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newly acquired Leading Edge Model D - monitor cable and IDE/CF help needed

Most 16-bit ISA VGA cards should work fine in an 8-bit slot. Over the years I've tried at least a dozen different ones and all except one worked in an 8-bit slot. Although to be fair, most were older/lower-end cards, nothing fancy like a Diamond Speedstar 24.
 
vwestlife said:
Most 16-bit ISA VGA cards should work fine in an 8-bit slot. Over the years I've tried at least a dozen different ones and all except one worked in an 8-bit slot. Although to be fair, most were older/lower-end cards, nothing fancy like a Diamond Speedstar 24.
Click to expand...

Thanks for all of the help! I just purchased one of the 256Kb Trident 9000 cards online and will give it a try.
 
QUICK UPDATE / and a question:

Well, the Model D arrived. I gave a quick glance at the motherboard, nothing obvious/ worrisome standing out. Looked remarkably clean. Battery was not bulging. Hit the power switch, and passed the smoke test. Inserted the 16 bit Trident 9000 based video card into the 8 bit ISA slot and hooked up the 15 pin D-SUB cable to an LCD monitor. Placed a PC-DOS 3.30 boot disk in the drive, reset the machine... and it booted to DOS! Tried some original booter disks, and they worked as well.

Both of the Toshiba A: and B: drives are reading and writing to 360K diskettes just fine. The previous owner(s) must have taken good care of this little gem, either that or it sat in a climate controlled closet for decades

I CAN NOT TELL YOU how relieved I am that everthing is working (so far). My next goal is to get an XT-IDE CF drive installed, but Adrian Black's video made me think that I MIGHT have to upgrade the Phoenix BIOS (I have no way to do that at present). And I can not find any other mentions online of using a CF adapter in a Leading Edge Model D.

QUESTION: Am I likely limited by the motherboard BIOS when it comes to XT-IDE?
QUESTION: My 640K ram check cycles through TWICE before it boots the PC-DOS disk. I don't seem to recall my other 1980's era MS-DOS machines doing this back in the day. is this a normal variant?
 
I recommend you remove the battery before it starts leaking. It's going to be dead anyway.

I don't know about the Model D BIOS revisions. If your VGA works, that means option roms work, so there's at least a chance XT-IDE will work.

Some BIOSes do a 2-pass memory check, first pass to find the size and second pass with test patterns. Pressing ESC usually skips the second pass.
 

I did some reading up before I tried the XT-IDE in the Model D. It was suggested that we had to disable the RTC using a jumper on the motherboard. I did that and the XT-IDE worked, for a while, before it overheated. I do not know if it was just the one ISA slot I had it inserted into. I removed it and did not try to use any of the other ISA slots. But the good news was that it did not damage the XT-IDE card. I have been using it in my NEC 286 with no problems.

Seaken
 
UPDATE: Seaken, thanks for the info!

My Leading Edge Model D is working great so far without any major modifications/repairs required yet! It's running Phoenix Bios 2.13, and I am DESPERATELY wanting to install an XTIDE device and wondering if the following quote from a decade old necro-thread here still holds true:
Edit 2: XTIDE card works on 2.13 without a problem! According to my research, it seems that 2.13 and 3.0 of the Phoenix BIOS used in the model Ds were the ones used for "fixed disk" models, though I'm just speculating from random snippets I've been reading. But there could perhaps be a correlation.

In addition to Seaken, has anyone more recently used an XTIDE device on the Model D or another PC Clone with Phoenix Bios 2.13 and had it to work? Especially with the newer XTIDE BIOS revisions?
I have ZERO experience with flashing/replacing EPROMs and really don't want to venture down that road unless absolutely necessary.

Also: Any recommendations about WHERE to purchase such device? I know there are CF and SD card versions, and that TexElec is one supplier, such as below:
https://texelec.com/product/isa-ide-to-sd-adapter/
https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/
 
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