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Is this a 5161 ?

SteveG

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2020
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Millmeece Near Stafford UK
I think this is a standard PC fitted into a 5161 chassis.

see the photos

If I am correct what are the chances of finding a 5161 motherboard?
 

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The hard thing to find is the extender card. TubetimeUS made reproduction designs and someone here has made a few of them from the design, but they are a little pricey.

I’ve got the ISA backplane and receiver card, but I have no way of really testing them without paying for (or making) an extender.

Looks like someone got lucky recently and found one on eBay for $39 because the seller probably didn’t know what it was. If you search completed items for 5000548.

Other numbers to search:1130600
 
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Interesting on extenders from Poland. I'd love to order some PCBs, if I could find a few dozen other interested people, from the gerber files on Github. I have plenty of receivers, and I think 2 or 3 IBM cables, but only one receiver, and it's installed in my 5160 (which is connected to my 5161).
 
If I am correct what are the chances of finding a 5161 motherboard?

I guess I didn't see this answered directly, but I concur, that is definitely *not* the backplane from a 5161. It's a little strange the chassis label also says "5161", normally what happens is just the lids get mixed up... but, actually, comparing that motherboard to a Googled picture of a 5160 motherboard it looks like that's not an IBM motherboard, it's a clone. So, yeah, I guess someone needed another computer more than they needed an expansion chassis.
 
So will an ISA backplane work any better than a standard XT motherboard if I purchase 2 extender boards?

You won't be able to use that XT motherboard as an "extender board" unless you do some serious hacking to it. (You'd need to cut a bunch of traces/remove components to turn the slot area into a passive backplane not driven by the motherboard's CPU/buffers.) You'd probably be better off either buying a new passive backplane (not too hard to find, although almost all of them are going to have AT-style 16 bit slots) or laying out a new PCB that replicates the original.

Here is what a 5161 backplane looks like:

Anyone happen to know if the schematic for the backplane is out there? (Haven't looked for a technical manual for the 5161.) I'm curious about that one bit of active circuity on the board, is that a clock generator?
 
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