Oops.
This is an IBM 51...
Wait, haven't we done this already?
Yeah, we've actually done this twice!
You know what? You know what this computer is. If you don't know what this computer is,
you should go check out my other two videos about this one already.
So this video isn't going to be just about any old 5150, this one's about *my* 5150.
And my 5150 currently has 256 kilobytes of memory,
an XT-IDE adapter provided to me by Monotech, which I have a review of,
two 5¼ inch floppy drives, a CGA card and an IBM 5153 monitor.
For right now, the 256 kilobytes of memory is the biggest problem this machine has.
Almost all the software I can try and throw at it just says it's not going to fit in RAM.
So I've been left with very little software I can run on this computer.
Now, in the past, I've just lamented this fact and moved on to software
that would run on these more meager specifications that this computer has.
But now, it is time to finally fix this problem rather than ignore it.
So, I give you...
...the Tecmar Captain!
My 5153 here is kind of screwed, but we're just gonna ignore that for this video.
I'll order some caps and we'll fix that in yet another video.
The Tecmar Captain is a multi-interface card like the more popular AST Six Pack.
And the features this card have are serial, a real-time clock,
memory expansion, and a parallel port but we're not going to be using that and you'll see why later.
But for now, the only thing I'm interested in are the field of sockets
meant to be populated with 4164 RAM chips.
Now, I got this card with 64 kilobytes on it already,
but that only gets me up to a paltry total of 320 kilobytes.
That isn't really enough to do anything.
So,...
I went ahead and ordered a couple rails of RAM.
And this is what 50 chips of 4164 looks like.
Now, if getting 50 chips of memory sounds like a lot, then you don't know the half of it.
Well, actually I should say you know just *over* half of it.
Because when this computer's fully decked out for 640K of RAM,
it's going to have 90 RAM chips in it.
Now, if 90 chips sounds kind of weird to you, that's because the 5150 actually has
nine chips per bank, one is used for error-checking.
Since between the motherboard and the expansion card, I have 320K,
I still have half of the chips to go to put in there.
So, time to populate these banks with 45 more RAM chips!
Well, it passes inspection.
But, upon reflection, I think it would have been smarter to clean it a bit harder
because I don't know that the contacts, that are inside the sockets,
are actually much cleaner than the board that is green here.
Now, before I stick the Tecmar Captain in here,
I need to go ahead and change it to know how much new memory it has
because it's currently set for 64K and I need to change it to be 384.
We also need to get in there and change the switch settings on the 5150 motherboard
so it knows that it will have 640K of RAM.
Now that everything is ready, let's go ahead and put the card in here.
It is noticeably heavier now that it's all loaded with RAM.
And I decided I am gonna go ahead and put the parallel port in here.
Alright. Before putting the case on and patting myself on the back, calling it done, let's go ahead and do a test boot.
Wow, does it take a long time to test all that memory now?!
But, that does look like it's successful! No errors!
While it's still open, let's go ahead and swap out the DOS 3.3 CompactFlash card I have
with the one I installed DOS 5 on and see how it handles the new RAM that I put in here.
Welp, that's DOS 5!
Now, if you remember last time, it would get to this part and the shell would crash.
And this certainly looks different now.
Up in here, you can see the LED flickering away for the IDE access.
Boom! DOS Shell's working!
Cool. I bet that means I can exit,
and run "edit" now.
Yep! All my problems are fixed!
But for now, I think I'm gonna stick with DOS 3.
The 5150's not exactly powerful, and I'd rather have an operating system with less overhead on there.
Well, now that I have enough memory in this computer, I can finally try "Vette!" on it
which is the whole reason I had originally bought "Vette!"
So, let's go ahead and do it!
Ummmmmmm...
That doesn't seem quite right...
Now, I did actually have this problem with the Sharp PC-7000.
When I did that video, I just cut that part because I assumed that
there was something wrong with drive B still.
But actually, drive B has been working just fine since then.
And now, I'm starting to suspect that this disk may be bad.
Which, uhhhh...
...sucks. I have image to this disk so I can make a copy and the image was fine.
But for now, I'm just going to go ahead and copy the contents of the disk to the hard disk
and see if that will work instead.
Yep! That off the hard drive, no problems. So I'll just use that instead.
Ugh, it's fried.
178.1.
This runs about as well as I was afraid it would.
But hey, it's running!
Now, what I care most about is the memory.
But, I have added two other ports to this computer with just adding the one card.
A serial port and a parallel port.
Now, originally, I didn't intend on putting the parallel port in there
because it kind of takes up a slot and it doesn't really do much other than be a parallel port.
And...You know, who wants to use a printer anyway? But then I remembered,
"Oh wait, *I* do."
I kind of forgot I have the IBM 5152!
Which is *the* dot matrix printer that goes with the IBM 5150!
However, there's nothing that's special about the 5152.
The IBM 5152 is actually just a re-badged Epson MX-80.
(The RX-80 is a different model of the same printer.)
So there's really not all that much that's special about the 5152.
So much so that Epson didn't even just re-badge for IBM,
they also re-badge for other companies, like Hewlett-Packard here, for my 82905B.
Inside, these two printers are mechanically identical.
Which is good, because it means if one ever breaks, it's going to be easy to find spare parts.
And, they share the same ribbon.
Normally, the Epson MX-80 clones would be electrically identical as well,
but I just so happened to have the exception here: the B version of the HP series 80 printer.
This one's GPIB internally.
Well, that's enough of the comparisons.
I'll just pilfer the paper holder from the HP computer and move on to trying this out.
I would have liked to compare it to the RX-80, but this box is actually empty inside.
I bought it at Goodwill and when I opened it up, lo and behold,
I found a PCjr instead.
So, it's kind of hard to complain that it's not in there.
Alright, I've got it all connected and now while the computer is booting up,
I'm going to go ahead and feed some paper into it.
Alright, both ready, just in time!
Alright, for the first printing test, I'm going to go ahead and launch GW-BASIC,...
and just do a basic "lprint".
Let's see that again up close.
The print's really faint on it because that's the original ribbon I got with my HP printer.
So, who knows how old that actually is? But you can see it does work.
Alright, now I want to see if I can make this thing sweat.
So I've gone ahead and grabbed a bigger text editor program
and let's see what it looks like when we print out a README.
Okay, so we have quite a bit here.
191 lines. That's not too bad.
I'm all right printing all that. So, let's go ahead and try it.
Okay, so you go into command mode and you just do this.
Easy enough.
Well, the printer's been plenty of fun here, but we'd still have one more thing
we need to check out as far as the upgrades go.
The final new port added to the computer was a
25-pin serial connector.
Serial connectors got used for a lot of things unlike parallel ports
which were mostly relegated to printers.
So this is a very useful interface to have on here.
Out of all the uses that this has including mice,
modems, connecting to portables, I want to use this to connect to another computer.
Enter the Sharp PC-7000.
Now, connecting two computers together isn't something you typically do over serial.
It is possible and fairly widely supported by different applications.
But most hardware isn't really built around that idea.
Serial controllers and the peripherals they connect to have opposite connectors.
So when you want to get a cable for them, you need one that has
the opposite connectors on both ends of the cable.
However, to connect to another computer,
you need them to be the same connector on both sides.
So you can either use a cable that's already like that
or you can get an adapter that allows you to plug in one end of the cable and make it the same as the other.
But that's not the end of the complications.
Due to how the serial cable is wired internally,
you also need a null modem adapter.
So I'm going to have to add that on as well,
making this the entire cable assembly that we need to connect the two computers together.
Okay, so what would you even do with two serially connected computers?
You could try running a terminal application such as HiTerm to control one from the other or transfer files,
but these computers are basically equivalent and, really, there's easier ways of sending files.
So, I don't think that's it. Much more intriguing though are games.
So let's go back to "Vette!"
"Presenting the real duel!"
(I'm sure that's known to dig at accolade.)
"Unique 2-player option."
"Race against another driver with direct computer link."
So, this is a game from 1989 that supports multiplayer!
We can see in the manual that you have the choice between
direct and modem connections, and direct as described as
using a null modem serial cable to connect the computers.
I really like that in the manual, it even tells you how to make a null modem cable.
You can wire up your own serial cables. They're not that complicated.
And it's nice to see that it really only uses three wires.
So, I guess I didn't need to use a 25-pin cable. I could have used 9-pin adapters. But, oh well.
Now, the PC-7000, I think, will actually be a little bit quicker here.
Alright, now we're gonna bring both into the main menu,...
we're going to bring up the configuration menu,...
go over to "communications" and turn two-player mode on.
So on the 5150, we will...
We can leave the "Save options" enabled actually,
and then we can just start and now it's waiting for this computer [the PC-7000] to connect,
and on this side, we have to disable the...
"write the save" option because it will try to write to the floppy disk which is write-protected.
But once we've done that they will both go back to the main menu. They are now connected.
So,...
let's begin the race.
All right
So we can see we have the curb there but not on this one [the PC-7000]
because they are both in the same game in different physical positions.
I'm just gonna slowly pull in front of the other car to see if I can stop.
Oh, we can see me [on the 5150] driving across the screen now.
And there we have it! Multiplayer gaming on computers from the early 80s!
Well, I guess the Sharp's actually from the mid 80s and the game itself is from the late 80s.
But still, 80s "networked" multiplayer!
I hope you guys have enjoyed this look at upgrading my 5150.
Even though it's just one card, really,
it's still pretty cool how big of a change you can make with that and add all these features.
I couldn't do any of this before with it, especially the memory. That was key.
But, hope you guys enjoyed that and I'll see you later.