Let's teardown some vintage IBM computers!

hello everyone we've got some beige from Big Blue on the bench here my favorite so we've got an IBM PS2 Model 30 here as well as an IBM PS1 both of these machines are from that massive Franklin E-Waste haul and I've got my PS1 from my Personal Collection I've owned this machine for about six years now found it at a thrift store it's a 386 machine and it's been my go-to for early dos gaming for almost that entire time nothing wrong with it although we are going to be borrowing its Monitor and it's due for some maintenance it's probably getting pretty dusty in there all right well let's tear into these all right how can I possibly not start with the PS2 PS2 of course stands for personal system too you can see we have a double-sided double density three and a half inch floppy drive here looks like we might have a hard drive and of course it has the ultra satisfying toggle switch for power foreign Gotta Love 80s IBM now unfortunately we do have some damage here I'm definitely gonna have to step up my plastic repair game in order to take care of that but for right now I'm just gonna have to be super careful in this area because this piece here is just about ready to break off and here's the left side of the machine see we've got our key lock here I do not have the key for it so I'm going to figure out a way to get a replacement fortunately it's in the unlocked position and we've got two of the four screws which have to be removed in order to open the case and here's the right side of the machine see we've got plenty of cooling slots for airflow and of course here are the rest of the screws and having a look around the back of course it takes a PS2 keyboard and mouse this is the line of systems that originated the PS2 nomenclature that is the reason why we call them PS2 keyboards and mice now we've got our parallel port here got our 68 pin high density scuzzy card here got our 25 pin serial port and although this looks like a VGA connector it is actually an mcga connector this is another highly ubiquitous connector that originated on the PS2 line this is one of the first models of computers to feature this conductor and it's still in use today it's yet another reason I consider these systems to be historically significant if you're wondering why pin 9 is missing that pin is used for monitor type detection known as edid specifically it Powers a tiny eprom inside the monitor which contains data about the monitor's capabilities edid was not added to the VGA spec until around 1994 and since the mcga spec barely made it into the early 1990s it of course never used edid I do not like the look of that rust there on that serial Port that has got me a little nervous luckily I looks highly localized all right let's go ahead and open this thing up so these screws can be removed if either a T20 Torx driver or just a regular flat blade screwdriver I thought this is definitely a machine that's deserving of respect so I'm going to go ahead and open it with a Torx driver if I remember correctly these screws are spring loaded and they stay with the case oh yeah I hear it in there yep sticks with the case how convenient all right got the other screws loosened up so all we have to do now is Slide the case towards the back and it should just lift right off oh no somebody victimized this thing they cut the connector for the keyboard lock and I see some other severely disappointing things but let me go ahead and get you a better camera angle okay well to start with we don't have a hard drive now ps2s take a special type of hard drive has a special connector I think there are adapters you can use to implement a more readily available hard drive but I would much rather have an original IBM PS2 hard drive and another unfortunate thing is we don't have the floppy cable and that is also something that is unique to the IBM ps2s this is not a regular Edge connector like you would find on a five and a quarter inch drive this actually delivers power and data to the drive so I am going to have to scour eBay to try and find some of those cables I have heard that they are very hard to get okay this thing just about has me in tears looks like that high density scuzzy card is not only missing they also cut the connector off however there is some good news the ram is fully populated so let's go ahead and pull those out of there got to be real careful because these are some of those all plastic Ram slots [Music] all right that module looks like it's in good condition let's go ahead and put that to the side let's take a look at the other one [Music] all right looks like the same type of module go ahead and get these things cleaned up now I do want to remove the motherboard in order to do a thorough inspection of it there are however some risks involved in that because this plastic is pretty brittle and before we can remove the motherboard we have to remove this entire Drive cage which means I have to get that floppy Drive face plate off and I've got to get it off in one piece because all the drives on the PS2 have a little sled system there to where you can slide the drives in and out through the front so being just as careful as humanly possible I'm going to go ahead and try to try to push down on those plastic Clips if you hear me scream it's because one of these clips broke that was close all right I got one loose these things require a very uncomfortable amount of bending oh my heart just skipped the beat but that was just it popping loose yes came off in one piece thank you retro Hardware gods however we're not out of the woods yet because we still have one more plastic tab that has to bend and that's this little locking tab in the front here so let's go ahead and get that heart rate elevated so you just push up on that while pushing the drive forward oh there it goes yes intact and I am going to have to remove the hard drive cover because it interferes with the removal of the drive cage but fortunately I can get two fingers on those clips now I don't have to brutally apply the force with a screwdriver so I can be far more controlled and bending them and there we go and unfortunately it looks like we have a little bit more damage around where that plastic is broken one of the little attachment points for the face plate is broken off in there and the drive cage is part of the faceplate so the entire face plate has to come off and that is going to be very nerve-wracking all right now we take our IBM approved 4.5 millimeter hex head socket get that screw out of there [Music] now the only thing still holding the face plate on are these little plastic clips and they have four little fingers that all have to be squeezed together simultaneously in order to release so I'm just going to go ahead and use this quarter inch air tool fitting that should be small enough and round enough to compress all four fingers at once so let's see actually this one only has three fingers because it looks like one broke off but came loose now I'll do that lower one and I'll just work my way up the case [Music] all right that's working sure hope there aren't any underneath that drive cage feels like there is okay yeah there's a plastic clip below this drive cage so I'm going to remove the power supply first now let's go ahead and remove this little stiffener bracket on the iso riser [Music] now remove the Riser itself [Music] and there it is and we got very lucky looks like somebody already took the battery out of this thing before I had a chance to explode and here's a look at the back side however looks like one of those tantalum caps exploded so I'm gonna have to figure out what the value is on that and get it replaced fortunately we should still be able to test this machine without this Riser installed hopefully none of the tantalum caps on the motherboard have exploded now in order to get to the power supply mounting screws I'm going to have to remove this back plastic panel and some of these clips are going to be far trickier there's no way I'm getting the air hose fitting on that so I'm just gonna have to ever so carefully get at it with a screwdriver just apply some back pressure kind of like picking a lock [Music] gotta find which one's binding a little click on one two is binding there we go and finally gotta do the whole lock picking thing again see if I can do it left-handed whoo was not expecting that and it is nothing short of a miracle that not a single one of those clips or their little fingers broke let's see if we can keep up that look now let's go ahead and disconnect the linkage for the power switch so close [Music] get out of there all right it survived now let's get that power supply disconnected from the motherboard and finally after all that three more screws and it's out man I completely forgot how difficult these things were to repair just have to slide this out of its little footing get it out of there now these two clips here should release the drive cage from the front panel so let's just squeeze those while pulling now I'm going to use this 3 16 socket on a crazy long quarter inch extension and I'm going to use it to get on that final clip while peeking through the power supply hole there we go and finally we are free now at last I can get that drive cage out of there didn't notice this little locating Peg broke off of the drive cage fortunately it was still inside the system but it should be perfectly fine to reattach that with some super glue and just wipe up the excess here now it's got these i o Shields out of here because I'm pretty sure they're going to get on my nerves that is just a sad slight to see luckily it looks like we might be able to crimp a new cable onto that all right got all those screws removed so let's see what kind of weird geometry we have to do to get this thing out of here foreign [Music] there we go and I'm absolutely relieved to see that the underside of this board is absolutely perfect no corrosion whatsoever so that little bit of rust on the serial Port was just there to terrify me and there's our CPU the Intel 8086 now let's go ahead and turn our attention to that power supply now this is one instance where I do not want a smoke show so I'm going to start by taking this thing completely apart and inspecting the circuits [Music] let's go ahead disconnect these two halves [Music] now a word of caution about working inside power supplies even if they've been powered off and unplugged for a while these giant capacitors here can still store enough charge to absolutely ruin your day so it goes without saying don't go poking around inside power supplies unless you know exactly what you're doing all right let's go ahead and lift one end of that fuse up out of circuit and give it a test all right fuse is good fan bearing doesn't feel the greatest but should be good enough and I'm obviously the first person to ever take apart this power supply see the screws still have the anti-vibration adhesive on them well that's about to be no more [Music] all right nothing Wicked on the underside of that board just looks like we have some old solder flux here let's check out the other one and the underside of that board looks good too all right so now I feel a lot more comfortable with giving this thing some power okay even though this power supply doesn't have any Molex connectors we still have a way to torture the sacrificial hard drives now I've got volt meters monitoring the 12 and 5 volt rails so let's see all right we are good the only problem I see so far is that power supply fan is making a bunch of noise I don't know if you can hear that over the hard drives so I'm going to take that thing back apart and look at that fan yeah that thing's pretty noisy so let's go ahead and give it some love let's go ahead and cut into the label to get at the bearing and pop that little cap out of there [Music] now let's give it a drop of oil and work that in oh yeah much better let's let that work in for a few seconds so I can get that little cap back in there wipe it down with some IPA now seal it up with some Captain tape and since I have this fan out might as well give it a good thorough de dusting all right got these RAM sticks cleaned up so let's go ahead and get them back in there now this motherboard actually has some onboard Ram but I want more all right let's see what some IPA can do for that Rusty serial port well it's a little bit better I might just have to put a teeny tiny little bit of navel jelly in there to get rid of the rest but fortunately it's a tiny and highly localized spot so it's going to be okay for now all right got the power supply and motherboard reinstalled now obviously I'm not going to be able to boot this thing without that floppy drive cable but we can at least see if it posts my PS1 monitor should support mcga I'm not completely sure about that but let's find out oh look it's counting Ram yeah look at that that thing's working it did only count 640k Ram it's kind of suspicious but let's see how far we get okay well looks like this thing wants to boot I do want to pull that Ram back out of there and see what it counts up to all right got both RAM sticks removed so let's see what happens okay now it's only 128. okay I looked up those RAM sticks which I should have done in the first place and they're 256 kilobytes each so those two sticks plus the onboard Ram do total up to 640k got to remember this thing's from 1987 when 640 krm ought to be enough for anyone okay well this thing's working at least to the extent that I can test it without floppy drive so I guess now all I have to do is start scouring eBay for a floppy cable and possibly a hard drive also have to figure out the value of that blown up tantalum cap on the Riser but I have a feeling that this machine is going to be just fine all right I got those face plate Parts cleaned up as best as I could none of those stickers survive the cleaning process and unfortunately a little 3M sticker left a bit of a shadow on that floppy drive cover so I might just have to live with that even IPA is not taking it off okay now for the hard part getting these things back on without breakage all right I'll see if I can get this thing back in there without having heart failure that sounds terrible but it is actually going back in [Music] all right that worked let's see if I have that kind of luck with the back panel all right that went on perfectly all right I'm going to leave these Drive Bay covers off until I can hopefully find the hard drive and the floppy drive cable so I'm just going to put those in a safe spot but for now let's move on to the next system all right the next system is going to be the IBM PS1 from the Franklin E-Waste haul you can see we have a significant amount of damage here to the face plate but we do have a three and a half inch floppy drive and the reveal branded CD drive and having a look around the back this of course takes a PS2 keyboard and mouse got two serial ports here got a parallel port and Onboard video and got some kind of sound card and of course a dial-up modem all right let's go ahead and open this thing up and these machines do not use any kind of screws to secure the case all you have to do to open them up is to lift up on this tab here on the front and then pull the case forward so just lift up on that tab I hope it doesn't break pull forward [Music] and oh man this thing's got some goodies see we've got a manufacturer data September 1994 on that CD-ROM drive and I am dying to know what kind of sound card that is so I'm going to go ahead and get the style up modem out of the way [Music] and it is a reveal SC400 very nice so that's the matching sound card for that CD drive I'm not sure but that thing might have an opl chip on it let's go ahead and get that out of there and get a closer look at it [Music] and we do indeed have an opl free chip that is a Yamaha ymf-262-1-m the opl chips are a line of FM synth chips produced by Yamaha they are highly desirable to enthusiasts like myself because they produce a distinctive sound in DOS and early Windows games that's not just some audiophile nonsense either there is a very clear difference between opl generated and emulated midi music let's take a look at the back super clean card let's go and put that in the safe spot all right let's go ahead and start pulling these drives start with the floppy Drive [Music] now there's three screws that hold this floppy Drive In it attaches to this entire bracket here it's kind of like a floppy drive on a stick just grab this send pull that out of there let's get the CD-ROM cable out of here [Music] wait this thing's a 486 no way I thought it was a 386 like my PS1 let's see if it has a socket for the DX CPU oh my God yes it does what yeah there it is I cannot believe this thing is a 486 I'm going to be able to play Doom on a PS1 well I think I found my new PS1 darling I guess my PS1 is going to become the parts donor all right let's get the rest of these cables out of here [Music] let's get this power supply disconnected from everything [Music] and looks like we have a hard drive down there let's get that disconnected let's get that CD drive out of there and look at that has the original IBM hard drive 133 megabytes I'm actually just going to leave that in there all right let's get a look at that Ram [Music] no indication of size let's go ahead and get that edge connector cleaned up and here's a good look at the BIOS and the graphics chip I cannot believe this thing's a 486 and since it might seem strange to some viewers that the CPU is soldered to the motherboard you can optionally install a beefier 486 CPU in that socket above the onboard CPU and that'll gain you some significant performance improvements I might try to install the dx2 a little later but for right now I'm just going to boot it up with the onboard CPU all right let's get that Riser out of there looks like none of the Caps have exploded yet backside looks clean all right let's go ahead and replace that battery it's just a regular CR2032 in a very awkward spot [Music] actually looks like we got some leakage but luckily it doesn't look catastrophic let's just clean that up with some IPA [Music] all right we're all dried up so let's get a new battery in there all right let's give that power supply test now unlike my PS1 this power supply actually takes its power on signal from the motherboard so I'm gonna have to leave this signal wire connected I don't think any voltage goes through there but let's just keep our fingers crossed because this is definitely a non-standard power supply and I cannot find the pin out and of course I'm going to leave the main power cables disconnected from the motherboard all right good old sacrificial hard drives always ready to take a bullet for us let's see what happens [Music] all right both it just look somewhat reasonable just gonna let that run for as long as these hard drives can take it all right I've had these things clicking away for about five minutes now I think that power supply is trustworthy enough I don't really have much of a choice because I'm pretty sure this is a special PS1 only power supply and yeah I checked this thing will not take a standard at power supply connector those are keyed differently so this power supply is all we got let's see what happens all right we got complaints pretty sure it's just angry because the ram is not in there so let's go and get that back in but that is a good sign [Music] all right once again [Music] all right that's much better let's go ahead and get a monitor connected to this thing and see what it's doing all right the monitor is monitoring power on oh I got a cursor and all kinds of complaints okay it's weird that it's still complaining about the CMOS battery maybe those connectors are still kind of dirty but this thing's working all right let me take a look at that battery socket again and then I'm going to get everything that this thing needs connected it's looking good so far all right I got all drives reconnected got that sound card back in there also gave that battery socket a good thorough cleaning with a scratch pin and some deoxite got a keyboard connected so let's see what this thing does okay well that hard drive did spin up I didn't hear any heads move still complaining about the CMOS battery hmm okay let's just continue for now oh it's booting that hard drive works see what this thing has on here apparently nothing version of doses this even 6.22 let's see what's in the Dos directory okay lots of Dos stuff I thought for sure we would find some games on here has a Windows directory does it have Windows no see what is in there nothing apparently now this thing's pretty blank you could at least have Scan disc on here [Music] all right let's go ahead and check this hard drive out let's do a surface scan yeah there's barely anything on this drive oh I think we're gonna make it yes that hard drive is perfectly healthy all right let's see if that floppy Drive works oh apparently not can't even put a disc in there oh well not the worst thing that can happen all right well let's try the CD drive well opens right up and closes let's see if it'll read a CD now this thing booted way too fast I don't think it loaded a CD driver let's see yeah no CD driver in there pretty sure it's not in config.sys either [Applause] nope okay I'm gonna have to swap in a working floppy drive and get my dos boot disk in here all right got a good floppy drive and a doll split disc in there let's see what it does okay I think all the CD drivers I have on this disc are for IDE drives only so time to go on a good old-fashioned driver hunt all right good old archive.org I have what is allegedly the driver for that sound card and CD drive so I've got the machine booted back up to the hard drive so let's see if this thing installs starting Disc One okay install seems reasonable well that's not good maybe that sound card doesn't work okay let's try a different Isis slot then okay I cleaned up the edge connectors on the Riser and the sound card also hit everything with the oxid and we still have the same problem so back on the Hunts I go all right found another set of drivers this time from the Vogons forum and supposedly it's for this exact revision of sound cards so let's find out okay let's try install where's the any key okay okay allegedly we're done let's say no okay let's reboot okay we'll obviously added some stuff to the auto exec.bat does not look like it loaded a CD driver see what is in that directory that it created let's send utility okay let's see what demo 8 is computers today need more power oh Shunk okay well clearly the sound card works okay well at least you got the sound card squared away now I got to figure out what it did with the CD drive surely it's not D drive nope hard drive nope hmm let's see what's in drivers okay well that looks like our CD driver so let me go ahead and copy over mscdex from the boot disk and set that up and see if it does anything okay so here's what it added to the config.sys file that does not look like a CD driver to me so let's go ahead and add that all right save that now let's copy over msctex from the a drive and I'll add that to the auto exec.bat save that and reboot okay that didn't work okay I've got another potential candidate for the CD-ROM driver also from the Vogons Forum so let's see let's install okay this looks promising I guess okay no I do not all right good now mango remove my manual edits from the config.sys and autoexec.bat file just in case they conflict okay looks like it did that for me at least for auto exec.bat let's check config.sys [Applause] okay looks like it took care of that too all right then we should be good to just reboot come on please let this be the one nope okay I might be stuck here that drive is most definitely connected correctly okay I tried all the available addresses with that driver and had no luck so I'm gonna see if specifying the address with that cr56x driver does anything let's see nope okay well I'm kind of running out of time on this I also tried a known working cable and I also tried my Creative Drive which is the same model of drive as this one and no luck so if you have any idea what I should try next please let me know in the comments but for now I'm putting in a tappy CD-ROM drive in this thing and we are most definitely connected correctly that is the PIN header for the Panasonic drives and the verified that pin one lines up with the red marking on the cable on both the sound card and the drive sides oh well give me my disc back and here's a good shot of the label on that drive all right I changed over the jumper settings to IDE mode on that sound card so we're gonna see if it works with an IDE CD-ROM drive and yep sure does let's make sure it actually reads foreign sure does all right let's give this thing a quick RAM upgrade [Music] you already know where I'm going with this [Music] do music on a real op03 I can barely see the monitor yeah it looks like that frame rate's pretty terrible on that onboard 486 SX fairly playable all right let's see what we can do about that CPU okay despite my earlier excitement it looks like this board actually does not support the DX processors looks like we can only use a 487 MAF co-processor in this although according to the manual it does support a Pentium overdrive chip so I'm definitely gonna have to keep an eye out for either a 487 or a Pentium overdrive chip those are both pretty rare chips but you never know there could be one sitting in that giant lot alright I pulled the motherboard out to see if there's anything we can do about that persistent CMOS battery error so let's see if that battery voltage is actually making it to the board [Music] okay looks like it is so this issue just got even more strange okay let's test it from the underside of the board and yeah got voltage so there could be an issue with the circuitry that switches between the power supply voltage and the battery and that's probably controlled by these two transistors here so we might be doing a board level repair on this and I got to figure out what the values are for all those components so this board will definitely be making a reappearance in the motherboard repair video I just don't have enough time this week to get into it and since I ended up having to pull it out anyway here's a good look at that hard drive see it looks a lot like the PS2 hard drives except it's IDE [Music] all right let's get that back in there okay well this machine is not quite ready for prime time yet however I am satisfied with the level at which it does function so let's move on to the next system and the next system is my own darling PS1 nothing wrong with this machine at all but it is due for some maintenance and I figured I'd give you a tour of one of my personal systems since I've owned it for so long you can see it has the original IBM five and a quarter inch drive and it's got the push button opening and closing mechanism let me show you how that works put the disc in there and then push that in and when you want to get it out just push it again and the three and a half inch floppy Drive is obviously not original but it is delightfully noisy that thing makes some of the best three and a half inch floppy Drive sounds I've ever heard and yes that is a factor I consider When selecting drives but I do want to replace that drive with one that's more appropriately color matched this drive also makes some wonderful sounds and you can see this machine is in need of some plastic repair we've got some cracking here and it originally had a front panel that folds down but I have had absolutely zero look finding a replacement for that I've had an eBay saved search on it forever that still has not been triggered and now that I have two ps1s I guess I need two of those and here's a look at the back of the system you can see it's very similar to the system we just looked at I did add a sound blaster awe 64 and that's actually from a video I did several weeks ago on some systems I found in the garbage and of course this machine opens up exactly the same way as the last system just lift up on the tab and pull forward [Music] foreign now you can see the top side of that five and a quarter inch drive with its IBM part number although it is actually a Canon Drive model 5501 and even though it's a 1.2 megabyte high density drive it still has no problem working with single-sided and double density disks which is one of the many reasons I love it and here's the other reason I want to replace this three and a quarter inch drive it's pretty crusty that is actually rust but fortunately due to recent events I have no shortage of three and a half inch drives to choose from and there's the Sound Blaster you've seen this card in a previous video the only thing I changed is I replace one of the capacitors because it was dented so let's go ahead and get that out of there now let's go ahead and get these drives disconnected [Music] and get all these cables out of here [Music] let's go ahead and pull out that floppy drive on a stick let's get the hard drive disconnected [Music] now let's go ahead and pull this five and a quarter inch drive this is kind of tricky because the mounting screws are on the bottom so I have to remove the entire Drive caddy which also houses the hard drive so it's a little bit tricky [Music] and here's what that assembly looks like and here's the underside of that five and a quarter inch Drive I just think this thing looks so cool very simple in its design and here's a look at the hard drive and even though this is a Max tour drive it is original to the system see it has an IBM part number and has a capacity of a whopping 129 megabytes is of course an IDE Drive you guys look at the logic board and this drive makes some wonderful sounds I absolutely love it and here's a good look at the motherboard let me just go ahead and pull that Riser out of there haven't had any problems with any of these capacitors so far there's look the back and there's our Intel 386 CPU and I am only using the onboard Ram I'm going to be rooting through that lot to find some compatible RAM for this thing and I do not have the 387 math co-processor here's a good look at the BIOS here's a good look at the graphics chip and there's nothing wrong with this motherboard at all but I do want to pull it out of here because it is due for a dusting let's just get this power supply disconnected [Music] won't be testing this power supply because I know it's good let's go ahead and disconnect the hard drive and power LEDs all right got all the screws removed so all you got to do is pull it out of its little locating Peg there and pull it out here's a good look at the back side of the board I don't know why but I find IBM motherboards to be exceptionally satisfying looking all right I'm just going to go ahead and knock this dust off with an anti-static brush all right that looks much better now go ahead and do the same thing for the inside of the case now this tubing on the outside of the power switch wiring is getting pretty sticky as they tend to do with age it could probably stand to be replaced but for right now I'm just going to clean it up with some IPA [Music] that's much better and I also went ahead and de-dusted the power supply in its fan that thing was filthy and no trouble out of this fan bearing at all most of the time on these pizza box style cases the power supply fan is the only source of airflow let's just clean up the edge connector on that Riser it's using some IPA all right fresh and clean let's get this thing put back together all right let's boot this thing up [Music] now I didn't change the Dos installation or anything this is exactly how I found it and actually has IBM dos on it and also has Windows 3.1 with the original PS1 background also still has some of the PS1 tools on here [Music] this machine is definitely a survivor [Music] okay and everything is pretty much exactly the way I found it although of course I had to add some games [Music] yeah there's no way I could use this machine as a part stoner I'm gonna have to find a new face plate for that 486 PS1 if this channel ever gets big enough I am definitely exploring the option of molding new replacement parts for these types of machines well even though it's incomplete I'm still absolutely thrilled to have a PS2 in my house again I used to be absolutely in love with those machines when I was a kid my favorite machine was the model 50z and I'd be absolutely thrilled to find one of those again and speaking of being absolutely thrilled we just crossed the 5 000 subscriber Mark so thank you so much to everyone who subscribed and pledge their support on patreon and helping this channel to grow as quickly as it is and if you're new to the channel and you like this kind of content be sure to subscribe because I have a lot more to do but that's all for this video thanks for watching

Channel: MikeTech

Views: 16,593

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Id: S2yd4ovvqkA

Length: 39min 48sec (2388 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023