Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing
and today it's this thing, the IBM PC AT thing
that I unboxed a little while back
and when we left off there
I had just added everything to it that
you would expect for it to have when
this particular one was manufactured in
1988 so I thought it was a really
interesting video. If you want to see
that unboxing, there's links, they exist.
but today I would like to upgrade it to
a few things!
One being RAM, right, 640k ought to be
enough for anybody, so goes the saying.
But this doesn't even have that so this
actually right here I was clearly lucky
to be able to source. This is an original
128K IBM expansion board for the AT
And a user on Reddit actually actually
contacted me and said "hey I don't need
this if you want it I'll give you a good
price" and he did, so thank you sir! I also
have the official IBM 512K upgrade
board and both of them together should
combine to give it over a meg of memory
which would be sweet. 512K is, I mean, it
does a lot of stuff, but I added an EGA
card to this on the last video. And for
example, yeah do you see that?
So 640K is required to run a game like
SimCity in EGA graphics. I could run on
CGA or Hercules or whatever with the 512K
that's in there but I don't want to
man, I want all my 16 colors at once!
Another thing I do want to upgrade is
an 80287. And it's matching 8MHz
to this and it's a coprocessor
a "math copro." Not necessary but it helps in
certain situations for calculating
things. I just want to benchmark stuff.
I'm not sure if I'm going to use this
but I do want to mention it at least.
This right here was sent to me by a
viewer of mine, David. He actually sells
these on his eBay Shop and it's just
a CMOS battery for double A's. You know, the
lithium battery that's in there and 30
years old still works, but who knows how
long it's going to last. So that'll be a nice
easy thing to swap out for just AA
batteries. And I also have this Sony
3.5" 1.44 meg floppy disk
drive, model MP-F17W-T6! So, that'll go
quite nicely. I mean it's the same color
and everything it's like it's made for
the IBM AT. because it is. And then also
last but not least is an Adlib card and
while this is the sound card that would
have made a lot of sense for a lot of
users in 1988 when this computer was made,
this is introduced in 87. And yeah it's, you
know, still in the box I've had that for
a while. I always wanted to put it in the
AT so let's just stop talking and just
do it, I'm excited! Right so first up is
this 128K board and yeah there's the
thingy. Well I've got five extra slots
here so I'm just going to stick the 128K
right here and then the 512K right
here. I'm going to do one at a time
because there was some question as to
whether this one worked or not.
First time these little brackets have
been removed since it was assembled 30
years ago!
Pretty crazy. Whoo yeah that's a tight
fit. Installing RAM isn't quite as
straightforward as it might be in a
modern system. We're actually going to
need to run the diagnostic disk to set it up
*floppy disk and beeping noises*
Yes it still said 512K there at the start
okay so it is not seeing the
expansion memory yeah, all right.
So okay. All right I just tossed the 512K
one in there and it does seem to have
detected that one so we'll see
what it does
but yeah swapped all the chips and um
Guy I got it from said he had replaced
'U8' here and I had no luck getting it to
work so I mean. That maybe this is just
dead or something. I don't know if that
means a game like Keen will work, that
requires more conventional memory. Yeah
it doesn't doesn't make a difference.
Right okay, well in the meantime I can
start at some of the other upgrades
the sound card upgrade right now would
be kind of pointless without this RAM
thing sorted so I'm gonna go ahead and
add a three and a half inch floppy disk
drive which is going to be interesting
I've never actually put one in a
computer of this age before. "Remove the
two screws and faceplate," oh
uh yep, there's that
You know I didn't even think to
look to see if I had the right cable
Man there's so many things packed in here, as-is
check this out, all these other
connectors for five and a quarter inch
drives so I don't I don't need all this
I just need like the one cable going to
the one drive I had in there. And I'm
going to need a little, you know, adapter
thingy for the power on here to hook into
the regular molex, but you can see how
it's going to to fit, basically. The
colors actually are slightly different.
Uh it's close enough. Just proving that I
have not done this with this particular
machine before, so, this drive bay does
not have any way to connect
or mount inside there. Floppy drive is
just sort of flopping around and if you
look at the side of this drive look at
this thing
you'll see these metal rails, and it just
sort of slides into these two little
grooves, makes it really easy. I don't
have those rails to put on to the side
of this I'm gonna have to look and
figure out what I can do to get this
properly mounted. You know, I don't know
why I didn't think to do this before but
I have this dead IBM AT that I've been
meaning to restore for a while but look
it has one of those 128K boards
I'm sure this drive itself also has the
rails that I'll need but you know I'm
just going to go ahead and make some and
the way I'm going to do that is just by
cutting up some of this flexible PVC
board. And then we really just you know
cut out the same shape and stick some
holes in it, I mean it's just plastic.
There's one. Looks pretty good to me.
And now we have two shoddily made rails, let's see
if this works
screw heads are little bigger than I
thought...
on the other hand I mean, it looks like
it's going to work. Yeah I mean that's
that's going to hold, sweet. Data cable
right here, well how is this going to be
held into place then? Oh yeah I guess I
need this one for the other side, yeah
that's how that works. You can check the
manual and that's what it says to do
"Take this bracket apart and use it for
the pieces for the bottom drive if you
choose to install one" the heck, IBM?
Oh yeah I almost forgot I have the other
128K memory board to test, may as well
okay so this is where the 287 goes in
pretty straightforward all we need to do
is match up that little notch right
there with the notch on the socket that
it goes into, which is facing this way.
Okay!
Well that's that! Right so we've got the
287, 128K board, and a three and a half
inch drive to turn on to see what happens.
oh the memory is still going up
sweet, yay! Okay that's cool don't see the
three and a half inch drive powering on... all
right what's the holdup?
All right unplugged the three and a
half inch drive for now because I don't
know what it's doing. I don't know it's
just not detecting, it's either detecting
only that drive or not at all. Well let's
get into the setup and see if we can
get the RAM board and 287. Ahh "the math
coprocessor has been added to your
system options" yay! Okay should have 640
base memory now that's good. See if it
reboots and takes it. Awesome freakin
finally! Alright well we're getting
somewhere here. So yeah we've got the 287
and hopefully 640K of RAM
Yes, 594K free so let me see if
Keen works because now I mean I'm just
I'm curious
oh EGA card detected oh yeah it looks
like we're doing it man that's crazy
that it requires that specific card in
order to get 128K added to it to get
the full 640. Interesting, a little slow
down there.
Gameplay seems to be fine now actually
never played this on a AT 286 eight
megahertz like this, so that's awesome
I think this is the slowest machine
that I played this on, this is so cool. Yeah,
that's like the only part that seems a
little slow is loading, but I guess that
makes sense. I don't know. "You hear in
your mind it's too bad that you can't
get the three and a half inch drive
working," yes I know, that is
unfortunate. Glad that'll be the next
order of business. Don't need that
anymore so back to the three and a half
inch drive here. I'm just going to go
with my sort of other instinct, here's
the one that connects to the top five
and a quarter inch drive and it has the
secondary one here, "B." And obviously
that's a different connector than what
is on the three and half inch
drive that uses a 34 pin
kind of more standard thing. So I have
this adapter here and this is just
converting the edge connector to a
standard 34 pin thing. Oh my god
it doesn't fit. I don't know how well you can see
this but this little overhang on the
left-hand side of it goes up against the
metal part of the drive. It physically
doesn't fit, this is... it doesn't even need
much it just, yeah, there that should do
it! Bet you can fit now aren't ya! See now, if
if you can fit now actually wanna see if
that were an original part to this
AT and I would not have
bent it but I mean this is just a
generic drive that I picked up years ago
so who cares. Oh they're both making
noise now, that's a thing. Okay please
tell me that that's working
Is it double-sided, no
so is, okay this is supposed to support
1.44 meg, why is it not showing up
you know I thought for sure... okay so see
here's the thing... there's certain
versions of the AT that support a 1.44
meg floppy disk drive. I thought for sure
that this one did, so it's either the
setup program that is like, not
up-to-date, or its... I hope it's not the
BIOS because... *mumbles with irritation*
gonna try SimCity at this point
it's a double sided double density disk which
is 720K. You can tell because it only has one
hole here and well it friggin'
says so right there
please work, so tired of this crap
Oh hey it read, oh good, okay, 640 by 356
16-color graphics, "spacebar to continue," I will
okay so we've got SimCity there
that's good I got the copy protection
sheet. I'm too excited so I'm not going
to put my mouse driver on there yet or
even plug in a mouse, I'll do that some
other time.
oh holy crap, that's super cool! Yeah I
can just move the mouse cursor with the
keyboard. Dude terraforming, oh look at my
city map drawing. So this is what I was
really wanting to do with... well, with
all the upgrades, this is pretty much the
culmination of my upgrades. And here is
the copy protection sheet which is
"1659421." "Congratulations you passed!"
Well good,
ancient copy-protection sucking. I love
seeing this draw on the 286 here and
this is the really high-res
mode of EGA, yay!
Sounds! You're not going to get them I'm
going to tear them up before you do, hahaha
All right okay so I've got 128K, 512K, and
the 3.5" inch 720K drive installed. I
might try to figure out what the 1.44
meg thing is about, I know like what to
check I just got to do it. I'm gonna do
that outside of this video because I'm
tired of it right now. But what I want to
do last is get the Adlib installed
which is um, just like such a cool sound
card and I'm just happy to mess with
this again. This is a revision 1.6 I believe
this is a 1990 model that's just
the classic FM synthesis Adlib card
with the Yamaha YM3812 chip. Yeah
wonderful sound on this thing. It does
have the same kind of sound for FM synth
music as a Sound Blaster would have, yeah,
let's do this! One of the glorious
things about cards like the Adlib is
that it doesn't require anything except
for you to insert it. There's no drivers, has no
real setup of any kind, you just put that
in there. It did come with some like
jukebox software, I've showed that before.
But really that's the extent of the
setup, we should be fine. The games will
set it up for it. Okay so I'm still not
giving up on this three and a half inch
drive thing, look at that, there's the
BIOS chip right here: 62X0821
that's a 1988 revision, it should
support a 1.44 meg drive
and I'm going to try GSetup instead of
the IBM thingy that was supplied with it
maybe that'll work!
So let's see if this will allow me to
actually tell it that I have a 1.44
meg drive, because that BIOS should be
cool. Okay so, floppy disk B should
definitely be number five there, okay
yeah, first I'm going to try a 720K one
to see if that one is still reading and
yes it is, that is good.
Okay now I've got a high density disk
Tada!
Holy crap okay, so that's the disk drive
sorted, um
fantastic. Thank you, GSetup! Now I'm
going to get something with Adlib
capability and install it on here so we
can hear it
And yeah I put the case back on and stuff
because uh yeah it's friggin loud. To
test this out I'm going to be playing
Battletech The Crescent Hawks
Revenge, which is a super cool game and
it's got Adlib support. The earlier one
Crescent Hawks Inception did not, which I
had been playing on here before the
upgrade. Mmm it detected Adlib already,
that is awesome.
And these games came with so much cool
stuff in the box, look at this poster man, this
is insane! I love this art like 80s and
90s Battletech art is some of my
favorite. Yeah I'm glad I got that
1.44 meg capability working.
It's not needed necessarily, I mean these
are like, these are double-sided disks
720K, but you know I mean, sometimes I
just want to write my own discs on a
modern machine. And modern USB floppy
drives don't take 720K discs so it
makes it very hard to write stuff to 'em. You
know, that being said like, why don't I
just install compact flash? Maybe I'll
take it that far, but I kind of like the idea
of this being like the best of its kind
for 1988. But then again like it's also
tempting to just...
I don't know what I'm going to do to
this, I'm just, I love this machine, if
you can't tell.
*Adlib music plays*
*Adlib sounds play*
That's the Adlib's attempt at sound
effects, or at least Infocom's attempt
at Adlib sound effects.
Dude I love that sound
um so yeah I mean I don't remember how
to play this, I haven't even tried it in a long
time. But hey it's got music and that's
pretty fantastic. I'm gonna try one more
thing just to see
just to see
*LHX Adlib theme plays*
It's admittedly not the best example of Adlib
I could have chosen but it's a childhood
favorite man, what can I say. Well yeah
that's it for this video. I'm not sure
what else I'm going to do with the 5170
in the future but I do want to do
things with it because it's enjoyable if
you have any suggestions let me know in
the comments and you know, I also do want
to do some compact flash stuff in the
future, if not with the AT then with my
Woodgrain 486 so stay tuned for that
and uh, yeah!