Early 5170 motherboard at 6mhz and multi-io cards

[dhau]

I am having hard time getting floppy and ide working on a first issue 5170 motherboard. It's running at 6mhz.

Only one of ~10 multi-io cards worked for ide, but that card doesn't work for floppy.

Another card with onboard bios works as floppy controller, but not as ide.

I replaced bios with Phoenix A286 1.01 form -0 degrees, but it didn't help.

Is it because there is only 512 KB RAM?

Or is it because it's running at 6mhz?

What do I need to do to upgrade it to 8mhz beyond switching 12mhz xtal for 16mhz?

I wanted to keep it at 6mhz, but if that makes working with ide difficult, I'm ok upgrading to 8mhz.

 

[jafir]

I’ve got a first version, 6mhz, 5170 with a gold star ide floppy card. It works fine with the stock, original 5170 BIOS. I have none of the weird issues people mention on the later BIOS, for example shown on Adrian’s Digital Basement on YouTube.

I do have like 4.25 MB of RAM.

I’ve got plenty of MFM drives now, so at some point I’ll probably put the original controller back in, because the early BIOS only has drive tables for up to about 100 MB, so I’m wasting the IDE drive, I think. Overlay software doesn’t seem to like that 5170.

I’m using a 1.2MB and 360K floppy. What are you using? I think some people have issues with 1.44MB drives without some extra work, like the latest BIOS and maybe using GSETUP instead of the IBM diagnostics.

 

[dhau]

It has 1.2MB 5.25" drive. I guess may be mobo is not very good. I'll try different slots, see if it makes any difference.

 

[Malc]

Ive got plenty of MFM drives now, so at some point I’ll probably put the original controller back in, because the early BIOS only has drive tables for up to about 100 MB, so I’m wasting the IDE drive, I think. Overlay software doesn’t seem to like that 5170.

You might be able to get more drive space with that IDE drive, The IBM Bios has the same 504/528 mb limit that many bios's had back in the day, If you can add a new drive type into the bios using CHS 1024/16/63 you can get around 504Mb of drive space. Or try the XUB, Being a Rev 1 IBM 5170 board YMMV

 

[Malc]

It has 1.2MB 5.25" drive. I guess may be mobo is not very good. I'll try different slots, see if it makes any difference.

What size IDE drive did you try ?, The older and smaller the better around 1 Gig or less but you're not going to get much space out of it even if you can get it to work with an existing drive type in the bios.

 

[jafir]

You might be able to get more drive space with that IDE drive, The IBM Bios has the same 504/528 mb limit that many bios's had back in the day, If you can add a new drive type into the bios using CHS 1024/16/63 you can get around 504Mb of drive space. Or try the XUB, Being a Rev 1 IBM 5170 board YMMV

Thanks! I’ve also got a much older copy of ontrack, version 3.5, so I may give that a try as well. Honestly I don’t NEED 1GB of space on this, since I can just FTP files on and off of it thanks to mTCP.

I’ll probably try a few different things next time I set this up, before putting it back to a mostly stock configuration.

 

[dhau]

Can anyone comment on upgrading 5170 motherboard form 6MHz to 8? Is Xtal all I need to change? Or is there more?

I installed ide_atl.bin from here: https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/binaries/ in u17/u37, and it works fine. I had to load it in xtidecfg, save it to get the zero checksum, pad it to 64KB with zeroes, then split it into two 32KB files with even and odd bytes. I then burned two 27c256 and installed even in u17 and odd in u37.

I finally found one multi-io that works with both floppy and the ide. It's a fancy UltraStor 15C with onboard SIMMs for cache. I guess it uses it's own clocks and don't use ISA clock signal.

It works fine with XT-IDE BIOS.

All the other multi-io cards that work fine in 8MHz systems didn't work in this 6MHz system. Same with a Realtek 1991 VGA card.

 

[modem7]

Can anyone comment on upgrading 5170 motherboard form 6MHz to 8? Is Xtal all I need to change? Or is there more?

Discussed in the earlier thread at [here].

 

[dhau]

Discussed in the earlier thread at [here].

Thanks, reading this thread now. So it seems it may be enough to do just xtal 12 -> 16MHz, but possibly need 8MHz 286 and 8MHz 82288 chips.

Can you please provide some info on the memory used in first version of 5170 motherboard? It's double-decked.
Is it 5v only? Or does it need 12v and -5v like the old-old 4116?
Is it possible to replace the double-decked memory with regular 41256 chips?

 

[modem7]

Can you please provide some info on the memory used in first version of 5170 motherboard? It's double-decked.

At [here], see the 'Comments' column of the TYPE 1 row. So, 41128 class chips. If you click on the '41128' link there, you will be shown examples of 41128 chips.

Is it 5v only? Or does it need 12v and -5v like the old-old 4116?

See [here].

Is it possible to replace the double-decked memory with regular 41256 chips?

No, not as a drop-in replacement. For example, the IC socket is expecting a chip with two RAS pins.

 

[dhau]

modem7 thank you for explaining a bit about memory. My concern is that if one of those stacked chips goes bad, I don't have any plan b. How do two RAS signals work?

In one stacked chip, are both chips identical? Or will one only work when RAS1 is active and another then RAS2 is active?

If I'm ok rerouting pins, can I just stack two 41256, ground highest address bit, and connect bottom chip RAS to RAS1 and top chip RAS to RAS2?

How do people solve this? I guess I can always switch to 256KB mode and use remaining good chips from the other bank as spares, but that's not ideal.

 

[jafir]

The chips aren't too hard to find. There is a good list of them shown here: http://minuszerodegrees.net/memory/41128.htm

When I needed some, I went to ebay and searched the part numbers until I found a good price on some NOS chips. I ended up getting a few tubes of the samsung part number for what worked out to about $1 per chip when buying full tubes. At the time I was just being lazy, I wasn't sure of my troubleshooting skills, and wasn't sure how difficult it might be to find, so I bought enough to do ALL of the banks. I ended up using the info here: http://minuszerodegrees.net/5170/ram..._breakdown.jpg and I was able to find out exactly which chip was bad, so I used only one of about 40 that I bought. I've on occasion offered them to users here for not too much money if they need a chip or two, and they cannot find them.

 

[modem7]

modem7 thank you for explaining a bit about memory. My concern is that if one of those stacked chips goes bad, I don't have any plan b. How do two RAS signals work? In one stacked chip, are both chips identical? Or will one only work when RAS1 is active and another then RAS2 is active?

RAS1 is for one chip, RAS2 for the other.

If I'm ok rerouting pins, can I just stack two 41256, ground highest address bit, and connect bottom chip RAS to RAS1 and top chip RAS to RAS2?

That sounds like it will work.

How do people solve this?

Purchase 41128 class chips. For example, I see ZA1250NL and MK4128N-15 and MSM37S64A on eBay.

 

[jafir]

I see a good price on KM4128 from a seller in Georgia right now. I'm not sure if there is a significant difference between those and the KM4128U or not. Looks like $2.49US for a lot of 8 chips, with $5 shipping to me, probably more to Canada.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/302898249038