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What to put inside empty 5150 drive bays? Any creative ideas?

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1200XL M.U.L.E.

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May 9, 2021
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First, I hope 2022 is starting off well for everyone here. :) Stay safe, stay healthy, stay happy!

Second, I would like to solicit some ideas on what I could put inside a full height empty drive bay in my 5150 case. This would be the right-hand side bay. I have a 1.2MB and a 1.44MB floppy drive in the left-hand side bays. I thought about a NanoITX motherboard but that won't quite fit. Then I considered a CD-ROM drive (just because?) or a internal IDE ZIP drive (just because!!) connected to my XT-IDE card but I found out the drivers won't work with the 8088 processor. All five of my expansion slots are used.

Any ideas? Just for fun?

Thanks!
 
How about putting together a PCB with a few different ROM sockets in parallel, and then a knob to toggle between them-- you could have real IBM BIOS, a third-party enhanced BIOS, and a diagnostic ROM as options. You could potentially even do it with, say, a single 32K EPROM and pushbuttons to toggle which 8K block is actually mapped.
 
Then I considered a CD-ROM drive (just because?) or a internal IDE ZIP drive (just because!!) connected to my XT-IDE card but I found out the drivers won't work with the 8088 processor.
Click to expand...
Zip is not an issue; there are drivers for 8088 as well (e.g. palmzip). But I don't think you can connect a Zip or a CD-ROM drive to an XT-IDE card. Unless there has been some serious changes lately, XT-IDE is for hard disks only, either real ones or CF/DOM.

If you have a sound card installed, speakers are certainly a nice idea. You can fit two to fill up all the space. Black ones are even still being made and sold.
 
If you got an old deceased IBM MFM hard drive you could remove the hard drive and re-use the Frame, Wire up the Drive activity LED to the XT-IDE card, Pic is of the right hand bay of my 5160 test system, Compact flash and USB port optional :)
XT.jpg
 
My left hand bay is occupied by a half height 360k floppy and a half height 1.44m floppy pretending to be a 720k floppy for now.

My right hand bay is occupied by two IDE/CF adapters in appropriate half height mountings that pretend to be two hard drives.

The two CF cards in front exposed slots give me the option to swap versions of DOS as easily as shutting down and restarting the machine.
 
Maybe you could get a 8-bit ISA SCSI card and attach a SCSI Zip drive to that. If memory serves, all Zip drives had SCSI innards, they just attached parallel port adapter connectors, which slowed them down quite a bit, and discounted them to appeal to the larger PC market. I remember being mad about this after paying more for the straight SCSI version. lol I'm not sure what hacking would be necessary to "de-parallel port" one of the more common PP Zip drives.
A better suggestion might be finding a small wifi router or hotspot with blinkenlights. I saw someone refurbish a Compaq Portable this way and it came out looking pretty good. I'm not sure how functional it was, but this sounds like a matter of aesthetics, anyways.
 
Thanks for the replies, everyone!

The speaker inserts mentioned by @Chuck(G) made me think of adding a small car stereo but they are too wide.

Selectable ROMs mentioned by @Hak Foo got me wondering what kind of extra features could I get with extra ROMs. I really don't know. (??)

All 5 of my slots are used so I can't add a sound card or a SCSI card. :(

@whartung really got my wheels spinning! A Raspberry Pi? I don't know the first thing about them. What could I do with one of those? Has anyone successfully interfaced one with a PC/XT?
 
My preference would be a semi-decent built-in amp and mono speaker for Adlib style sound card. May be a two slot 3d printed custom bracket to hold it all, so you can use a 4" speaker.
 
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1200XL M.U.L.E. said:
@whartung really got my wheels spinning! A Raspberry Pi? I don't know the first thing about them. What could I do with one of those? Has anyone successfully interfaced one with a PC/XT?
Click to expand...
Think modern UNIX PC in a space of a floppy drive. Wire it up with a COM port, find a DOS terminal program, get the whole "green screen", timeshare, modern UNIX experience. Or, better, load it up with SimH and turn it in to a PDP-11. That would actually be kind of cool.
 
I think the questions should be is there any 3D printed bracket to mount them to. The 5150 and 5160 are meant to install up to two full height 5.25" drives. If you install a half height you need to get clever with how you mount it.
 
I want an LCD screen that takes a good chunk of 2 x 5.25", and enough electronics to hook up CGA card to it. So 5150 is more like 5155.
 
I started digging into Raspberry Pi single board computers. It looks like the latest one is a model 4 and it can have up to 8GB of RAM. Unfortunately, they are all sold out. Only models with 4GB of RAM are available. I'd probably never max out the memory use here (or would I?) but if I'm getting one then it's going to have 8GB of RAM. ;)

Are there well supported alternative single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that can run Ubuntu?

@dhau Yes! I also looked for a small general purpose LCD screen to fit inside the full height bay but couldn't find one. :(
 
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