pinkdonut666
Experienced Member
SO I wound up through some misguided eBay bidding with 2 IBM Personal Computer AT 5170 machines. One of them cam from the US (made in USA machine) & the other machine came from Germany (funnily enough the shipping was less than the machine from the US?) and that was a made in UK machine.
Both have rev1 6mhz motherboards with 512k
The made in UK machine was the better of the two, and was much more original. so it's the machine i opted to install an IBM EGA card, and keep the IBM 5.25" floppy drives. more or less an All IBM machine.
The other machine, was no where near original. It had an aftermarket seasonic 230w psu, Seagate 251-1 hard drive, and a 1.44mb floppy drive.
the machine also has an aftermarket AMI 286 bios. The floppy /mfm controller had also been swapped out with a WD card, possibly to support the 1.44mb floppy and 40mb mfm? anyways. It also included an Intel aboveboard, ATI VGA card, etc.
What I would love to be able to do to this machine is add an intel Inboard 386 AT, but seeing as those are rarer than hens teeth, I settled on another solution.
I picked up this MONSTER full AT Mylex 386 motherboard on Fleabay for a pretty good deal i thought, 4mb ram, 25mhz 386, cyrix fastmath,
Now That I've picked an upgraded motherboard, I may as well upgrade the storage. I posted a thread earlier asking about an IBM RT ESDI controller, which thanks to ya'lls recomendations i will be avoiding ESDI. Which got me thinking, why not go scsi?
Scsi would be a good option, then I would have the freedom to run any 50pin scsi hard drive ( I'm thinking full height 5.25" so it sounds like a jet aircraft), something like an SD2scsi, and a SCSI CD-rom (maybe an early caddy drive)
I'm sure there are people here which much more knowledge about this than me, as I have only ever used scsi in PIII machines with ultra 3 scsi...
ANYWAYS.
I figured a scsi controller like something here would be idea, as i can simply replace the WD MFM/floppy card with this.
I'm sure it doesn't make a huge difference, but I was told NCR & future domain scsi cards are fairly descent. I'm looking at options on eBay, and these seems to be MUCH MUCH more common than ESDI cards. This should also give me the ability to run a CD rom drive off the same card which would be nice.
I'm trying to build this system in a "period correct" early 90s upgraded 5170 just as a fun project to play with. something different. (yes I know I could just used an ISA IDE card (I have a few of those) a CF-IDE and an IDE CD-rom but where is the fun in that?
Both have rev1 6mhz motherboards with 512k
The made in UK machine was the better of the two, and was much more original. so it's the machine i opted to install an IBM EGA card, and keep the IBM 5.25" floppy drives. more or less an All IBM machine.
The other machine, was no where near original. It had an aftermarket seasonic 230w psu, Seagate 251-1 hard drive, and a 1.44mb floppy drive.
the machine also has an aftermarket AMI 286 bios. The floppy /mfm controller had also been swapped out with a WD card, possibly to support the 1.44mb floppy and 40mb mfm? anyways. It also included an Intel aboveboard, ATI VGA card, etc.
What I would love to be able to do to this machine is add an intel Inboard 386 AT, but seeing as those are rarer than hens teeth, I settled on another solution.
I picked up this MONSTER full AT Mylex 386 motherboard on Fleabay for a pretty good deal i thought, 4mb ram, 25mhz 386, cyrix fastmath,
Now That I've picked an upgraded motherboard, I may as well upgrade the storage. I posted a thread earlier asking about an IBM RT ESDI controller, which thanks to ya'lls recomendations i will be avoiding ESDI. Which got me thinking, why not go scsi?
Scsi would be a good option, then I would have the freedom to run any 50pin scsi hard drive ( I'm thinking full height 5.25" so it sounds like a jet aircraft), something like an SD2scsi, and a SCSI CD-rom (maybe an early caddy drive)
I'm sure there are people here which much more knowledge about this than me, as I have only ever used scsi in PIII machines with ultra 3 scsi...
ANYWAYS.
I figured a scsi controller like something here would be idea, as i can simply replace the WD MFM/floppy card with this.
I'm sure it doesn't make a huge difference, but I was told NCR & future domain scsi cards are fairly descent. I'm looking at options on eBay, and these seems to be MUCH MUCH more common than ESDI cards. This should also give me the ability to run a CD rom drive off the same card which would be nice.
I'm trying to build this system in a "period correct" early 90s upgraded 5170 just as a fun project to play with. something different. (yes I know I could just used an ISA IDE card (I have a few of those) a CF-IDE and an IDE CD-rom but where is the fun in that?