First post, by Hezus
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EDIT for the unpatient reader: It's a 2mb IBM XMA memory adapter from possibly an IBM 3270 Workstation system.
I've had this baby for a while. It came out of an IBM Model 30 8086 but I've not been able to get it to work fully. Neither can I find any specific branding or markings that would help me. Maybe you guys could make sense of it all?
Here's a close up of the front of the card.
What's clear is that this card has a LPT port and it is clearly being detected, as demonstrated here below. There is 1 jumper that probably sets the adres for the LPT port because when I change it there is a conflict.
The more interesting part are the RAM chips. There's even a daughterboard full of them on top of the card.
I'm not sure how to use the RAM portion of this card. I've read a bunch of stuff about these types of cards and it seems that RAM extension cards generally have DIP switches for configuration. Clearly, mine doesn't. I've tried to detect the RAM using TESTEXT v3.3 but nothing shows up. All of this leads me to think this card is for conventional memory rather than extended memory. Could that be right?
I took out the 2 SIMMs (256k) in the Model 30 to see if that RAM card would fill up the stock 128k from the motherboard, but nothing happened. I've inserted the card into a Turbo XT (Tulip Compact II with NEC v20) and interestingly enough it reported 256k of RAM instead of the 640k that's onboard. Either the card disabled the onboard RAM and it showed the 256k from the card OR the card conflicted with the onboard RAM and those 256k are the only RAM that the motherboard could initialise.
I know some of these cards used special software to work, but it wasn't supplied. The harddrive in this PS/2 was long dead when I got it. Neither am I sure that this card ever worked inside the Model 30.
Any help is greatly appreciated! 😀
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