[HELP HAWAII] NEW 2023 Book 8088 Review And Testing

well hey everybody Welcome to the channel my name is Aaron well today I have something a little unusual in that you have me at a disadvantage because you've already seen the thumbnail and you've already seen the title so you know for sure what's in this box when as the time of recording which is in your past I don't know for sure exactly what's in this box I think I do I think it's a brand new pc clone that is the IBM PC the original one that came out in 1981 used the 8088 processor and this is a brand new clone of that PC but in a laptop form factor with some newer technology of course thrown in so today I want to do an unboxing take a look at what exactly makes up this particular unit and I also have a stack of 8-bit Isa cards because this is supposed to come with an extension module that allows you to plug in real 8-bit Isa cards just like you would have on the IBM PC so I want to test these out and see if they work that's coming up right now on the Retro hack Shack hey everybody sorry for the interruption but I've got something important to talk about so you may have noticed on the channel that there was a longer than usual Gap recently in my episodes that were coming out and that is because I got to take a week-long vacation with the family and just basically didn't do any work during that time and I didn't have any backups so I could put out a video while I was gone so apologize for that but we were able to take a a trip to one of our favorite places which is Maui in Hawaii it was 10 days ago we left and came back one of our favorite places to spend time in Maui and to stay is Lahaina and we love the people the food the historic nature of the town and yesterday we got the news that um a fire had broken out fueled by Hurricane winds and it completely destroyed the historic town of Lahaina so as you can imagine this was shocking for us having just having been to a place that we love and then coming back and hearing that it has been completely destroyed and the biggest impact to be honest is going to be to the locals that live and work in Hawaii specifically in Maui in some of those places and on the big island where there's fires burning as well most of the population there uh lives paycheck to paycheck these are the people that clean the places where people stay they cook the food that people eat they take people out on a once in a lifetime trips to go snorkeling or or see whales or or whatever and how they make their livelihood is tied to tourists being able to come and they treat everybody great but that opportunity now is gone along with their homes their valuables for a lot of them now there's going to be no place for them to even work because tourists have also stopped coming they've you know asked tourists not to come at this point and so the main driver of the economy there which is tourism which was just impacted heavily by kovid now for those people that work and live in those air areas it's going to be just almost impossible so here's what I'm asking for you to do I'm going to put a link down below to a place where you can donate money to people that live in these areas I chose this particular link because it allows you to split money up between many uh charitable organizations or you can pick one if you have a specific desire for example Maui food bank if you want to you know donate specifically to that when you can using this tool if you have the means and you know you could skip a few coffees or maybe put off purchasing one of these great vintage computers to donate 10 25 50 bucks to the support effort I would really appreciate it and I know the people of Maui and Hawaii would appreciate it as well I mean who knows maybe we can raise a thousand bucks or something and provide food for a few families for a month or something like that so that they can get by until they can get their feedback under them so I will also be donating any of the sponsorship money that comes in from PCB way for example who sponsor my channel that money will also I'll give that back to uh to these local relief efforts and I'll also be changing up my lower third down below so you'll you'll see that throughout the next couple of videos with links for people to donate so again sorry for the downer hopefully the rest of the show is a little bit more uplifting but I really really do appreciate any support that you can provide okay on with the show all right so let's go ahead and open this thing up I've got my trusty knife here ready to go let's just go ahead and see what's in here well there's a lot of foam I think this is it here and this is the way it's sold on AliExpress that's where I got mine from about a month ago or so yeah if you search for book 8088 you should be able to find this on AliExpress I think a couple other YouTubers have gotten one of these and maybe done reviews I think I saw lgr did one he always pops up on my feed but I didn't watch that video so maybe he's answered some questions that I have already maybe I should watch it before I do this but I'm just going to go ahead and take a look and form my own opinion so here we go here's everything that was in the bag we've got the book 88 itself got a power adapter this is a 12 volt 1.5 amp power adapter actually it's pretty small for a power adapter of that size but let's hope it works and then here are the here are the and here is the ISA expansion card it's got three Isa slots in it and it's got a little cable that I assume connects over here to the laptop somehow and here is an 8-bit Isa sound card so let's just see if this actually fits I don't know why it wouldn't that would be pretty silly if it didn't fit yeah goes right in like that no problem seems to fit pretty well standard Isa slots so this will be interesting to see if these cards actually work but first let's take a closer look at the book 8088 itself so in terms of size this is very much on par with a notebook I guess you would say uh back in the day and the closest thing that I have in terms of size is this HP Omni book I believe it's an 800 and you can see the let's see this is just slightly smaller from this angle it's about a half an inch smaller all the way around in terms of markings on the computer itself we've got the label book 8088 there and that's about it nothing else on the back I don't know if you're going to be able to see this but it is kind of smoked glass here I can see a battery lithium ion battery tucked away here so here are some of the Legacy ICS that are in here although some of them are still being made so they're still new Chips but they're Legacy in terms of their form factor and things like that I've got a color Graphics adapter here which is kind of all in this little segment here with these three ICS if all this talk of reproducing a vintage computer has you thinking that you might want to give it a try look no further than today's sponsor PCB way PCB way offers inexpensive PCB manufacturing and a whole lot more need assembly Services no problem they can do front side back side through-hole components you name it they also offer 3D printing CNC milling and more so check out PCB way for your next project and I thank them for their support of the Retro hack Shack let's go ahead and open it up and take a look at what's inside oh very nice so it's got the uh first of all it's got an MS-DOS sticker I do like that and then it's got an opl3 Yamaha sticker because this I opted for the version which has the opl3 Yamaha chip in it and that should be under one of these doors right here here we go here's the opl3 board that this comes with so this does have a real opl3 chipset on it yeah this is the 8080 chip here this is the NEC new version of the of the 8080 and it's marked 1984. NEC and then I believe this must be the ROM eprom for this thing and it even has a space in here for the 8087 math coprocessor it doesn't come with one but if you had one and you wanted to stick it in here you certainly could stick it in right there okay in terms of keyboards you know this isn't too bad it has a mechanical feel to it and you know it's not clicky but it is very tactile and I kind of like it although you know it's hard for my big old man hands here they're not even as big as some peoples but it's it would be kind of hard for me to type on this all day because my hands do feel a little bit cramped it's okay I could use this I could use it in a pinch okay so I've got this plugged in now and uh I do have some battery lights on the side here so it looks like it is charging or one light anyway it looks like it is charging the battery I think that's what that indicator is so let's go ahead and turn it on and see what we see first boot will it work you can't get the power to come on the button is too shallow this will probably turn on when I put this in and I want to get it on camera okay yep it did okay first boot here we go I got some beeps that's a good sign I think oh there we go 8088 NEC 8088 okay oh look at this this is interesting it's coming up with an XT to IDE Universal bios so this is running the same bios that would be on the XT to IDE chip that's really interesting I think we're in C here it's awfully hard to see no pun intended but yeah here's C command.com config.old I'm assuming there's a config.sys yeah config.sys autoexict.bath so everything that you would expect to see on a traditional IBM type computer is here except it's really weird to see it in a laptop form factor and oh there it goes it came back it was still calculating the remaining free space because the it was never meant to have a disk this large on it and sure enough pulling out the compact flash card that came with this you can see it is a genuine compact flash card and it states right on here it's 512 megabytes in size and that's not the only way to get files on and off the system you may have noticed that this machine has a USB port on the side it's not a standard USB port to use for mice or other peripherals it's actually a specialized port to use with USB storage drives and there's a special USB controller built into this system that will Mount that particular drive as a Dos Drive in the system that way you can easily transfer files on and off although I will say in my testing the speed of that particular controller was pretty bad so I think it's a lot easier to use the CF card if you can also you may have noticed that the screen is slightly off center here it's actually pushed off to the left a bit and this was actually captured in the manual I found for this online where it says that you need to type in mode 80 several times perhaps to get this thing to go back it seems like randomly and more often than not in some cases this will actually push that text off to the side like that so that's kind of annoying but it's easy to rectify one other thing I found out from the documentation is that this thing does support enabling turbo mode as the CPU does support that so you can just hold down function and hit F6 and that will turn on turbo mode and I'll be using that on and off throughout the rest of my testing with this device let's just do let's go into windows and type win I think this comes with Windows 3.1 I don't think it'll run off the bat well it did it set the path oh yeah it did set the path okay so here we go Windows 3.0 from Microsoft doesn't look half bad it's a little stretched this does bother me a bit I think this is throwing me off too never intended to have a 16 by nine resolution monitor in fact this may be even maybe even wider than that it might be 16 by 10 or something let's see if I do traditional windows so because this is already running the XT to IDE bios that means that I can take my XT to IDE card that I use all the time it has a card in here that's running MS-DOS 5 and it's got a bunch of other stuff on it it's actually a two gig card but it's formatted to actually work on Old dos systems this is what I run my 5150 on used it on the channel before so I should be able to just plug in this card into this laptop and everything should just work the way it would work in a standard 5150 so put that in and let's see what happens when we turn it on here we go checking memory 640k of memory booting C this is exactly what I would expect to see in my 5150 and yeah it's running my configsis now or my auto exec.bat and yeah there we go it's calculating the remaining free space on the drive but no problem here we go Blue so the color is working I'm anxious to see what the color what it reports for color compatibility here yep so it comes back as a PC XT it's got the little color and video test going on now it's going to test the math code processor but there is no math code processor so you know that's going to be pretty standard but so far this is working just like a PC uh would work a PC or a PC XT interesting red green and then watch what happens when I do go to Blue it's almost like it's trying to get the right resolution and then going to this wide resolution see for a second comes up the resolution starts out normal and then it goes to this wide resolution for this wide screen so there we go the no color palette test so the color looks pretty basic very very basic color right now all right so I'm zoomed in a bit so we can play some Alley Cat and we should see the classic CGA colors those fuchsia and cyan color so let's go ahead and see if this works Yep looks like it's working it does that weird refresh thing to get the resolution right I kind of don't like that but what do you expect for something like this yeah seems like it's working just fine you want to use a joystick no I'm going to be a kitten always hard to do this with just the keyboard ah but the colors look really good no problem with the color so here I am over here there we go now I can get oh no okay now I'm in the house I don't think I've ever been on this screen before oh no no no no no no no what am I supposed to do here I'm supposed to get oh I'm supposed to get the flowers what anyway yeah this is uh this is oh I'm back in another window okay you guys don't want to see me playing Alley Cat you want to see me testing out more of this laptop so I'm just going to leave it there the next thing I wanted to see is if I could get any other bios is running on this particular laptop and when I searched online I found that the BIOS that the developer of this product had used is actually a copy of another bios called the 8088 bios maintained by Sergey kisalev so apparently the developer just copied this bios and removed the attribution essentially claiming the work as his own although not overtly so and that's a problem with open source projects you need to provide attribution in accordance with the open source license that was used and the developer decided not to do that so luckily Sergey has actually developed a version that will support the book 8088 so I burned that to an eprom and I want to get that installed in this laptop and here I ran into problems again it turns out that the door that you can open up to get access to these chips isn't quite big enough so I can't pull out the processor and I can't pull out the eprom that the BIOS is loaded on so now it's time to take this thing apart which was easily done by removing nine screws on the back of the laptop and this gives us a good chance to look at the top side of the board here which is very sparsely populated but pulling out the eprom that was in here we can see it's a standard 27c 512 eprom so I was able to quickly reprogram another one with sergey's updated bios and once I pop this in here we can see if it works you heard that right this bios has been programmed to play the Intel Inside music when it boots up instead of the standard boring beeps like the old IBM PCS used to do and it has a lot more information on the boot up screen than the old bios did that'll really help with troubleshooting some of these Isa cards I want to try out later okay now let's try Prince of Persia this game does run on an 8088 in turbo mode I think it'll even run without turbo mode but it's going to be super slow and it should Auto detect the ad-lib card if it finds one so let's go ahead and fire this up and see what it sounds like oh and I better turn on turbo mode okay turbo mode is on a little glitch there when it first came out this is definitely synthesized music over multiple speakers with synthesized sound it's not a it's not the PC sound so that sounds pretty good and looks pretty good let me give you a direct audio feed out so here we go let's just see how this plays I mean this would be that yeah that's not bad that's pretty typical actually I mean you know we're stuck with CGA colors for now but yeah that actually looks pretty good and come on get up there there we go yeah it and it responds basically the way that you would imagine if you ever played this game as a kid there's not a lot of lag it looks great a few little audio glitches as it was was starting up but um yeah you could actually play this on this little laptop so not bad for a game that came out I think in 1990 and if we run this with the command prints.prints space std.snd there's a lot of options you can run here with the executable then we should get an example of what the standard IBM PC speaker sound sounds like foreign yeah so dramatic difference there in terms of uh going from the adlib sounds to the PC sounds but they both work and with this game at least Prince of Persia they work automatically and things are automatically detected so um yeah this seems to work fine so as you can see you know from the mess on my desk I've been doing some testing and getting out some equipment and trying some things so I wanted to test some of the cards that I got on the video I did on my second Channel recently where I actually found 57 Isa cards at E-Waste and kind of went through them in real time with you and kind of discovered what they were and some of them I didn't know and you guys suggested lots of help and tips for identifying some of the ones that I couldn't identify off the top of my head so thank you to everyone that commented that was on my second Channel E-Waste Wednesday videos and other videos will appear over there as well so yeah just make sure you go over and subscribe and thanks to everybody that subscribed already I really appreciate it but let's just talk for a minute about these cards and how they're going to connect to this laptop so this will connect to the laptop and it saves you from having a huge connector or some weird thing it does save a lot of space so that's how you connect this to the back of the laptop with a included cable this board also has a barrel Jack for 12 volt input here because the 12 volt bus is not passed through from the laptop to this board let's talk about some some issues that may arise and I've seen in just a little bit of testing I've done with this thing number one out of those 57 cards that I found in that big box at E-Waste uh you know there's only a small amount that are actually 8-bit Isa cards instead of 16-bit Isa cards and yes some 16-bit Isa cards will work in an 8-bit slot but you know I'm not going to go through and try to figure out which ones will and which ones won't it just takes too much time so I'm going to be concentrating on the 8-Bit Isa cards only for obvious reasons here also I don't I haven't tested these this isn't like I'm testing good known working cards one of the things I wanted to do with this laptop if it worked well enough was to use it as a test bed instead of getting out my IBM 5150 which you know weighs 20 pounds and you've got to take the cover off and all that if I could use this reliably to test cards that I find at E-Waste or wherever then that would actually be saved me a lot of time and effort so however I haven't tested these cards so they could all be bad I just don't know one last thing that's going to probably cause an issue is the original 5150 the PC and the PC XT I believe both had dip switches and those dip switches would change memory settings and bios settings that would allow you to for example use an EGA card um that has its own bios and the problem with that is is that I haven't found any dip switches on this thing that I can switch to tests for example an EGA card so I'm going to try it out but I have very very little hope unless I can find a way to do it in software I have very little hope that a card like an EGA card which relies on those dip switches being changed for it to work are going to work on this machine so that may cause us some problems as well now this cable is pretty short so I kind of am stuck attaching this in the back here so I'm not going to be able to give you a nice visual there and there's really nothing going on there anyway except I'm plugging the card in so not a big deal but first I thought I'd try to test this 8-bit Isa Sound Blaster card this is a sound blaster CT 1350b again don't know if it works don't know what will happen with uh resource conflicts Etc I have gone in here and changed some of the settings here irq settings and so forth so that they would hopefully not conflict and also I'm hoping that the updated bios may show some information about conflicts or something like that when it boots up kind of as the the checks that it does as it boots so let's go ahead and plug this in and see what happens and I do have the Sound Blaster drivers loaded on the CF card so if it does actually boot up and doesn't you know conk out on me as it's booting then I'll be able to load the drivers and actually see if I can detect it and play anything so let's go ahead and start it up see what happens oh that's not good so I'm getting no signal so I'm just going to go ahead and turn that off now I did test these cards for shorts I'm not detecting any hard shorts on them but yeah putting the Sound Blaster card in causes this thing to puke and not boot at all so either the card is bad or there's some sort of some sort of conflict that is causing it not to boot but yeah Sound Blaster card so far you know not not working at least not this one now let's just try I don't know if I have drivers for this card but let's just try this reveal card I think it's a sound blaster clone so and it is eight bits so let's just put this in and see if I get any better results from this one okay so this card is at least not causing the system to crash so let me see if I can install the drivers real quick and see if we get anything out of this sound card okay well that's two three or four hours of my life that I'm not going to get back I didn't go through all that obviously this is not going to work or at least I don't have the time to get it to work right now uh I did finally find the drivers they're almost impossible to find under the name reveal but I did find that this was a clone of a sound galaxy nx2 sound card so I was able to get those drivers unfortunately when you try to install them the it seems like the setup program is hard coded to look for these discs on floppy because I don't have a floppy interface yet working for this um it's going to be impossible for me to get these drivers to load maybe I'll come back to it later but yeah I just wasted too much time on this I fiddled around with dosbox trying to get the the driver files extracted from their proprietary files on the disk and the setup disks and anyway I spent a lot of time on it I'm not going to go any further I think this card would work given enough time to work out getting the drivers installed but as it is right now I'm not going to go any further so okay I'm pretty not sure this is not going to work but I'm just going to plug it in and try it anyway this is a EGA card this is a Vega video 7 card these are pretty good cards I have another one of these that I use all the time and it's got some cool emulation settings you can change whether it does like CGA or MDA Graphics in software if you want or using the dip switches over here so this is set up to work with EGA so let's just go ahead and plug it in and see if we get lucky like I said I don't think so because I can't change the dip switches that would be on a normal 5150 so anyway let's plug it in just see what happens okay I've got the card plugged in I've got my RGB to HDMI device that I saw on my website connected set up for EGA mode so if anything does happen to come out of this card or it does oddly work uh should be able to pick that up but let's go ahead and turn it on and just see what we get oh oh that's not good so it started to boot but then it failed at some point and I'm guessing it's because those settings like I said we can't change those in any way so I can't get it to run the BIOS there's probably some sort of like a bios conflict here unless there's a way to change that like have it hard coded in the Bios perhaps maybe I can work with the developer to get that done but I don't even know why um you know it's only really because this one doesn't have those dip switch settings so yeah not working with this but let's try a CGA card all right so here's one of the CGA cards I found in that big E-Waste haul of Isa cards fairly bog standard but it does say CGA right down here get that focused and it says CGA on the back here too so definitely a CGA card so let's go ahead and plug this in all right here we go hey this is working awesome so yeah for a CGA card you don't have to change the dip switch settings they're already set for CGA because that's what the laptop uses so it's basically just mirroring the two displays using the internal one and the external one and even though I have this set for EGA mode it's still good enough to display the CGA Graphics that are coming out of this little card so yay when card works it's working on the laptop let's just pull up uh pull up a game or something and just see what it looks like I'm sure it'll look great but let's just see and there we go Prince of Persia looking fantastic on my monitor because of the RGB to HDMI adapter and uh yeah that's great so this would look good on a CRT or like I said you can use an adapter like this whatever but it's working really really well this looks really good all right well I really also wanted to try some of these uh floppy adapter cards but unfortunately the laptop is hard coded to emulate an a drive in a B Drive internally somehow so the problem with that is I can't add any external drives so I can't use a card like this and add more drives because there'll be a resource conflict there'll be a conflict in there so unfortunately testing out floppies is out I did try to test um one just to see if it would maybe override maybe there was some some software in there that would override and say hey if you find a an actual you know controller card then use that instead that would be a nice addition here but oh well not working okay let's test this i o card um it's I picked this one because it's clean it's got all the chips so you know it should have multiple ports if I want to test that and it's configurable it's got all these jumper connections so I can change settings if I need to and above all this card is cool see what I did there all right let's go ahead and test this card out so maybe I can get a mouse working okay first I just want to check it's got no lpt ports and no com ports so hopefully this should not be a conflict all right I went ahead and plugged in very old school Logitech mouse plugged it in cards in let's see if my read out changes now from the BIOS it's very helpful to have that bios print out some of these specs yep there we go com one uh it sees com2 and it sees lpt1 so yeah this is awesome this is looking like it's totally working but need to load a mouse driver and see if I can get this mouse to work okay so I've tested this card now on this machine and I've also which it was not working and I've also went ahead and took it and the mouse over to my 5170 that's sitting over there on the shelf and it wasn't working over there either but what I noticed was is that this card when I took it over there was giving me different com ports that were available than it did here on this machine and so uh I did two things number one I looked at all of the settings on this particular board all the jumper settings I looked them up you can find the jumper settings online for this board and I did some things like disabling the second com port for example it was set for the lpt port as lpt2 and there was no lpt1 so I moved that over to lpt1 so it just kind of made just kind of simplify things and made it more standard the other thing that I noticed was that the mouse wasn't working so this three button Logitech mouse that I have is going to need some attention so I'm gonna have to mark this not working and when your mouse isn't working what are you supposed to do why of course you pull out your user manual the Logitech mouse user manual all 200 pages of it oh here's the problem I wasn't holding it correctly I went ahead and went through my stuff and I found this Microsoft mouse it is the absolute worst looking mouse that I own it is just decrepit uh the cord is all brown and gross and the mouse itself is very yellowed but I think this combination will work so let's go ahead and fire this up and see what happens so I can see that this is now reporting com 1 and it gives me the address there now this is saying lpt2 but I looked this up in check it check it is reporting this as lpt1 so a little bit of strangeness there not really sure what's going on but let's just see if this works I do have the Microsoft mouse drivers loaded but instead of using that I'm going to go ahead and use cute mouse to see if that will work because that kind of works generically with just about everything I found in all the testing that I've done so I try to use cute mouse whenever I can and you just run CT Mouse here we go and yeah installed on com1 it tells me the address and the irq and it says it's in Microsoft mode which is good because it's a Microsoft mouse so this is now working we should be able to go in here and run edit and there we go Mouse is now working in DOS mode yay now let's see if we can get the mouse working in Windows as this boots up I will say that until now I have been using the arrow cursors the keyboard to get around windows and test some things out and boy is that a pain in the butt um windows will come up and I remember this from using it you know a long time ago it'll come up with a little mouse cursor even if you don't have a mouse it'll at least come up with that little hourglass and that can be a little bit confusing when I first jumped into Windows the mouse was not working at all and I remembered luckily from back in the day that you actually have to configure Windows to tell it that you have a mouse otherwise it won't do anything so what I did for that is I just went ahead into the main window and went into Windows setup and right now this says Mouse Microsoft or IBM PS2 but when I first came into into the setup program it said no mouse configured there was no Mouse on that line but you can go in here and change this you just have to go into the options change system settings and you can tab down to the mouse line and you can change it to you can use up and down to change it to whatever you want now when I first did this what it was asking me for was the disk 2 from the Microsoft Windows 3.0 installation which of course I did not have it would not take a subdirectory on the C drive as an input for those files even though they were there so then what I did was I remembered that this thing will read a or mount a USB drive as an external drive so I went ahead and plugged that thing in it mounted it up as an external drive I put all of the files from that floppy which I downloaded from win World online I put those in the root directory of the USB drive and then I pointed it at this drive letter which happened to be e in this case sometimes it's D sometimes it's e in this case it was E I just put an e colon backslash hit enter and then it loaded all the files just fine and it asked me to reboot and once it did that the mouse is 100 working in Windows so I can go in here and close things out it's working just fine there's absolutely no problems so now we can open up games and do a little solitaire which I still play quite a bit on my phone there we go now I can see the palm tree a bit better as this is in black and white and uh there we go we can go ahead oh this is going to be a problem isn't it because I don't have color so I'm gonna have to remember my colors I think I can do that right yep so there we go now I can play a game of Solitaire using my mouse and it's going to be much easier than trying to uh to do that with a keyboard I don't even know if you can do that with a keyboard so this is great I validated that this i o card works and it's working fine with this machine I could get a mouse running on it seems like if I wanted to add a printer for example I could do that now through that Port so I'm really happy to see that this card is working all right so time for some final thoughts on this book 80 88. uh let's start with maybe some pros and cons uh Pros would be that look it's it's light I mean you would never do that with an actual 5150 or 5160 from IBM but you can do it with this it also has a battery so while I ran it on power most of the time you could totally run it on battery instead and make this thing completely portable so those two are definitely Pros I would also say that since it mostly has the real Hardware in here at least in terms of processor a bios chip the screen chips on the back I mean those are all uh maybe not of the same period but at least accurate in terms of the dimensions of the chips and the fact that you can actually pull them out they're all socketed you could change them if you want to I think that is a pro as well because they certainly could whoever made this thing or came up with this thing certainly could have decided not to go with any of that and just used SMD components and soldered everything to the board so that it wouldn't be changeable but that would really be going against the spirit of coming up with one of these devices and the fact that it does include the sound card and the ISA expansion again those are choices that could have gone a different direction so kudos to whoever came up with this for actually including those as well the biggest con for me was the fact that I couldn't test everything with this it would have been nice if I had just a little bit more control over how this thing operated so that I could for example do what I wanted to do with it which is test more of these Isa cards without having to unscrew my 5170 or my 5150 or lug that out with the Monitor and everything and use that for testing I'll be able to test some cards with this it looks like based on the results that I got but not everything so having a little bit more compatibility either in software or Hardware to have some more control over emulated floppy drives or not for example or being able to test a EGA card on this thing would be really nice to have in a future product to be honest I wasn't expecting that much out of this product but I was actually pleasantly surprised it worked in terms of how you would expect a 5150 or 5160 to work and I had a blast playing with this now granted there were some things that were really challenging to get working but those are things that are challenging on a real 5150 or 5160 from back in the day things like finding the right drivers resource conflicts you're always going to have those on those machines so a lot of my time was spent just troubleshooting and having a lot of fun seeing what I could get to working and what I couldn't and you know would I recommend this over a 5150 no is it a little bit expensive for what you get I would say it's borderline I'd say it's right in between that sweet spot of being um too expensive or not for me if it's a fun little novelty and I'm happy to pay the 200 plus dollars to get one of these with the ISA extension and the sound card in it I mean it's really not that much in comparison to everything I think there's more possibilities maybe for the community to come alongside and make some special mods for this thing or change it in some way if you have any ideas of how you might want to do that or you know perhaps you know get involved on Vogons or one of the other forums where you know we can see like what kind of changes can be made to this and I will say that adding the BIOS that Sergey did for to actually support this product really did help a lot to have all those resources listed and things like that I felt at least that way I was being true to the community and true to him and his work as opposed to what the developer initially did with this product which was to remove all those mentions from the BIOS which goes against the license of that work it goes against the GPL you need to give credit for those things and being able to chuck this into my bag and maybe take it to a vintage computer night and I don't know pull up a few programs on it certainly again a lot easier than the 20 or 30 pounds of monitor plus big case that I would have to do if I was taking a real IBM PC or pcxt to that event I do want to say a huge thank you to all my patrons they make this channel possible if you want to become a patron the link is down on the bottom and I have a whole playlist of other IBM videos that I'll put on the screen here if you want to take a look at those I go through the 5150 and all sorts of mods and interest things to discover so I highly recommend checking out that playlist and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Retro Hack Shack

Views: 7,425

Keywords: retro, vintage, repair, computers, electronics, hardware, software, apple, ibm, atari, commodore, radio shack, retro hack shack, retro hack shack after hours, e-waste wednesday, e waste wednesday, video, sharing, camera phone, video phone, free, upload, e-waste, e waste, ewaste

Id: RVcWGaBcw5I

Length: 43min 13sec (2593 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023