What mysteries lurk inside this mint Turbo XT?

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video it's another episode of pc archaeology it's been a little while since i've had one of these but today on the bench we have a my tac pc with an amdec monitor and a matching keyboard so without further ado let's take a look what's going on inside this machine [Music] as is normal for these pc archaeology videos i don't know anything about the machine we're about to look at so it may end up being a super boring video or there might be interesting goodies inside the machine as i mentioned in the intro this is a my tack pc here it's got four five and a quarter inch drive bays half height or two full height which leads me to believe that this is an xt clone just because the original xt would have had two exposed full height drives we have an amdek monochrome compatible monitor and it's got the anti-glare cloth material over the crt and you can see here that's the studio light that's sort of behind me and it's actually doing a pretty good job cutting down the reflection problem is with this material it's almost like the material that pantyhose are made out of is it collects a lot of dirt it's very difficult to clean you have to totally disassemble the monitor if you want to take this off to properly clean it and usually when you do and i have other videos about this the crt that's underneath this the glass is usually really dirty and it darkens the picture quite a bit which requires you to have to turn up the brightness and contrast just to get a usable image so a lot of times these monitors are quite worn out when i get them because they've been driven so hard over their lifetime and then there is this keyboard that was included with it it's quite yellow it's an xt style layout but interesting is when we flip it over here it actually has an xt and an at switch right there so even though it's got the xt layout it is possible to actually use this on a later machine now it doesn't feel super great but a lot of times these types of metal constructed xt clone keyboards are actually mechanical of some type but we'll take a look at that more in a second so back when the original pc and the xt were being cloned a lot of the original clones just looked exactly the same as the ibm they just didn't have the ibm logo here so at least my tac tried to do things a little bit differently and mix it up a little bit you know they add some grooves here there's some grooves down here they just sort of changed it up a bit and i kind of like that i think this is one of the more handsome looking clones that i've seen now initially i had made an assumption that this floppy drive here was a t-act but i noticed that the led is down here and it's square which is not normal tx typically have a rectangular led up here in the corner so this is probably some kind of a clone of a t-act or it's an early derivative that i'm just not familiar with this machine does have a hard drive it's going to probably be mfm now i don't think this is going to be a seagate hard drive because typically if it does the led is down in the corner or maybe it's on this corner so this is probably a three and a half inch hard drive maybe it's a western digital let's see when we open the computer what's actually in here the whole machine is in excellent shape there's no scratches or anything on the entire case no rust either so that's pretty nice we have the usual chonky xt power switch of course ibm originated that in the original pc and everyone just sort of copied now looking at the back of this what's interesting is the original pc had five expansion slots and the later xt had eight but this machine as you can see only has six exposed cards this is going to be the monochrome and the printer card maybe that's the hard drive controller and the floppy controller and these potentially are just blanks there is a button right here which is almost certainly the reset button which would imply that this machine does just run at 4.77 megahertz so a complete clone of the original pc or pc xt moving over to the left we have the power supply and some labels this is the exhaust the fan is actually mounted on the top of the power supply almost certainly the iec mains input with the iec output this would go to that amdeck monitor it actually has the correct connection to plug into this so when you turn on the power switch that's right here it will actually turn on your monitor as well and here's the my tac label my tach model number mpc160ts-d1 here's the serial number and you have to wonder was this number in sequence did it start at a hundred thousand and they made 4051 or is this really the machine number 104 051 to come off the assembly line so i decided to do a quick search for my tech to see what i could find out about the company and i found this article in infoworld from march 9th 1987 talking about xt compatibles remember that by 1987 the 286 was well out and established there were loads of 2d6 clones and the 3d6 i think was either out or it was just around the corner so xt machines especially those like the original ibm that ran at 4.77 megahertz were pretty slow look at this section right here most manufacturers now imitate the base specifications of the ibm 640k 130 watt power supply and eight expansion slots but machines that run faster than the original xt are more the rule than the exception now the article goes on to say there's really no reason to buy ibm anymore and that's really because all of these clones are just functionally identical and 100 compatible with the original xt so all software will work and here's the comparison chart of xt compatible desktop systems it does list the ibm xt right here and look at that price uh hard disk system is the second column 3 480 dollars what now interesting is itt made a clone that's nearly as expensive as ibm's ncr also made a clone it was also thirty two hundred dollars so you saved uh a couple hundred dollars at least but wow anyhow my tech international is right here with the mpc 160 t or 160 te at 1400 or 2100 the model we're looking at right now is the mpc 160 ts not te so i'm not quite sure the difference there but as you can see both models here especially the original t there is significantly less expensive than ibm's for my attack it has footnote number eight which down here includes 768k of ram very interesting we'll be taking a look inside the machine later and we'll see if that's the case all right and here's the section on the my tag it just says 8088-2 microprocessor is used in both models and it's switchable between 8 megahertz and 4.77 and it includes a 9 month warranty a bit unusual but that seems relatively generous a lot of these say 90 days i'm just scrolling through the rest of the article and there's actually like no performance benchmarks or anything and weird is they just have another random bad looking picture of ibm xt right here so it's like filler or something like that you can see these ads right here though i just keep scrolling down the a i pc2 dual disk drives 599 and turbo option available and actually take a look at this this is actually a 2d6 clone it would be a massive step up from an xt and 1149 and has no hard drive but it really does show at the time when this article came out prices were dropping dramatically unfortunately i'm not having any luck finding any pictures of the old my tac xt's or like prices or anything like that i find ads like this where it says my tech xt or at call here is an actual my tac ad from 1989 though but it looks like they've upgraded to much more generic but sort of 3d6 looking machines as well the paragon series 286. it's a 16 megahertz vga power station my tack when reliability is a decisive factor well i think that's going to be a little bit of foreshadowing for the rest of this video next i'm going to take the top cover off and just an observation that all of the original screws are installed on this every single screw on the back here is the same it's sort of a larger type so that means that whoever worked on this last at least put the screws back or maybe this has never been worked on since it was manufactured you just see a sea of gray but we're looking down into the computer now and i'm going to slide the cover off and reveal the contents all right i'm back on the tripod because the camera is not wide enough angle to really get in the entire machine so i'm going to have to use this angled view i really really need to get myself a wide angle lens for at least one of my cameras so i can get these big things on the bench in the shot completely all right so first off what i'm noticing is that this machine is really really clean inside it's quite amazing there is a little bit of dust there's some on the disk drive right there on the motor but overall i'm really amazed how clean this thing is so i don't think this computer was ever really used very much so with this floppy drive which is almost certainly 360 k i can see why now i thought it maybe was a t-act but then realized the led placement was different look at this board here this is a my tac disk drive so almost certainly this is a clone floppy drive a clone of a tack teac one thing that i do find interesting is that on a tech drive you can raise and lower the lever here with no disk in there this one seems to have some kind of an interlock mechanism or this thing is very jammed up no i'm pretty sure this has an interlock so they actually improved it slightly compared to the t-act design trying to move this lever even with no disc in there it feels very gummed up like it's there's a lot of resistance even just to move with this small amount so this thing will probably need a little bit of a tear down or at least some lubricant to get that thing working properly here is the xt clone power supply and yeah it's looking really really clean it's just a little bit of dust on the top but that's about it and notice i'm putting fingerprints here but no one else has been inside this machine in forever we have a powertronic brand switching power supply next up is the hard drive and i can tell right away without even moving these cables that this is a mini scribe drive and there it is mini scribe quality from the 30th of april 1987. this mini scribe drive looks familiar i don't see an immediate part number usually their part numbers are written on the side of the drive but i'm pretty sure this is a type 2 drive which means it is 20 megabytes in size it has the same capacity and physical dimension not just the size of the actual drive but i meant the heads and cylinders internally as the seagate st225 and yes indeed i can confirm that this drive is not a brick this is an actual hard drive all right moving on to the motherboard we can definitely see that it's pretty boring one thing that i can tell right away without really looking any further is that this is the hard drive controller here with these ribbon cables that go to the mini scribe but there's no floppy drive connection on either of these cards so it must be plugged into the motherboard so unlike all the ibm early motherboards at least this actually has a little bit of integration on it or it must at least either that or the disk drive is just not connected to anything but judging by the fact that this machine doesn't look like it's been opened or touched in forever i'm thinking that yes the disk drive is definitely connected to the motherboard this is probably going to be a mytek branded monochrome and printer card now down here it says mono graphic and there it says printer slash non-flicker reading around the edge here certified to comply with the limits for class b computing device pursuant to subpart j of part 15 fct rules this card has actually been fcc certified and there it is it's actually an fcc number right there made in taiwan i'm sure i can look up that fcc id there and we will see that this card is almost certainly made by my tack themselves now i'm looking for any branding on the back of the board and there really is nothing it just says reliance v dash o there and on the front we do have one jumper there j2 says printer and there's an off uh silk screen right there that's nice i mean typically they usually write nothing so the fact that it actually tells you that that turns off the printer that's nice and we have two socketed chips here as well and then we have v1 and v2 jumper as well with it set to v2 i wonder if it has to do with like the character set maybe this is probably the character rom right here oh and i'm noticing that these two socket ics are 4464 so two of these make 64 kilobytes eight bits wide so that would be for the fact that this is going to be a hercules compatible monochrome card and hercules cards typically have 64k for their high resolution monochrome graphics that is alrighty the next card here is the interface card for the hard drive controller all right well this card looks a little bit different than i'm used to has this really large package here which i assume is like a an inductor perhaps or something like that you'll notice that the ics on this card have date codes around 1987. and this car which i forgot to look at seems to be also i see 8702 there so yes similar age 1987 as well so i have to say i've never seen a hard drive control that looks like this of course it's an xt hard drive controller so it'll have its own rom bios which will almost certainly be located at c800 and then we have these large 40 pin dip packages here under the cables there is a connection here for the second control cable that would go to another mfm drive you connect them both to the main 34 pin ribbon but you do need independent uh control cables to go to each drive it does say right here dtc 5150 is that a ci and then it says data technology corp with a little logo all right here's the motherboard for the my tack there's a serial number sticker here that matches the one on the back of the machine so this is the original motherboard that came in this machine right off the bat i noticed that this has three banks of memory here and these are tms 4256 chips so 256k for eight of them which would imply that this actually has 768k populated and on most machines like the original pc xt you would have two banks of 256k and then you have two more banks of 64k to give you a total of 640. but it's possible that that extra 128k that this has on it over like the pc actually maps into high memory that you could use or maybe it shows up as ems memory i'm not exactly sure my keen eye viewers may be noticing this right here which is a br 2325 from mata cheat electric corporation i think this is a rechargeable 3 volt lithium battery but this also implies that this machine has a clock chip which is fascinating these typically don't leak even though they are rechargeable they don't leak but they do wear out so i have no idea if this works the fact that this is a br or rechargeable battery means i can't obviously just stick in a regular cr2032 in here not without adding a diode you'll notice at this angle this machine also only has five expansion slots this one here is just a blank you can't even use i know it's not going to be easy to see because some of these wires here but the cpu is an nec part but it's not a v20 it's an 8088-2 so this actually probably is a turbo machine although you could run this in a 4.77 megahertz machine and obviously it would work just fine i'm moving it with my finger but there is the floppy drive controller cable so absolutely that is integrated into the motherboard as i had thought and this button here almost certainly is the reset circuit on the back let's see if it's a momentary it is so this has a reset button why wouldn't they just put that on the front who knows everything else about the motherboard here looks pretty standard like the power connector from the power supply nothing different going on obviously the only thing is there's some extra circuitry on here to support the floppy drive but i do not see any extra circuitry on here for serial ports or anything like that there are no extra connectors at least that i can see although a bunch of the motherboard is hidden under the hard drive obviously i'm even realizing here that there was an attempt to make some cable management which i've messed up here but these ribbon cables were nicely folded on top of the hard drive here so it wouldn't impede airflow but also even these cables here are all zip tied together just pretty nice like there's extra power connectors right here and they're not just loose they're all tucked away so that's really it for the inside of this machine it seems pretty well built like everything is very sturdy nothing is flimsy at all it's quite heavy and all the peripherals and the cards and everything were screwed in in a very secure fashion and nothing was loose all right it's time to give this thing a test now i don't want to just try it with this original power supply in here i don't really a trust that this works properly but b if there's a shorter tantalum on the motherboard that could damage this power supply as well so i'm going to plug in my regular at power supply that i test with everything because that thing is a kind of a workhorse i've abused the crap out of it and it i know if it gets shorted out it doesn't get damaged from that it just shuts off which is the desirable thing here's the power supply i was talking about this thing is a workhorse it's also nice this has a really nice long power supply connector so it's easy to test stuff like this i could just run the power supply off to the side and it works well what i also like about this power supply is it has no problem running with no load and earlier power supplies from the 80s often needed some kind of a load on them to regulate properly so you couldn't just run them with say just a floppy drive or something but this one has no problem at all so i have no issues running the motherboard on this machine without any other peripherals connected compared to the original power supply that might possibly need the load of a floppy drive or a hard drive or whatever connected to it so just be careful if you're testing really old power supplies to not just run them with nothing connected it can cause them to over voltage or under voltage in ways that can be bad for the initial smoke test of this machine i'm going to plug in my postcard and yes this is called a postcard p-o-s-t and that's because on 286 ats and later it will actually display a status code right here on this two-digit numeric display to tell you what's happening with the computer so if it's not booting say you give a black screen maybe it's partially booting and it's getting stuck somewhere now on an original xt or an xt clone it's not going to have support postcode so this is not going to show anything but it does have leds here showing all the voltage rails so we can kind of see if at least that's working properly all right i have the power switch here i know you can't really see these leds very well but i'm going to keep my eye on them there we go actually see it's showing ff here on the display so that's not really working but we heard a beep which implies that this motherboard is working i've gone ahead and i've reinstalled the video card that was in this machine and for further testing i'm going to use this which is the rgb to hdmi that i'm typically using now i recently was testing this on something what was it oh it was that uh pc xt that i fixed the capacitor on the motherboard that was keeping it from turning on and it wasn't working with monochrome cards well it turned out that the cpld that's running on this little device here that's plugged into the raspberry pi it was damaged and the input pin that is used on this nine pin connector for the monochrome video signal actually wasn't working at all so with the original board in here on a monochrome card or hercules you'd get a black screen but on the cga it would work fine so i've gone ahead and i've swapped out the board for one that works and then aaron over at retrohack shack is sending me a new cpld to swap out with the bad one on that other board so i can get this thing working again with the original board now i cannot say enough good things about rgb to hdmi it is such a great project when you have these old machines and you need hdmi up conversion say you don't have the original monitor for something like an old pc like this well the rgb to hdmi is your ticket for me i'm using it of course for my videos here because i capture the hdmi so everyone can see the output of the machines but i wouldn't normally do that because i have the original monitor even for this machine which may work we'll test that in a little bit but a lot of people aren't lucky enough to have the original monitors and for cga ega monochrome hercules all that stuff the rgb hdmi is a fantastic solution to give you pixel perfect display and i was recently working with ian who's the maintainer of the project rgb hdmi project to refine and really dial in all the monochrome and hercules profiles that were on this thing if we go into the menu and we look at profile here and there's going to be several in here so there's hercules the hercules and the monochrome profiles which are these two were never quite right on the configuration so you get like flashing screens or it would be misaligned or whatever it just wasn't quite right so i found all the monochrome and hercules cards that i could get my hands on and i went through and i tested all of them and i fine-tuned these so now if you have an rgb hdmi or you buy one go download the very latest release of the software and put it on the sd card and that means you'll be using those latest profiles that i made to get the perfect image on your monochrome card with the rgb hdmi oh and i want to add one more thing about the rgb to hdmi it's a fully open source project so if you want to make one yourself you can download all the pcb designs have them made soldered up everything but if you want to purchase a pre-assembled one i'll put some links in the description that of the time of this video there are actually some available for you to buy okay so i have the profile here set for hercules i think that's maybe closest enough to what this card is and let's power it up see what happens okay so there it is and it looks pixel perfect using the hercules profile not all monochrome cards use the exact right timing so they don't always match but there's a few in there now i think i have like nec video seven maybe mda which is ibm card and then also hercules and usually with one of those you're going to find one that works perfectly otherwise you're going to need to tweak it a little bit they're all similar enough but we can see here we have a phoenix bios 2.13 from 1985 keyboard bad 640k what happened to that extra memory it may still be there it just might be jumpered out or the bios only checks to 640 and doesn't actually go any higher than that so that ram is just mapped into upper memory somewhere now i forgot to plug the power connector into the floppy drive so let me do that because obviously the floppy drive is plugged into the motherboard already like i didn't take out the disk controller because there is no disk controller to take out all right the power cable is connected to the floppy drive let's plug in this xt keyboard because it's uh happens to be the one i have handy and now let's give this a power i saw a flash there keyboard bad well that's interesting on the switch on the back is oh so that would be a tantalum that just shorted and the power supply shut off it's why i like this power supply because uh it has good short protection and it looks like right there is the bad tantalum that's just shorter the little top is blown off on it well unfortunately tantalum caps have a failure mode that is a short circuit and that can cause issues with your power supply because if it does get damaged from a short it can also burn traces on the motherboard depending on how much current the power supply can output now the one thing to consider is that these tantalums on here all could potentially fail but it doesn't necessarily mean they are going to fail and unlike say electrolytics which leak all over your board these will just short the smaller ones which are bypass caps for all of these 5 volt chips here these can also shore as well but typically when they do there's a lot of current on the five volt rail and those will just sort of like you'll see little burn marks on them and they fail short and then they open because they burn out they get so hot but the 12 volt ones and these are going to be -12 and plus 12 volts these these tantalums along here for the cards those rails aren't used anywhere else on the pc they're only going to be used on the isa slots those seem to be a little bit more resilient so when they short it actually causes the computer not to work anymore so i'm going to take the brute force approach and i'm going to try to just cut this plant till i'm right out of here i'm leaving those legs in there just so i can more easily solder a replacement onto them but there's that little pinhole mark hopefully you can see that clearly that would have been the little pop that blew off this shorted tantalum here so with the video card back in there and the rgb hdmi reconnected to it i'd say that this machine should start working again i mean the keyboard was complaining it was bad i don't think that's an unrelated problem see there we go it powered right back up again and yes it still says keyboard bad oh you know what part of the reason for that is i did unplug it let's see if this uh no it just says 39 keyboard bad push f1 it's accessing the disk drive all right i think i see the problem here it's saying disk boot failure typing the key to retry and it keeps actually retrying the boot process i bet you this keyboard has a stuck key on it none of the keys are actually stuck though why don't i take this opportunity to pop one of these key caps off and let's look at what's underneath here let's see if there's any kind of mechanical keyboard going on yeah i'm not too sure what we're looking at here looks like it's got a key switch but i don't know if it's rubber dome just underneath or a membrane or something like that it makes sense if it's membrane that there's some like gunk or dirt stuck in there which is causing one of the keys to be held down all the time at least the key caps appear to be double shot probably abs here which is why it's yellowed all right i grabbed another xt keyboard this is the one i typically use pretty sure this one is going to work without issue ctrl delete does reboot and no more keyboard bad message all right we're getting disk boot failure type any key to retry let's take a look at this disk drive before i try to read a disc in it all right so to fix the gummed up feeling when you move the lever i took a little bit of this bearing oil here and i just put a couple drops right at the spots where this shaft passes through the chassis so there's one there there's one there which i don't think you can see and i put a little drop there and then i used a cotton swab just to clean up any excess because i don't want the oil dripping down onto the floppy disk when you put it in and now if we stick a random floppy disk in there like that now this is really nice and smooth now the one thing that has me a little bit worried is that there was no seeking of this drive from the bios now that might be normal maybe this particular clone clone bios doesn't actually seek this drive but it does have me slightly worried that the head mechanism is sort of stuck so i'm going to shut the power off and we're just going to try to move this oh yeah that's not moving at all so i'm going to use this screwdriver here and i'm just going to try to move the head okay it's moving okay i think what's happening okay it's a little more freed up now i don't think the motor is gummed up i think these two rods are gummed up so now with the camera reposition you can see one of the rods right there and there's one on the other side as well there's a little bearing or like a bushing that this sled slides on so i'm just going to put a little drop of lubricant right there and a similar position there and then i'm going to start moving this manually and you have to do this when the power is off because when the drive is powered up it typically sort of holds this stepper motor in position and it's much harder to move so just shut the power off and it will move much more easily so i'm going to use this bearing oil again and i can't remember where i got this i think it's really designed for hvac motors to put inside the bearings for your heating and cooling system but i find it works pretty well i'm just gonna put a little bit of this on a cotton swab here that's gonna allow me to more strategically put it onto the rail here so like that and on this side as well luckily it does not look like it's too rusted up or anything now if you're trying to free up the heads that are seemed stuck like this one was don't try to move it by this part here this is all very fragile try to turn the stepper motor manually and this is now moving much more freely all right i'm going to say this feels about normal there's always a little bit of resistance inside a stepper motor but the head is moving nice and freely now all right i'm going to turn the power back on let's see if the head moves nope it didn't it definitely is connected to power but the light is on and it actually is spinning so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use this cleaning floppy here and we're just going to give this thing a little bit of a clean so slide this in hopefully that starts spinning it there it goes so now it's doing the cleaning now if you don't have a cleaning disc just use some 99 ipa and very carefully clean the heads you have to be extremely careful because the top head especially on a double-sided disk drive like this can be easily knocked out and damaged okay here is a copy of ms-dos 3.3 this will be a 360k disk which is what this drive is sounds like it's working i was a bit too slow moving the camera but it has booted into dos i'm going to type dir and it is showing the directory let's run the mode command there we go see it's working nicely alright so the motherboard is working the floppy drive is working what's next the hard drive let's see if this thing works it's not uncommon for mini scribe drives to have a head stepper that's gummed up as well sort of like the floppy drive except in the hard drive it actually is the motor itself a separate motor that jams up and i'm pretty sure it's going to be right underneath this cover here we'd have to remove this drive to try to apply a little bit of that same bearing oil to this so let's see if this even spins [Music] okay it's spinning up [Music] sounds like it's okay like it's working all right so time to put this controller back in here let's see if this mini scribe drive can actually read maybe there's interesting programs on this machine i don't necessarily think there is it may just be completely boring stuff like word perfect and that's it which is probably all that's on here okay so it's just sitting here and i have a feeling oh one hard drive okay now it's trying to boot off the floppy drive but you can't see the light is on uh whoa we booted we got ms-dos version 3.2 r3.03 all right what do we have on here we have floppy's wp directory with a wordperfect batch file the park.com let's run that should park the hard drive there it is parked it i wonder what t8 and t5 is i would not be surprised that that sets the speed of this computer to 4.77 megahertz and 8 megahertz so let's do t5 system clock frequency 4.77 megahertz now if we do dir we look at how quickly it's drawing the text not super fast and if we go t8 now set to 8 megahertz much much faster you can see the speed difference right there okay back to the root directory that's about it on this machine there's nothing else on here it's unfortunately a little bit boring i ran wordperfect on here it absolutely works fine i ran a few other little programs i loaded the odd file and uh it's working this drive is functional which is pretty amazing to me so really excited about that let me just run check disk here so we can see how large this hard drive is but i'm going to be guessing that it is 20 megabytes or 21 megabytes or so you almost think the noise this is making now implies that there's some kind of a problem with this hard drive i don't think so i think that's just the way this old version of check disk goes through and validates the fat tables and whatever else and there it is 21 million total bytes so just as i thought that's 20 or so megabytes just like an st225 seagate drive okay so for running check disk on this machine i am going to put in my xt ide here i think this should work we'll be able to know pretty quickly if it's running at four point seven seven oh it is running eight megahertz the default speed is turbo there it is a little bit of an improvement okay i'm gonna put this orange disc in the drive here because i wanna run a diagnostic on the floppy drive just so we can verify that it is working perfectly now what i like about the check disk floppy drive test is it just does random seeks and will report a read error so it exercises the head too and now that i lubricated those little sliders just make sure that the head assembly and everything is moving properly if there's any issues with that being gummed up it will reveal itself in here there we go it passed okay so this drive is absolutely working perfectly all right i am going to dump the roms here using rom dumper this will just save these roms onto the machine i'm going to make a my tac directory and i'm gonna move these rom files into there but i'm gonna delete d thousand because that is xd ide which does not matter all right i'm gonna go back and check it because i am curious to see i'm gonna plug that original keyboard back in which key is actually stuck and there's a keyboard test routine in here under input devices and we have an 83 key keyboard that's what we're testing so i'm going to unplug this keyboard i'm going to hot swap it while the machine is on and i'm going to make sure not to hold down any keys on here while i plug this into the machine all right and look at that it detected the space bar as the key that's pushed down and it's definitely not pushed right now it's it's up like it should be but it's detecting that as the key that is stuck all right what's left to do now is test out this internal power supply because it seems like everything else on this machine is working perfectly i'm going to grab the multimeter here we'll just uh stick this into one of the leads here so we can get an idea of what the voltages are like on this now remember i said don't run these power supplies without any load on them at all they generally aren't going to work right or they might work but you're going to have weird voltage readings so if we turn this on now 5.04 volts the machine is running that looks good the fan is noisy and horrible sounding but that's pretty typical and we're getting 12.1 so this power supply working nicely fan just sounds horrible and now the very last thing to test is that monitor that this came with i put the top cover back on just so we can more easily take a look at the monitor here before we first try to power it up this is a normal monochrome monitor so it would plug right into the back of that card and as i had mentioned the power input is actually a cable that plugs in the back of the power supply so the monitor turns on when the computer does we have a power switch here there is a brightness and a contrast knob here and you can see where this has been adjusted forever because it's quite yellow in one spot it's almost like someone never changed any of these although actually the contrast knob the yellowing is a little bit more sporadic so maybe someone was adjusting that over time the fact that the rest of this is not yellowed implies that this is painted and that's why this thing doesn't have any yellowing at all except for these knobs here and on the back we have an mdec 12-inch data display model 410 a for amber i think 310 is the older style that i've showed on the channel before clint over at lgr had a brand new 310a which he bought new old stock and unboxed on his channel pretty cool so this is the later one which looks a little bit less distinctive and a little bit more boring than that older one does have a date here of june 1987 so that sort of implies when this entire computer was manufactured and purchased vertical size vertical hold and h center control although only one sticks through the back there too you have to stick a tool into the monitor to make those adjustments all right we're ready for the smoke test of the monitor i i'm going to turn off the power on it so i think it's off you know to be honest you can't tell i think that's off right now here we go okay computer's turning on i do have it hooked up to both the monitor and the rgb to hdmi it's a little splitter cable so let's see what happens the lights on oh there it is it was just very slow to warm up it looks pretty dim as i would expect for a monitor of this age probably got used a whole lot and then of course this dirty screen cover here almost certainly dims it out all right i'm gonna run david murray's planet x3 it's probably the first time a game has ever been run on this machine its entire life was just used for word processing we're gonna pick hercules two color seven pc speaker there it is it's running oh we got burning a lot of burn in here yep so right here you can see the burn in this gives away how much usage this monitor actually had over the years lots and lots of burn in there on every line that's just text characters not even graphics just text now zooming out here's planet x3 of course it's working just fine with no issues and of course on the rgb hdmi you can see i have a nice pixel perfect image as well i do have the brightness and contrast maxed out right now on this monitor and it is this dim and the funny thing is the yellowing on these knobs here if i turn it you'll see notice it's actually not very yellowed looks like this monitor was more at like this position for its entire life which still produces a useful image although that is quite dark if i max this out again at least it's a little bit better i've brought up the ms-dos edit program here just so we can see that burn in notice how it exists right over here on this side it's not burned in here and that's of course because of the formatting word perfect it always line wrapped around here i am somewhat surprised by all of this because of course like i mentioned the dust inside this machine was so minimal but this amount of burning would only happen after a lot of usage i did copy the utilities off for changing the speed of this machine onto my compact flash card here so if you are looking for these let me know in the comment section below well that's going to be it for this pc archaeology episode i apologize that this wasn't more interesting but like i said at the beginning i just don't know when i start out with one of these things this my tech pc is just a perfect example of by the late 80s how pcs were just so commoditized and that these inexpensive turbo clones were just a great way to get a very solidly built pc that had an upgrade possibility like you could have swapped out the motherboard you could have put a color video card in there it got rid of this monitor there's lots of options with machines like this and that's what made these pcs so cool at the time i think there was a huge savings with these over in ibm but obviously whoever bought this thing just used it for one thing and that's word perfect and probably worked perfectly for them clearly this thing is solidly built and works well it's an amazing shape and it works absolutely perfectly well other than of course that bad tantalum which i just cut out and the floppy drive which needs a little help working again but probably hasn't been used in forever and even before it was probably only used for the hard drive and no one ever used a disk drive anyway so it just sat there idle and it got sort of gummed up so that is gonna be it for this video if you liked it you know what to do thumbs up if you didn't you know what to do all the usual huge thanks to my patrons their names are scrolling the side of the screen if you want to become a patron to get early access to videos and other special content there are links in the description below don't forget to check out my second channel if you haven't already and i do have a merch store which has t-shirts right now so if you want to see those and buy an adrian's digital basement t-shirt you can do so and that is going to be that so stay healthy stay safe i will see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 85,491

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Id: buPWVof5E8Y

Length: 40min 24sec (2424 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022