EEVblog #1028 - What's All This PC/104 Stuff Anyhow?

hi if you think the Arduino or one of its many compatible units started the embedded computer craze with our stackable boards and an industry standard form factor or if you think you know raspberry pi is the Dark Arts with its for if with its industry standard interface now well you'd be wrong maybe 25 years wrong because here is the industry standard embedded computing platform it's called a PC 104 and unless you're familiar with the industrial embedded PC scene you may not ever heard of PC 104 but this standard is an industry standard has been for 25 years now in fact it extends back to the late 80s as an industry standard footprint and there are countless manufacturers who manufacture stackable boards like this and you can actually get to our boards and just stack them on top like that as many as you want limited by the power supply or whatever system requirements you've got and if you think they're sold a lot of Arduino and Raspberry Pi I think you'll find that the PC 104 might have completely dwarfed the sales of the hose over the years because this is the industrial PC standard let's take a look at it now the story technically starts back in 1987 with a company called M Pro and they released what was called the AMPRO little board / a PC and this was an early version of what was to become the PC 104 standard but before that back in the early eighties empro actually released a CPM compatible our board which was basically a CPM single board computer so if you think your raspberry PI's and your Arduino so pioneered this concept you're well out of date this thing's been going on since almost year dot of the computer revolution and then in 1989 they released another version which is more like the form factor that we're starting to see here and then couple of other companies started to copy the empro one and then in the early 90s about 92 a lot of companies got together and said hey we need to form a consortium develop a standard for this thing which was released as the pc/104 standard and then it just exploded once that does stand it was it wasn't ratified by the I Triple E or anything else but it was there was a pc/104 consortium of all these large industrial embedded PC companies and they all started to develop based on this same a form factor of these are point one inch our header connectors here with the stackable modules so the pc/104 standard basically defines the size of the board which is are not quite square it's actually 96 by 90 I'm not entirely sure and it defines basically the not only the size but the mounting holes in here like this and also the RPC 104 connector on the side and this was actually our sixty four pins total and it basically duplicated the functionality of the original IBM PC bus architecture they added a few pins for you know some extra grounds or whatnot but it's basically electrically identical to the IBM PC bus this second one on here like this which was an extra 40 pins and that was equivalent to the PC 80 bus 64 plus 40 104 pins and that's where the name come from pc/104 standard so they released that in 1992 so it's been 25 years since they released that standard and a whole host of companies started manufacturing this these pc/104 compatible boards but hey they didn't stop there once our PCI became a thing they were like released the PCI 104 form factor board with the additional PCI and then they added PCI Express and they've you know Riesman kept pace recently with the interface standards but they've always kept the legacy is a connectors on there with all the pins that allow you to stack the boards but apart from that everything else on the board was up for grabs all these connectors could all be different and the processes could be different memory whatnot and you know there were certain height requirements and you know physical requirements and things like that but apart from that it was only the mounting holes the size and the bus that was the standard and they were powered from our five volts through these screw terminals here now you may have guessed by now that this is actually an IBM PC it's a regular PC in an industrial stackable form factor this particular board here is the eye cop 6050 a company called a cop who are still going still manufacturing this boards this one dates from the early 2000s you can see the date code there mm OH - and it's got a DM MP chipset which is the Alim six double one seven and this is an 803 86 SX combined chipset so it's got an into 803 86 SX compatible processor in there like a low-power version it's got all the peripherals everything else built in to the one chip solution on there it's got the ami bias over here it's got some external memory it's gotten another Ilir chipset over here presumably for i/o is it almost all single sided got one tiny little thing over there which is probably some TT old job they couldn't fit on the top geez the piece of a designer must be miffed about that anyway and then we've got the classic m-systems disc on chip and this was an absolute game changer this is your old school equivalent to your solid state drives you've got these days that you take for granted and they're nothing well this is what started it all that the M systems discs on chip and the discs on chip by 2000 it's basically a a flash drive in one single dip chip that's all pretty much all there was to it and these range from I think 16 megabytes up to one gig eventually before they were bought out we are SanDisk so this bad boy is basically an intel 803 86 sx computer with solid-state drive on it powered from a single five volt input with a 16-bit isa bus we've got our floppy drive we've got IDE interface and serial ports and whatnot on the thing it's in keyboard and mouse and everything else this did come in a V version which included the video but I didn't have that version I've only got the non video so you could get all sorts of boards for this thing and so we'll take a look at this this is the uses the chips and Technology sixty five five four or five chip said this was just a plug on video card that can either power a CRT output or an LCD over here but the good thing about the PC 104 standard is you could get boards for anything you wanted if you wanted eight or sixteen serial ports for controlling all sorts of stuff back in the date no problem just get your add-on boards you wanted relay interfaces isolated opto digital interfaces whatever it was u k-- a DC's the whole works you know data acquisition systems you could get them for the PC 104 format and entire companies sprung up around just making these pc/104 format boards and a lot of them are still around today this one in particular I cop still making them and these things were the Ducks guts and basically still are for embedded computers there are other platforms around but the PC 104 standard is still going the consortium's still there they're still promoted and it companies are still manufacturing all these things and in real industrial situations like if you suggested using a Raspberry Pi or in AD we know or anything else that just laugh at you and go no rubbish give me PC 104 thank you very much and of course there's been plenty of other embedded PC platforms that have tried to become sort of you know de facto industry standards and things like that some of them have this little modular based ones in dim sockets and all sorts of weird and wonderful ones but nothing has proven the test of time like the PC one for I mean they after 25 years still going strong but of course modern ones have kept up with the times they've got until Adam processes or whatnot in Ethernet and wireless and all sorts of fancy pantsy stuff will be built on to them so anyway we've got this old-school 803 86 SX with disk on chip so I thought it'd be interesting to see if we can get this actually booted up and still working after what 15 17 years or something like that of course it will these things lasted forever they're still going now of course we have the manual for this one no worries but was not able to find the manual for the video card so we're just going to have to suck it and see with this one and so what we're going to do is pair up the processor board on its own first five volts input five volts and just one amp current limit it should be enough to wouldn't take more than five what surely from memory these are only like a couple of watts fingers crossed hello-hello 1.8 watts I expect that to maybe change yeah 1.9 yep 2.3 okay so half an amp maybe it should be in the bias now if it's still working and you'll notice that there's none of this you know power or status LED rubbish on this thing - hey that's just a waste of space so I'm no indication at all that that things are going apart from the current consumption so the power consumption two point three what's yeah it's a bit higher on idle than say a modern Raspberry Pi or something like that but for back in the day that was pretty impressive alright so we'll switch that off now and we'll stack our video card on I'll keep the current limit on there this should take another you know half a word or something like that perhaps jumper on here which says are 5 volts / 3.3 volts but there's no header on there at all there's a header on this one over here II 1 III I presume that some sort of address but I think I don't think that's for the regulator I think that might be for maybe something X all over here perhaps it should just power up that's what I'm gonna do I'm not gonna bother putting a jumper on let's see what happened it's going over there there's some plane going over there I think I could be right on that now of course we can choose to either stack this on the top or stack it on the bottom the problem with the bottom is we know this is you know this should be working we've got the full manual everything for it so I'm going to stack it on top just so we have access to our probe things and stuff like that while we're mucking around trying to get at least a signal out of this video card and get it hooked up to a monitor now if you've never plugged these on before you don't know the force of a hundred pins like that it is very substantial don't put it down like that and just press because you can accidentally bend the long fragile pins on the bottom so you've got to stand it upright like that and gently I get it in there like that and it stands off like that we can put the extra standoffs in there later but you know there's fairly good rigidity in that already you didn't really have to put the jumpers in certainly not just for bench evaluation and stuff like that all right here we go I've kept my 1 amp current limit hey it hasn't a 5 it's more 2 point 7 watts once again this should increase so it's drawing more current than before so my hunch on that regulator was right it didn't need that jumper three point seven odd watts with the chips and technology video card awesome I mean that was absolutely incredible power consumption for the day because like your typical PC was drawing you know tens and tens of watts I mean even your laptops and stuff like that word so to get an embedded platform working on just a couple of watts was really amazing stuff now we have to try and get some video out of this and we've got our three connectors on here it's not these these are fear our flat panel display because the chips and Technology are 65 five forty five for those playing along at home could do both RGB CRT output and flat panel display so this one over here must be your CRT RGB and a dead giveaway you've got three resistors like that there they are for your RG and B output impedances in if we have a look 14 coincidentally the standard VGA video connector is 15 so they've gone for 14 and pin 15 on a regular VGA connector is not used basically we only use pins are 1 2 & 3 for your RGB signals and fought as sorry 13 and 14 for your horizontal and vertical sync so my educated guess would be if this designer was competent in the least they would have made the pin out match the pin out for the VGA that you know one two three and then afford it yet the two on the end they should be it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to probe the just the resistors on top first cuz they're easy and see what we get hello hello there we go single there's our video information and yeah so that's how RGB well that's one of them it's red green or blue and bingo there's the other resistor and there's the other one so if I'm right hello yep and because it's going to be a staggered pin configuration there you go and pin three bingo so by that logic no pun intended the two ender pins here thirteen and fourteen should be the H sink and vsync oh hello because there will be our TTL level signals one volt per division so the RGB was lower of course bingo that will be our horizontal because of the frequency of it and the continuous nature and the vertical should be a pulse like that wait got it we're in like Flynn so we at least have a video signal coming out of this I'll just solder some wires on the back going off to a D 15 and I reckon we're going to get the ball to boot on this puppy because the power consumption you saw it went through the different stages have a look and you see that it starts up it's jumping all over the place which indicates the process is going through different various modes and then it will eventually settle on power figure which should be the bias our screen decided to just chop up an existing VGA lead I've got a bunch of these if you haven't seen inside these these are actually are very well shielded and you can get like crap quality ones back in the day in for high resolution displays you really needed a high quality cable for it anyway so they've got the outer our braid then encasing the whole thing they've got the foil and inside these are once again individually shield it because they're serious that's to stop our crosstalk between the two internally that's your red signal that's your green signal and that's your blue conveniently color-coded your RGB because they they're analog signals the VGA is an analog display and this white one here that would be your horizontal sync because that's a high frequency and the rest of that you could just buzz those out to figure out what one is what no worries alright fingers crossed let's give that a bill see if we get lucky all right are we feeling lucky punk you've got to ask yourself one question do I feel like well do your bunker switching on yes we're in like Flynn a little bit how are you doing because you know with mucked up the signal integrity just a tad but it boots no worries whatsoever main processor Alim six double one seven screaming 40 megahertz 640k no one will ever need more than 640 K EMS you remember when you had to use EMS that was ah those were the days okay so we can fix that display it should be the braid so what I'm going to do is just I forgot to connect up the braid so I'm gonna hook the braid just up to ground here and we should see a very significant improvement tada that's the difference between the shield and no shield on the signal integrity it's just the clock recovery inside there it's all jittery as buggery full boot sequence for those playing along at home tonight copyright 1996 Wow 32 Meg wait wait wait we're in now it came with the keyboard cable on it unfortunately it's the old 5-pin din ps2 standard and the only keyboard I had that had a fire pinned in is my old Tandy 1000 keyboard I've actually done a video on the Tandy 1000 PC and how I designed a turbo board for that back in the day so that's a really old video I don't think it's got a huge number of views I'll link that one in at the end so what I've done is hacked in a ps2 keyboard I didn't have a PST keyboard but luckily I found one down in the dumpster no worries at all and had a real hard time finding a ps/2 connector for that hmm anyway I budge does that one in let's pair it up and we're in like Flynn haha it worked beautiful so we got stared at see my setup the dates a little bit out because we don't have a battery in their boot sector virus protection love it ah our boot up sequences okay it's going from Marcy but we've got nothing in our disk on chip we just take for granted our you know USB ports and everything else these days but I'm going to find and hook up an old three and a half inch floppy and in the advanced chipset set up this G pcs function this is actually how we set up the M systems disk on chip and these are the according to the manual these are the settings that you need so it's all set up hunky-dory but of course there's nothing on it well found myself a three and a half inch floppy drive but I had to scrounge together an old machine to actually I get a floppy drive connector in it you might recognize this one this is a dumpster the XPS I fought when he used to use this as the live the lab a live machine and make a DOS bootable disk I do ever does bootable disk somewhere but I don't know why just be easier to do this then try to dig that over the archives damn it setting up whole computers is a pain in the ass it really is look at the right speed on this puppy like a bat out l really have to get myself one of those newfangled USB three and a half inch floppies on the eBay it's a ridiculous all right let's try it I've got it hooked up I've got the drive powered from an external PC because I don't want to dick around trying to do that so let's switch Iran it's reading Drive lights coming on it's reading X DOS extra fatal error reading disk loading aborted what wow that's a diss that came with it so it actually came with the X DOS operating system Wow hands up if you use that designer written by Thierry Giron good on your Thierry okay this has got the ms-dos boot disk disk IO error ah I'm having no luck but I found this in the Attic clean boot disc dos 6.22 with scan and TB AV so obviously this was my boot disc from way back if I had any virus troubles this one was like a guaranteed you know right protected version of DOS 6.22 with antivirus i think thunderbolt let's give it a bell it's been up in the attic though which is not temperature control so it's temperature cycled so I don't like the chances of that it's been up there for a long long time especially with the Australian heat and everything I still can't find my box of our floppies by the way my original way I had two boxes of floppies cannot find them it's loading Oh Starlin ms-dos no no disk errors yet this is promising we're in we're in new date whatever I don't care your time are we in we're in the prompt the a prompt yes finally so we actually do have a C Drive that's working but obviously there's nothing in there it's called disk on chip so we need to copy the operating system version of the operating system onto there for fun let's go into TB AV here who had thunderbolt by virus but detector back in the day 89 to 95 ah those were the days I just love the mix of old-school prompt here with the rest of the he has screen overlaid in memory anyway do we have sis no we don't have sis cuz that's normally how you do that all we've got is literally nothing else on there it was just command calm because sis was the command that you used to transfer the operating system to another disk and that's what one do we want to copy 6.2 to on to the C Drive maybe we can actually install this X dos thing if this is the original disk that actually came with it so I'm going to do it's just got command comm it's got those DOS files of course I'm gonna do install and see what that does so cuz otherwise are gonna take the floppy drive to another machine hook it up transfer from USB download the sis files from somewhere like the Internet and then it's just messy please boot first with the X dos 5 to run install and we know it doesn't boot Oh finally I'm at the point where I've got a bootable ms-dos disk I've got all the files on there I need including the all-important sis slash question mark there we go so drive and then a copy from drive a to drive C so that should work so let's go sis Drive once specifies the location of the system files a and then C sis I see how's that I think it likes that come on let's boot this disc on chip system transferred whoo yeah c'mon calm now let's reboot this puppy and see what happens so I'm going to take the disc out I can give it a three finger salute it should snow there's no Drive in a and it should try and boot from C so fingers crossed come on starting nearest us we're in we're in today C prompt and that was with no floppy we did it we know winner chicken dinner I finally got a bootable dost 6.22 pc/104 board you have no idea of the amount of effort I went to it's taken me probably like a full day's work to get this thing booted like and many trips to the bunker and back home and up in the attic and all sorts of places to get this damn thing working is but it boots and the disc on chip from end systems still works a treat awesome I can remember when dust 6.22 came out and we got things like you know oh boy and not sure whether a 6.25 from two six or something when we got at it and we got things like scan disk you know we've got some decent upgrades in I think from dos at least from dos for four to six I started out with dos 3.1 or something something like that I can't recall hmm anyway copied a couple of games on there two tiny little DOS games I think with all this stress I'm gonna have to uh play Eliezer hi I'm Eliza I'm your personal therapy computer yeah I need it please tell me your problem [Music] do computers worry you yes are you sure yes why did you repeat yourself I don't know don't you really know no are you saying no just to be negative yes I see it's not getting very far now I'm running an old version of donkey apparently this one is famous because it was actually co-written by Bill Gates himself to demonstrate the graphics capabilities of the early PC oh yeah what do I have to do I've got to avoid donkeys hang on yep oh wow this is stunning ah doesn't get any better look good on your bill I tell you what a game I really liked when I was a kid I played this forever pango do you use a color monitor you'd bet you're asked level one novice you haven't played it in 30 years pinger eyes well that's super quick that's yeah that was the problem with games back in the day if that's why we had turbo buttons so you could slow down the computer for these old dos games so it's not moving ah anyway it always looked better than that maybe they had like a high-res version or something hmm welcome to break here whatever happened to Ken Silverman I wonder good on your Ken ah this oh my god I'm not quick enough it can't ok can't respond quick and after keeping the keys cannot respond quick enough to play this game no no kidding I suck so I hope you enjoyed that look at the PC 104 which is still a standard these days especially in military and lots of other industrial applications they still swear by the pc/104 standard and it started in the late 80s still going what close to 30 years later for a standard that's pretty awesome will the Arduino around in 30 years raspberry pi anyone hmm I don't know but PC when I fall you don't hear about it but it's still going strong so hope you enjoy that mi struggle to get discs on chip working I trust me you didn't see the half of it wow it's just so difficult and getting these old machines up and running unless you've got everything there and you work on old computers all the time I got stuff scattered from here to Timbuktu and well that was not easy at all bit of luck didn't go my way things screwed up but I've eventually got the thing working so anyway if you liked it please give it a big thumbs up and as always discussed down below and subscribe over here and subscribe to eevblog 2 up here I'm releasing lots of videos on eevblog too so if you're not subscribed it'll be at the end it's not right now but it'll be right at the end subscribe to eevblog too cuz there's heaps happening over there anyway catch you next time

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 183,256

Rating: 4.9187331 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, pc-104, pc/104, pc104, pc-104 standard, raspberry pi, arduino, embedded computing, computing platform, 1980's, 1990's, tandy 1000, thunderbyte, thunderbyte anti-virus

Id: 6ad0KP5EvpU

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/BastardRobots]

I really want that 386 board. One place sells them for 200