I discovered last night that the right-most ISA slot (the one closest to the power supply) in my newly-unearthed 5160 won’t take the Silicon Valley Computer ADP50L 8-bit IDE controller I’ve been playing with. It will take other (short!) cards, but when I put the IDE controller into it, either the option ROM is invisible (ie. the typical BIOS ROM extension signature “55AA” not found) or won’t initialize for some reason, because I don’t get functionality out of it and the boot “banner” produced by the card is missing.

At the time, I could only conclude that:

1. The IDE board is slightly awry
2. The right-most ISA slot is slightly awry
3. There is some technical limitation I’m not aware of

#1 and #2 are easy to accept (the hardware is two decades old), but not #3. Was there such a limitation?

As it turns out, there is! The helpful folks on the cctalk mailing list were able to point out that the data lines on slot 8 are wired to the other side of a bus buffer chip to the data lines on the other 7 slots. A card in slot 8, therefore, has to assert a special signal on the ISA connector to enable this buffer. The most common use for this slot was either an Async card, or the card you use to connect the 5161 expansion chassis.

Yes, that’s right, I said expansion chassis. If 7 slots weren’t enough for you, you could connect 8 more using a chassis that looks like the XT does, but sits on top of it. If a PC with fifteen ISA slots isn’t the most badass thing you’ve ever heard of, then you’re reading the wrong damn blog!

What’s really sad is that I’ve already filled all 7 available slots on the XT. Don’t believe me? Weep:

• Intel Above Board Plus 8 (2MB EMS)
• CGA
• Sound Blaster Pro
• Serial/Parallel card
• Floppy Controller
• Roland SCC-1 (currently open to put in a network card)
• Hard disk controller

…and that’s it, I’m full. I would really like to put three other Above Boards in here to reach ludicrous amounts of EMS memory (theoretical limit is 56MB!), and a Central Point Option Board so that I can dupe any disk I want, and another parallel port so I can attach an LPT DAC, and an ethernet card so I can stop transferring data over LPT, and the IBM Music Feature Card, and oh hell my *other* IBM Music Feature card to double the number of voices…

Shit, I’d just max out other one, wouldn’t I? I’m sick. I need help.

Today was a very bad day.

I had a rough time at work, I obsessed over money while trying to hide it from my wife, I had to keep my cool around the kids when it came time to do homework and get them ready for bed… I was depressed, I blew my diet to the four winds with a bag of chips, I didn’t feel like working on the DVD project for some damn reason, and to top it all off: My 5150 died.

Yes, the IBM PC 5150 that I used to create 8088 Corruption died a horrible electric death; there’s a short or something on the board and I get no POST beeps, nothing. What makes it a particularly bad day for this to happen is that the 5150 is how I usually relax. Stop laughing! Seriously, I code 8088 assembler to relax, trying to come up with demo effects, or decompression routines, or PC speaker sound routines, etc. And boy did I need it tonight.

Since we moved into the house 5 years ago, I’ve been uncovering all sorts of little and medium-sized boxes that I had delivered to me back when ebay was a cheap place to get vintage parts (nowadays it’s a flea market populated by sheer idiots, but that’s a rant for some other day) but haven’t yet opened… video cards, sound cards, the occaisional analog joystick (CH Products: The only choice), etc. so I thought I’d go basement-diving to find something to cheer me up. Maybe a spare Adlib card or something. So I pushed aside some crap and found a somewhat large box delivered in 2001, right when we moved here. Got the swiss army knife, opened it up, and almost pissed my pants.

Inside was an IBM PC 5160 (the original PC/XT).

Not just any 5160 either — this thing is clean. It is the cleanest IBM PC I have ever owned; it looks like it is mint out of the box. Even the keyboard is clean. In the 8088 Corruption video you should be able to see a keyboard with a stretched-out cord and WordPerfect keycap stickers… this keyboard is mint with a perfect cord. But better than that, it’s been expanded to the point where it is very useful for someone who likes to code 8088 assembler and play old games: It has two floppies instead of one; it has a 25-pin parallel port which is great for transferring files over a special LPT cable at high speed and also hooking up parallel-port network adapters or Zip drives (yes, you can use a Zip drive on an XT) so backing my work up won’t be a problem; finally, a 9-pin serial port (most old PCs have 25-pin) which means I don’t have to dig for a 9-to-25-pin adapter and can hook up a mouse without hassles.

But did it work? I fired it up, it counted to 640K (another bonus), and after what seemed like eons, the floppy drives timed out and it booted from the internal hard drive with no errors… directly into Norton Commander… and into the root directory with the following contents:

ALLEYCAT
CENTIPED
DIGGER
DOS
FROGGER
LAPLINK
OTRAIL
PACMAN
PTROOPER
TETRIS
ZAXXON

And that, my friends, is when I started to cry. Those who know me well will know why.

Today was a very good day.

I recently butted heads with someone I had never met before yesterday and got into a heated argument over… CGA’s color index #6. Is it yellow or brown? The answer is brown (mostly), but more important than the stupid answer was how I acted with this person. Up until a few days ago, it had been a very long time since I had gotten into a Nerd Tempest over something so trivial and insignificant. Honestly, I’m glad I left that kind of behavior behind… although it has robbed me of some of my drive for my other projects.

What really bothers me is that, if we had met under different circumstances, I would have just loved this guy: He and I have the same passion for the same oldskool pc things, he’s just as knowledgable about CGA as I am, and the ultimate goal of both our hobbies is to preserve computing history. But because of this stupid nerd argument, I have the feeling he’s never going to give me the time of day again. I apologized, but he’s ignoring me. Such is life.