
 
sgifanatic said:
Thanks for clarifying! It appears 8088mph relies on the composite out and was designed for the original CGA; I am assuming it may work on a VGA card in cga mode, but the colors will likely be off?
Click to expand...

Yes, both 8088 MPH and 8088 Domination require CGA with composite.
8088 MPH will not work at all on VGA (VGA is not 100% backward compatible with CGA, and all the tweakmodes and timing-critical tricks we use, will fail. I have tried this myself on a Paradise PVGA1A card, which has software to switch it to CGA-compatible mode, making it one of the most CGA-compatible options available).
8088 Domination will work, but appear in B/W (same as on an RGBI CGA monitor), so it's a rather pointless exercise.

Also, if you want to watch 8088 MPH, a V20 or V30 is a bad idea. These CPUs are not 100% the same speed as an 8088, so some timing-critical parts will not work at all. Aside from that, I believe a V20/V30 will lock up during the end tune because of an incompatibility with the prefetch buffer.
8088 MPH *needs* a real IBM 5150/5155/5160 with 8088 at 4.77 MHz and real IBM CGA, old style, with Motorola 6845 to enjoy it the way it was intended.
Clone chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, videocards... they may all mess up the timing or colours.
I have found a clone, the Philips P3105, which works 100% as long as you use a real IBM CGA card. So some clones *may* be close enough to get the timing right.
There might even be clone CGA cards around that work 100% correctly, but I have not encountered any. ATi Small Wonder and Paradise PCV4 are not correct at least.
 
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On ebay, XT-IDE prices seem to be running between $80-100. Is that the going price these days? Wish there was a less expensive route...
 
You may be able to get a kit to build your own to save a little money. I don't think you'll get one for much less if it's completely assembled. :(

Heather
 
Scali said:
Also, if you want to watch 8088 MPH, a V20 or V30 is a bad idea. These CPUs are not 100% the same speed as an 8088, so some timing-critical parts will not work at all. Aside from that, I believe a V20/V30 will lock up during the end tune because of an incompatibility with the prefetch buffer.
8088 MPH *needs* a real IBM 5150/5155/5160 with 8088 at 4.77 MHz and real IBM CGA, old style, with Motorola 6845 to enjoy it the way it was intended.
Click to expand...

I've run it on a V20 and the end sequence plays perfectly :) Y'all did good. It only has a couple hiccups, but my system is a compatible, so as you say, YMMV.

--Phil
 
I bought my XT-IDE card from Lo-Tech, that was $6 plus about $6 shipping, then the total parts count to build it is $14 from Mouser, plus another $6 shipping from Dallas. I bought a Syba CF-IDE adapter card from Amazon for about $12 and a 8Gb SanDisk card also from amazon for $9

Assembly was fairly straightforward, I had a couple "been a while since I really did a lot with DOS" errors but it boots up and is so faaaaast compared to an 80's hard drive. That and the V20 code for the XT-IDE speeds it up some also.

20150507_135318.jpg


I had to make a little bracket for mine from a spare blank and some plastic to stop it migrating, but in a static system you can probably get away with it just sat in the ISA slot with no support. Nice thing is you can just switch the computer off, pull the CF, stick it in a modern computer, copy stuff onto it, replace and boot up. Very rapid.

--Phil
 
Like Heather said it is cheaper if you can build your own, Going the ebay route can be an expensive way to get one and be aware that some of the Lo-Tech boards that are being sold on ebay by the "get rich quick idiots" are an old revision board.
 
PhilipA said:
I've run it on a V20 and the end sequence plays perfectly :) Y'all did good. It only has a couple hiccups, but my system is a compatible, so as you say, YMMV.
Click to expand...

Yes, on my Commodore PC20-III it crashes, and it even has a real 8088 CPU.
I actually swapped CPUs with the Philips (it's a Siemens rather than an Intel one), but the CPU was fine, it's the Faraday FE2010 chipset that Commodore used, which causes the problems.
 
PhilipA said:
I bought my XT-IDE card from Lo-Tech, that was $6 plus about $6 shipping, then the total parts count to build it is $14 from Mouser, plus another $6 shipping from Dallas. I bought a Syba CF-IDE adapter card from Amazon for about $12 and a 8Gb SanDisk card also from amazon for $9

Assembly was fairly straightforward, I had a couple "been a while since I really did a lot with DOS" errors but it boots up and is so faaaaast compared to an 80's hard drive. That and the V20 code for the XT-IDE speeds it up some also.

20150507_135318.jpg


I had to make a little bracket for mine from a spare blank and some plastic to stop it migrating, but in a static system you can probably get away with it just sat in the ISA slot with no support. Nice thing is you can just switch the computer off, pull the CF, stick it in a modern computer, copy stuff onto it, replace and boot up. Very rapid.

--Phil
Click to expand...

Thank you. I am reasonably handy with a soldering iron. This might be the way to do it then...
 
The XT-IDE card still hasn't happened. I actually ended up buying one on eBay for $100 inclusive of shipping ($$$$!!!!!). However, it hasn't come in yet.

I installed a 5.25 1.2MB drive in my Gateway 486 and downloaded DOS 3.3 360K floppy images from winworld in the hopes that I could write the images to disk, and then boot the XT with those. Here's what's happening:

I bought "new" sealed Unisys high density disks (80 tracks/DS). When I try to format /f:360/u/s, I get a track 0 error from the DOS format program. When I try to format as 1.2MB, it works, but this obviously won't work in the XT's 360K drive.

Next, I downloaded the rawrite2 and rawrite3 programs (DOS) and used them to try to write the 360K image for DOS 3.3 - rawrite errors out saying it can't figure out the tracks/sectors on the drive. There is no way to manually specify this for rawrite, so I instead downloaded DCOPY.

With DCOPY, initially I got a write error after the first byte was written. However, when I reran it with the /F:360 switch after reformatting the floppy (1.2MB), it worked.

When I insert the freshly written floppy into the PC-10, it doesn't boot however. I get a disk error.

Any thoughts on how to get these disks to boot in the 360K floppy drive?
 
Try fitting one of the 360k drives from the Commodore in the 486 and format/create the disks using that. You can then test to see if it boots on the 486 before trying on the commodore. Also there might be someone local who can send you some suitable bootable 360k disks.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Try fitting one of the 360k drives from the Commodore in the 486 and format/create the disks using that. You can then test to see if it boots on the 486 before trying on the commodore. Also there might be someone local who can send you some suitable bootable 360k disks.
Click to expand...

That's something to try. Thanks!

I received the XT-IDE in the mail today, along with a bunch of 360K disks... also supposedly new. Formatted quite a number of the 360s before one of them was good enough to transfer the system files on to. The others all had huge numbers of bad sectors. And these are "new"!! Thank you eBay and degrading magnetic media. None of these booted the PC-10.

Despite the fact that I have an XT to PS/2 keyboard converter plugged into the PC-10, to which I have a PS/2 keyboard connected, I continue to get keyboard errors. F1 works once however. The system tries to boot the floppy and then hangs. I don't know what the darn keyboard issue is all about...

I also tried the XT-IDE - doesn't do a thing - no BIOS message, no boot. It had a CF card attached but since it didn't come with a 1.44MB floppy style mini ATX power cable, I can't power the CF board - not sure if I need to - the red power light on it still comes on. Despite power to the CF or lack thereof, I am expecting the XT-IDE itself to post some kind of message. That doesn't happen.

Instead of the long tirade about the pain this darn XT has been, I'll just end the post with a loud aaarrrghhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
It IS a Commodore :p Probably some "IBM incompatibilies" I'm sure your'll get something sorted. Once you've got it sorted you can stick to us common as muck generic Taiwanese XT clone owners ;).
 
sgifanatic said:
I also tried the XT-IDE - doesn't do a thing - no BIOS message, no boot. It had a CF card attached but since it didn't come with a 1.44MB floppy style mini ATX power cable, I can't power the CF board - not sure if I need to - the red power light on it still comes on. Despite power to the CF or lack thereof, I am expecting the XT-IDE itself to post some kind of message. That doesn't happen.
Click to expand...

The cards from James Pearce (Lo-Tech) and derivatives are XT-CF class cards, not actual XT-IDE cards. People searching for info when troubleshooting their systems will appreciate if we all try to minimize confusion by using the proper names. Not to mention the greatly increased chances of your own issues getting resolved if people know what you're talking about.

No output from the BIOS means that it has not been initialized. Most likely reasons for that are;

1) There's a conflict with something else in the system. Try moving the BIOS to a different segment address.
2) The PROM has not been programmed/flashed yet. Try the card in another system (your 486) and see if it initializes there. If not, use DEBUG to verify that the card has been programmed. Or you can just reflash the card.

If you have a null modem cable then you can install the OS using the virtual serial drive feature in the XTIDE Universal BIOS. If/When you get it to initialize that is.
 
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