The IBM PC 5150 -- Getting It Just Right

[Music] hi guys welcome to Adrienne's digital basement in my previous video which I'll link in the description below we took a look at my IBM 5150 I've had this computer since 2017 and recently when I went to turn it on a tantalum capacitor went bad which shorted the 12 volt rail to ground that prevented the computer from working at all so in that last video I took it apart and I fixed it since I had the computer out to work on it I figured it was a good time to actually clean it up a little bit and also change it up to make it more like how I want a 5150 to be but first a little history let's go back in time to July 2017 when I bought this computer I found the machine on Craigslist for $100 after chatting with the seller we settled on 80 the seller who was an elderly man told me he had owned the computer since new I didn't know much about the 5150 at the time but I later found out this was a very early Rev a machine based on the chips date codes the machine appears to date from the end of 1981 only about four months after the machine was released I was just 6 years old at the time when this machine was made that's amazing the computer had sat in the original owners damp garage since he stopped using it around 1988 I could tell the date by the timestamps on the files on the hard drive the dampness definitely had taken its toll on the chassis and case and caused quite a bit of rust I had also found that lots of bugs had set up shop inside the Machine requiring lots of cleaning of course I hadn't yet seen the left 4 dead commodore 64 that was found in a field which was obviously a lot worse than this machine once I had taken care of the rust bugs and filth I tested the machine and I found it powered on but it had some errors the 5150 is notorious for showing as little information as possible at boot time you are normally just greeted with a flashing cursor while you wait for it to do the boot time diagnostics and any error codes will pop up at that point if there are any the error codes pointed me to bad Ram after some troubleshooting and helps from the folks at VC Fed I found that a few chips were bad a couple on the motherboard and some on the expansion card with that squared away the computer was now booting and working properly okay so let's go over what I got with the machine when I first got it because right now we're looking at the machine after I've already worked on it so from an exterior perspective the machine came with the model F keyboard the computer itself and this original IBM 5150 monochrome monitor this CGA monitor here which is an IBM 5153 came with a IBM pc/xt I bought later on the inside the configuration is quite a bit different to how the machine would have actually originally been sold this floppy drive on the left is the floppy drive that came with this computer this is a double-sided 360k floppy drive without an IBM brand on it now information is scarce but back in this computer was first sold it came with a single sided floppy drive which about with about a hundred and sixty K of capacity sometime in early to mid 1982 IBM switched to a double sided drive as well but since this computer dates back to 1981 this computer would have had the original single sided drive this machine also has the 1982 BIOS in it which I think was required to support the double sided drives at some point in the mid 80s the owner upgrade this computer with a hard drive this is the hard drive controller that came with a computer which is a PC limited zm2 now I'm just going off the sticker on the EEPROM here because there's really very little information I can actually find about this controller all I do know is it's an MFM dual drive controller with built-in floppy support the day codes on the chips all date this to around 1985 which does coincide with the release date of the hard drive which was in this computer which is this Tandon TM 262 this is a 20 megabyte MFM hard drive three-and-a-half inch half high drive which is how we got a hard drive working inside this computer considering the meagre power output of 63 thoughts of the built in IBM 5150 power supply I can't find any documentation on this hard drive controller including any way to configure these jumpers but it does work with this hard drive out of the box and if you can believe it they hard drive actually still worked perfectly I did have to lubricate the stepper motor here and I have a previous video which I'll link to in the description below on how I repair these drives using a little bit of lubricant for driving the original IBM 5150 monochrome monitor the original owner at some point replaced the original IBM monochrome card with this CCS monochrome display adapter looking at the day codes on this card it appears to date back to around 1983 so I wonder if his original card failed and then he used this to replace it or perhaps with some kind of an upgrade I'm unable to find the documentation on this card so I don't really know if this was an upgrade or just a replacement but if you notice here there are two headers where the RAM is this probably has dual ported Ram and maybe a ram expansion capability that gave this monochrome graphics capabilities perhaps Hercules compatible but I do know that in an state right now this does not have any graphics capabilities that I can figure out and Hercules applications do not work on it because the owner had a single floppy drive and then the half-height hard drive there was actually a hole here in the front where there was no drive so I used that as an opportunity to take of go tech discotheque actually and installed inside the computer which actually allowed me to get files on and off the machine much more easily another card inside the machine is a fully populated ast mega plus 2 expansion card this has chips that data from late 1982 which means it was probably a pretty early upgrade for this machine I can't imagine how much a fully populated card cost because RAM was very expensive and fully populated this card has 512 K 256 on the card itself and 256 on the mega pack expansion card in addition to RAM expansion this card also adds a parallel port to serial ports and a real-time clock using this card brings the computer to the maximum supported Ram configuration of 576 K which is 64 K on the motherboard plus 512 K on the expansion card so I wanted to start with the display options so you currently see I'm running Ultima for quest of the avatar on a CGA monitor this is a 51:31 as I said before CGA can do sixteen colors in text mode but in graphics mode you just do four colors and it outputs at a fifteen point seven kilohertz so it's essentially NTSC output but it's RGB but check this out here we have the same game Ultima 4 which is a CGA only game running on my monochrome screen I turned off the light because there was a lot of glare on the CRT let me zoom in and give you a closer look so it looks quite good as you can see here this is a bone stock IBM 5151 monitor no trickery going on and I'm not running any special software to say emulate CGA this is running at the full native speed and whatever capabilities of CGA but there's actually a little more coolness to this let me show you something else alright it's a little hard to see because we're zoomed out but I'm gonna zoom in and show you something that's really interesting at least to me ok so this is my monitor here and you have to excuse the flicker but one thing that's interesting about monochrome monitors is the IBM monochrome monitor standard allows three colors black white and bright white this is a digital TTL monitor but as you can see here we have actual shades of grey and what this is showing is the color palette of cj's color 0 through 15 and look there's actually different shades and if I turn the contrast up and down it's affecting the top half here which is the the dim version not the intense version and the bottom is the intensity bit set so the graphics card I'm using which I'm gonna show you in a second not only does it emulate CGA as you saw me running Ultima 5 but it emulates the colors on a monochrome screen and it shows them in somehow these gray tones all green because that's what the CRT is but it shows grey and to my eyes there's absolutely no flicker it's a rock-solid image and I can see clearly defined different shades of grey here represented by each of the 16 colors I personally had never seen anything like this before I knew of CGA emulation for instance using a hercules card and that would allow you to run CGA on a monochrome monitor like this but I have never seen shades of grey on a monochrome monitor so interesting is that - running a CGA emulation mode like here the font is actually rather chunky and it doesn't look so great in text mode like you see the tops of the 5s have a thin line and the rest look thick and that's because CGA is 640 by 200 resolution but the monochrome video standard is actually 640 by 350 so this graphics card has to stretch the text mode so that it takes up the entire screen but you get a little bit of pixels that look weird because of that stretching but when it runs in the graphics mode like you saw Ultima it's actually just running in 640 by 200 and you have a black bar at the top of the bottom where those extra pixels are so it's not stretching the graphics mode those look correct but I can switch on the fly between color mode and monochrome by typing mode mono now we are running in the actual proper monochrome mode so if you notice the font is nice and sharp there and we have Hercules graphics emulation right now so that's the full native resolution but in black and white but if I type mode CEO 80 or CEO 44 40 column but we're going to do 80 column it switches into back into that CGA mode and in this mode we have all of the graphics capabilities of CGA all of the color modes full emulation of CGA in this mode and it completely outputs natively to this CRT so here at the back of the computer even more cool if you ask me is I have rigged up a toggle switch here that switches between monochrome and CGA mode so when the switch is in the up position where in monochrome I want to switch it down we are in CGA now I do have to power cycle the computer to get this to take effect but this actually switches between the two modes so all I need to do is change monitors is unplug it from the video card like that and plug in the CGA monitor and then flick the switch power cycle the computer and we are now running in full color mode here I'm running Deskmate in full hercules mode which looks really nice and sharp on this monochrome monitor all right so let me open this computer up and I'm going to show you what makes this graphic switching possible and also the other things I've done to this computer actually before we pop the cover I just want to talk about the exterior conditioning of this computer a little bit now when I got it it was in pretty good shape but I mentioned earlier that there were some rust issues those were on the inside of the chassis but they didn't stop there was a bit of rust issues on the outside as well now besides the rust there are little bits of missing paint like on the plastic here just little scratches I could probably fix that with touch-up paint but I've chosen to leave it but the front of the computer is actually in pretty fantastic shape on the other hand this side of the computer was in really really bad shape so the power switch is fine there's no issues there but there was a lot of rust on this side of the computer now I treated it with my rust remover technique and this is where I use wheel cleaner I'll link to the video in the description below you'll see how I did it and while I can see little rust marks it is a million times better I've zoomed up a little bit to see if I could show them to on camera but there's a little mark there there's just sort of little speckles of marks all across this but it's pretty amazing nonetheless how this turned out and I'm very happy with that switching to the back of the computer there's not much to report here there was a lot of rust on the back of the case especially around the Schloss here so I have repainted this I used rust-oleum rust converter and then I painted it with this flat black paint but it was very careful to kind of preserve the labels so the IBM label on this plus the barcode and these stickers here so this is what shows us that this is an early reveille because it has this db25 connector here and I'm very happy with how this came out considering I'm terrible at using spray paint this side of the computer is actually fine there was no issues with it and whatsoever there's no scratches and there was no rust so the top of the case has some battle scars and you see these scratches up along the edge here these are actually down to the bare metal the few of them are so these were all rusting as well when I got the case but when I did the rust removal process for the rust on the side of the case it took care of this as well all right so here we are with a top cover removed so right off the bat you probably noticed I already earlier shots that I have to five and a quarter inch disk drives in this computer again now the drive I got with his computer originally was this one so it's a 360 K double sided drive now I luckily found another drive in one of my other computers that's actually an IBM branded drive so if we look here you can see there's an IBM logo there hopefully that comes out in the camera but the drive on the right is actually an original IBM it's a 360 K you can tell 360 K drives because there are two connections for the head assembly both of these have this but I was able to find this original IBM drive which I took out of the other computer and I put into this machine so I restored this to a much closer to the original 5150 configuration at least from a floppy drive configuration I know it would be period-correct to put two single sided drives in and I do have two single sided drives but that's just way too limiting I mean I might need to copy a file onto this or something and you can barely work with those drives that small so there we go two double sided drives so let's talk about the peripheral cards now I showed you what this computer came with originally and one of those cards is still in this computer this one right here so this is the ast mega plus two with the mega pack Ram expansion so this is the card that has $1000 of 1982 memory I'm just floored that this card works properly and yeah so this is definitely staying in this computer it has a new battery in here so the clock keeps good time I have a serial port that I can access here so I can plug a mouse or a modem into it I don't use the parallel port because that's on the graphics card but this thing is a pretty kick-ass card so if we're looking back at the disk drives again so the two disk drives I wanted to get a little closer to how we originally were with this machine so what I was able to find is an original IBM dual floppy controller card so this is a bit different than newer cards because if you notice here has an edge connector and luckily I have the original cable that goes with this the original cable actually was already folded in the correct configuration for this chassis now this is the later card if you are familiar with these cards the ones that would have come in this machine well early on at least would have had slightly different looking down here but looking at the day codes on these chips this is from 1984 this board so this is a little bit later than this machine this came out of a 51 60 and XT but to me it's close enough and look it even has this giant external floppy drive connector I mean I guess probably that was used on the XT if you had an internal hard drive and you had one floppy drive you need a second plopper drive yet to plug some ridiculous external chassis in here now I alluded to this earlier and you might have seen something on the boot up screen but this is an Intel network card now of course it's a much later card here we're talking about an eight Intel eight sixteen LAN adapter it has an a UI port but it has 10 base T doesn't even have coax and yes it's a 16 bit is a card this card works fantastically in this computer because first off even though it's 16-bit this card is fallback to eight bit operation and you use these soft set utilities you control all the settings like the base i/o this does know jumpers if you notice that is all configured through software and this card works great and what I use this for is I use it with the network stack called M TCP it's a DOS based tcp/ip stack and it allows me to FTP files on and off this computer but even better is I can tell NIT directly to PBS's through this card so I highly recommend if you have one of these old computers find some of these old network cards three coms has worked as well but a lot of these old Intel cards absolutely work perfectly in 8-bit operation and luckily this slot that I had it in doesn't interfere the little extra 16 bit thing does not interfere with any chips there happens to be a missing I see right there on the motherboard so when I plug this in it just goes straight into the slot with no issues so this card here which it's a little hard to see because of the angle this is my next card I'm gonna pull this out here now there's nothing special about this this is a xt ide type card but it's called an XT CF as in it supports a compact flash card directly but these are these are fantastic I got this in kit form this is an XT - CF light I think version 4 and as you can see the car just connects like that this is missing the back slot cover so I don't have not didn't come with the kit and these compact flash card sticks through the back of the case so I have one tip about this card of a net problem I ran into with this computer so originally when I was killed this kit and I was configuring it I had it in a Pentium computer and I was using this compact flash card right here or one just like this it's a you know disc ICF 9000 this is an industrial compact flash card it's four gigabytes inside in size and these I found to be really reliable work really well but for whatever reason when this was in this card this works perfectly this combo worked perfectly inside the pen team computer but when I took this adapter card with that slot this compact flash and I put it in here I had nothing but problems right off the bat if I tried to write to this compact flash card it would lock up and the entire computer would freeze and if I control deleted it wouldn't even find the card anymore I had to literally power cycle the computer a little tip is if you're trying to use these xt CF cards and you're having issues where it's just not working reliably try a different brand I I wouldn't have thought this would have worked but sure enough this card here which incidentally is this called a1 favored a very inexpensive Chinese one I bought it's an industrial card as well I got it off eBay but sure enough this card in here works perfectly alright so here is my graphics card and as you can see here there's the toggle switch and I have it on a little slot cover that I just snipped off and then I drilled a hole with my drill press and that's the toggle switch so like I said this is the graphics card and there's nothing particularly special about this I found this at a store locally in Portland here and it was just a few bucks and what it is is just sort of a Taiwanese clone CGA / monochrome car so as you can see here there's pretty much nothing going on there's the main I see here there's probably two RAM chips and then there's some kind of a glue logic here for talking to the bus and that's it it obviously has support for external character generator ROM so the card itself has no markings to show what kind of branded it is but the chip the main chip obviously does HMC hm6 1:100 and when I google that I do find some information on it so this is the paper that came with it and sorry for the glare but yep mp6 3-1-1 mono color graphics adapter and it's got quite a few jumpers JP one through ten but that we look down here it actually does explain how to get things working but it's not always super clear to me how to make things work you mean mono color auto switching and abled or disabled character ROM I mean there's a lot of settings and some of it just doesn't quite make sense and remember the whole emulation thing I was showing you or it was running in CGA mode well that doesn't work always if you don't have these configured exactly right it will run in monochrome mode but to have no graphics capability will it will have Hercules but no CGA emulation so you got to get this exactly right so what I did is I figured out exactly how I had to have it configured and this took a while just to try every possible setting so to run in full CGA mode I gotta have the jumpers 4 3 4 5 6 7 8 on and 9 not on and to have mono but with CGA emulation I just need to have 5 6 & 8 on so essentially these three are off that are on for CGA and that is how I got the switch hooked up to go between the two modes so I took a toggle switch and I ran it to a little harness here that allows me to basically select and deselect the jumpers on the fly and it looks a little bit messy but essentially the way this card works is the top row of pins are all common together and they're just ground and the second on the bottom row those are the inputs probably to the main IC here so essentially I have one pin right here this one connected to the top row and that's what goes to the toggle switch and then on the bottom I have three pins connected now one of them is missing a little plastic but it's on there if you find one of these these are the cards that can not only emulate CGA on monochrome natively in the silicon but it does that greyscale thing with the monochrome monitor as well so there we go that's how this computer is configured right now otherwise the motherboard is all the same as it was it got the 64k Aram I haven't touched it all in fixing that capacitor the computer works well and let's put this back together [Music] and it works sweet not broken so let me show you a few things that I'm doing on the computer so I I do have a date time that works so if we look at the date so it's I guess this computer is y2k compliance eeem to work I'm using the clock utility by this guy oh it's just called clock so clock David mut amar I think I'm sorry if I mispronounced your name but if we do clock and T let's see if it's gonna tell us what kind of clock I have oh yes there it is mmm five eight one six seven that's the actual clock chip and there's the base tayo that is not configural on this a SD card is just set always to that you may have noticed here on my autoexec is I have here type network to start networking stack so I just wrote a batch file that's called Network dot bat which runs the network stack and if I run this what it will do is it loads the packet driver first for the eath intel ether express sixteen and then it runs the DHCP driver for M TCP which is what's going on right here M TCP comes with a whole suite of commands like FTP servers and telnet and various clients there's even an IRC client but one of the coolest one is the telnet client so for BBS scene I use this site called telnet BBS guy.com it's got all sorts of interesting VBS is on here but we're gonna try this one right here called alcohol at a BBS and the address is Elko BBS IO so let's give that a try telnet Alko BBS i oh yeah this takes a moment and we are connected detected an CM detection automatically and look at that it's not super smooth the way it's scrolling be nice of it kind of emulated the 48 hundred bits per second or 2400 bits per second so we can see this draw a little nicer but there it is that looks absolutely fantastic you just can't beat the CGA experience when it comes to BBS scene and I did a lot of BBS see when I was a kid and I just have so much such a soft spot in my heart for the way this PC character set renders with the colors and everything is just a joy to behold it looks gorgeous to me so here we are at the West Gate I don't have an account on this BBS thinking hit enter and yes it says uh ask you shall receive seek and you shall find knock it shall be open to you pause press the key to continue so there's one more fun thing I want to show you so when you're dealing with xt ide that's the bios that's on that little card with a compact flash now watch this if i hit control-alt-delete it will show a little boot screen up here and if i push f8 for rom boots see that's highlighted what happens it boots into the original basic ten prints IBM made a fantastic computer there we go yeah twenty-eight go to ten run oops not ruin run there it is well there you go I hope you guys enjoyed my video on the PC 5150 I absolutely love this computer this thing is a joy to use for me especially for the fact that I am only a few years older than this computer I just love this thing and playing these old games this is the year old original Qbert it can't beat it so I hope you enjoyed this video I'd love to hear your comments and put any questions you have in the comment section below thank you for watching and look forward to new videos you can subscribe and you'll see them come up in your feed thanks for watching bye you

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 54,719

Rating: 4.9593081 out of 5

Keywords: IBM PC, IBM PC 5150, Vintage PC, Retro PC, IBM, Retro computing, CGA monitor, cga graphics, mda adapter, monochrome monitor, xt-cf, XT-IDE, Gotek

Id: yXPpLLYMRqI

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2018