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
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