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Amstrad 5086 - VGA and keyboard woes...

G

gladders

Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2015
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35
Location
London
Hi everyone!

A while back I grabbed an Amstrad 5086 PC, an XT-clone. It appealed chiefly because it's very, very similar to my very first ever PC, although it's only an 8086 instead of a 286, which I think my old PC was. It was marked up as working with a screenshot of MS-DOS 3.3, but I couldn't get round to testing it immediately upon receipt, so it just sat in a drawer for a few months.

Upon receiving it I had opened it up to make sure it was okay and it looked pretty good. It even had a Dallas clock chip inside, modified to take power from two AA batteries. Result!

Anyway, I finally got round to powering it up, but bad news. I had removed the AA batteries that were powering the Dallas clock chip in case they got icky, but I wonder if it buggered something because when booting, there's no image on-screen and the computer makes none of the normal POST sounds and lights.

I wonder if it's stuck mid-POST with an alert about the battery having died... I've ordered a cheapo VGA ISA card to see. Does that sound plausible?

Also, I plugged in a PS/2 keyboard to this machine which does not work. It appears Amstrad did a very peculiar thing and made the keyboard port PS/2-shaped, but can only take XT keyboard signals. Weird.

Does there exist such a thing as an XT-to-PS/2 keyboard adapter? That way I could just buy an ancient XT keyboard and kludge it.

Failing that, anyone know where I can get an original 5086 keyboard?

Thanks :)
 
gladders said:
Does there exist such a thing as an XT-to-PS/2 keyboard adapter? That way I could just buy an ancient XT keyboard and kludge it.
Click to expand...

Yes, I got mine from ebay (A long time ago though), Just had a quick look and found this [ Example ] albeit on the wrong side of the pond and a bit expensive.

Edit: This is more like it [ Example ]
 
Last edited:
A regular 5-pin din to PS/2 adapter will work just fine, as Malc said. There are actually PS/2 keyboards that have an XT mode switch on the back, probably not as common as the 5-pin din keyboards with that switch, but I have seen them.
 
Retrom said:
A regular 5-pin din to PS/2 adapter will work just fine, as Malc said. There are actually PS/2 keyboards that have an XT mode switch on the back, probably not as common as the 5-pin din keyboards with that switch, but I have seen them.
Click to expand...

Thanks - if you spot any on eBay and such, could you let me know?
 
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