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I noticed someone mentioned in the RealDOOM thread "I have a 20 mhz-ish juko turbo xt" This intrigued me-- what sort of cards are in it? One of the growing pains on XTs was that 1:1 ratio between CPU clock and bus speed. I assume this tended to keep the platform down to 10MHz and very...

So I now have the ability to boot off of a ROM-disk, but precious little ROM space. I found one pre-prepared 63k disc image, but it's not the content I want. It also uses a FreeDOS kernel, which consumes 38k of the space for KERNEL.SYS before we even look at payload, so I'm sort of interested...

I decided to flesh out my old Magnavox Headstart/SX. This has consisted of "disable the 1Mb onboard RAM and stick in an 8MB SIMM", "disable onboard VGA and stick a 512K WDC 90C30 card in", and "replace the 40Mb IDE hard drive with a SD adaptor". The latter required the introduction of the...

I've been using a SD-IDE adapter with an XT-IDE card on an 8088-class machine with excellent results. I have a 32Gb card, the XT-IDE seemed to expose 8Gb of it to the host, and then I formatted a few partitions adding up to like 500Mb on it because directory listings take too long otherwise. :)...

I've been trying to set up a fixed-duration timer using a PC-compatible 8253 timer #2. Basically I don't want to use a dumb countdown loop because I know it's CPU-dependent. I'm in a situation where I can't just use the normal timer interrupt (it may not be initialized, early BIOS bring-up)...

It's well known that the 80186/80188/V40/V50 tended to be unpopular choices for PC clones because they offered "wrong" peripherals. Much of the value of integration is lost if you have to disable half the peripherals and wire in more compatible parts. Of course, when the parts were designed...

My XT-alike machine (admittedly new build, but the fact it's running a V40 makes it inherently vintage-flavoured) was designed with all the RAM and ROM on a seperate expansion card. This would be okay, except that it only has 512k + a 32k UMB at F0000. 32K of UMB isn't enough to load DOS high...

I recently pulled a Kaypro 2X I had out of storage for a few years The good news: It didn't explode. I seriously figured "I'd better work in an area where I can ventilate fast" because I expected RIFA consequences. The more frustrating news: it wasn't particularly keen on booting from its...

So the machine I'm working on (a V40-based XT cloneish sort of thing) has a 32k PROM mounted at F800:0000, and "practical purposes" are using about 12k of it (8k main BIOS, 4k option ROM to handle a special disk system). I figure there's something more useful or whimsical I can fit into the...

I'm working on building one of the "homebrew8088.com" V40 mainboards. Since it only has four slots, I wanted to try to get a multi-I/O card, to cover all my serial/parallel/floppy needs at once. The one I chose was a used, unbranded card where the only identifying mark is "COPYRIGHT BY B"...