Yes, a 1.2 can read a 360K disk but that's not the problem. The bios doesn't know what to do with a 1.2 drive. Even with a 360K disk in it, it's still a 1.2 drive. Also, there may not be a setup disk. The 8088 had no cmos for bios setup. There may be utility disks and such but probably nothing necessary to make the PC bootable. Seagate I think made an 8-bit IDE card that worked with one of their 40 meg drives but that's probably the only IDE support you'll find. You're probably better off, as already mentioned, looking for 8-bit cards and MFM or RLL drives at places like goodwill. That stuff is rare enough that sellers on ebay will start off bidding at prices that make me wish I hadn't scrapped all my old PC hardware. As far as 16-bit video cards in 8-bit slots--sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. You won't know until you try.

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Whoops, was writing reply when you must have posted that Daveincaps...and that's definitely a username I remember from my past here. Something about bad power supplies in my desktop...it's burned through ANOTHER one since then, if you remember (motherboard fault, but it's working...sort of). Regarding 8 bit IDE, I have ventured onto ebay and then quickly ran away. Lol, this is a hobby, not an investment. There were also Western Digital controllers for the XT class machine, as I have discovered. Drives, however, are a different story. As far as goodwill stores go, the oldest I can find in the area of technology is around the Pentium. If only you knew how many P1's I have waiting for new homes...and to think I threw out the 286 with XT hardware in it to make room for a Pentium 75. Tsk Tsk Tsk. RE: Lack of setup for BIOS Given that this is the only XT class board I've ever dealt with, I can't say what is normal and what is not. I do know it has two BIOS chips on it as is common for 386s, in my experience. Would these be pre-configured or do you think, due to the clone nature of the board, it may offer extended features? This particular specimen could be as recent as 1987, possibly newer.

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I should note that on boot the only thing visible is the prompt asking me to insert a disk; there is indeed no built in setup *interface*.

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Yeah, I've been around here for awhile, muddying thing up. You may just have to be patient in looking for old hardware. Besides much of them having already been scrapped or recycled, they just didn't make as many back then as they do now. I don't think I've ever run across an 8088 with more than one system bios chip. There should be a keyboard bios/controller that's a little longer than the system bios. And there could be option ROM chips or others that just look like a bios chip. The 8086 did have 2 bios chips but you say yours is definately an 8088. But I guess without looking at the motherboard I can't say for sure. If you can find it on the TH99 site you might want to post back the link.

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I remember checking TH99 (served somewhere else, but still TH99) for the board, and finding the problem was it was not identified by this model, so I looked by images...and so many 8088 boards were identical it became impossible. Identical board perhaps, but I doubt the DIP switches are common to them all. I have uploaded photos of the board and assorted important details. My mistake, there is a second socket next to what may be the BIOS chip. It is not in use and has been documented in photos. IMAGE LINKS Full board: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... BIOS and DIP switches: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... Panel connector: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... CPU with 8087 socket: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... Floppy controller: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... Top identification: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... Bottom identification: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... If anyone needs any clarification from the images, please let me know. I can't seem to get a clear full board shot; macro mode on my camera is blurry because it's too far away and normal mode is blurry because it's too close.

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Ooh! Progress? almost... Different boards do different things but I've found a page which suggests I might be able to get one of my 16 bit multi IO controllers to work (for floppy function) in the 8 bit slots of an 8088 board! http://www.creepingnet.hotlightbulb... "Floppy Drives: 2X 1.44MB Floppy Diskette Drives hooked to a generic IDE/FDD 16-bit Controller, I don't know how this thing runs happily this way, the fact that it works still boggles my mind."

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As I recall, the reason high density drives don't work with 8088-class computers is their data flow was faster than the motherboard could handle. So I wouldn't think a 16-bit floppy card could work unless it had its own bios to control the flow. 286's and up could handle the flow so no intervention was necessary. But it'd great if that worked, at least with some cards. I only found one everex 8088 MB: http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/E-H/... which may be an earlier version. It only has one DIP block. It's possible that block is the same as one of yours. The other might be a detailed memory configuration. It also has a turbo speed of 8 mhz. The 8088 chip you have can run at a maximum of 12 mhz. There would be 2 crystals on the board for the speeds--one for the base 4.77 and the second for the turbo. The crystals use a 'divide by 3' configuration where the cpu speed is 1/3 the crystal speed. So the crystal for 4.77 would be about 14.3. The 12 mhz capablility of the cpu may not be what the motherboard can achieve. Look around for the second crystal. There may be several for different functions but the one for the cpu at turbo speed will be 24 mhz for an 8 mhz turbo, 30 for 10 and 36 for 12.

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Regarding the 16 bit IO card working, the only thing I can imagine is that it is some type of "dual mode" card...if the 16 bit portion is not connected, it must default or go into "super-legacy" mode, I guess. I suppose little harm can come from trying. The 1600 board you found looks a lot like what I remember finding...I suppose it wasn't identical. It's been a while since I tried to locate it because I remember spending days on it with no luck. However, it's a safe bet that this "1600" board probably evolved into my "1601" board...or was replaced by it. The DIP settings somewhat correspond to the current configuration I have here, so it's not impossible that my SW1 block is the same as that one's. I was able to find 3 cystals in a row along the top of the board: 16, 24, and 14.3. Image: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... Something I've always wondered...since heatsinks are not a factor on stuff like this, how does the turbo feature not shorten the lifespan of the CPU? I imagine it gets quite warm if being used to it's fullest potential. As for where a turbo button/jumper may connect, I do have the mysterious panel connectors. From my readings I imagine one set of pins goes to a beeper or tone generator device, if not a simple speaker. When I was younger I discovered the reset button but shorting pins, but I can't remember which ones it was now. I can trace the leads from the pins and determine easily which ones go directly to ground; the positive end of them is a lot harder to trace but if anyone thinks they can decode the function of the pins by knowing that I will do my best.

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Yeah, you may have to use trial and error to discover the pin connections. They'll probably be a power LED, Turbo LED, Turbo switch and speaker. There may or may not be a reset function. The speaker connection was often a 4-pin connector with the two middle ones not used. There may also be a 'keyboard lock' connector. It would connect to a key lock on the front panel and disable the keyboard when on. It was usually part of the power LED connector. If so it's a 5-pin connector with the first pin being the postive LED connector, the second wasn't used, the third is the ground for the LED and the fourth and fifth were the keylock. It's probably best to locate the LEDs first. Finding the turbo switch requires shorting the pins and sometimes that's not good for an LED connection. If 16, 24 and 14.3 are the crystal frequencies then the 24 is probably for the turbo speed and it would be 8 mhz. Those old cpus didn't cram together anywhere near the number of transistors that today's do so heat is not a problem.

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I think I made a mistake when I said the top speed of that cpu was 12 mhz. On some 8088s, the number after the 8088 was a frequency rating. The 8088-1 was 10 mhz, the 8088-2 was 8 mhz. With no number it was 5 mhz. But I saw the '12' and was thinking 12 mhz. Most of the time (other than the above) the meaning of that number is the cycle time--inverse frequency--in nanoseconds. That's the way to read your siemens chip. The '12' means 120 nanoseconds (you sometimes had to intuit if trailing zeros were needed). The inverse of 120 nanoseconds is 8.3 mhz so I'm sure that's the correct way to see it. And that would explain why the turbo speed is 8 and not 12 mhz.

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Thanks Dave, you're proving to be a very good reference point :) Regarding the panel connector, I have experience with the "typical" blocks and the usual positioning of pins in them. However, this is a bit of a different case...maybe once I write this down it will make sense but until then I do not believe it does. http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/... ^the panel connector That is looking down at the top of the motherboard. From left to right: 2 pin connector: 1-ground 2-unknown 6 pin connector: 1-unknown 2-ground 3-ground 4-unknown 5-ground 6-unknown, goes directly to resistor 2 pin connector: 1-unknown 2-ground MY INFORMATION IS BASED ON WHAT I CAN SEE. If I can see a circuit trace leading away from the solder point on either side of the board, I indicated "unknown". If I can see no traces from the pin I indicated "ground" since generally all unused space on a board is grounded under the upper layers of the PCB Obviously first thing to do is try an LED on each of the pairs of unknown/ground and see what happens; since an LED does carry some resistance it should hopefully not blow anything up (IE not direct short). I'll post back about what pins cause an LED to light.

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I'm fairly certain one of the 2-wire connectors is for the speaker. The other might be a reset but I'm less sure of that.

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Alright, did some testing, and came to a few conclusions...all good, actually, except one odd one. Speaker = first 2 pin connector Reset button = second 2 pin connector The rest gets a bit hairy... Pin 1 on the 6 pin connector is keylock. It will lock the keyboard if grounded to ANY of the ground pins. This leads me to believe the pins adjacent to it are the power LED, and indeed an LED lights up full time there. There is a second position which causes an LED to light. That's where I get lost. I've run out of pins; there must be no switch-activated turbo function. The 8088 board on TH99 has a "soft turbo"...it's activated by keyboard commands based on jumper settings. Perhaps this is how my turbo is activated?

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I think you're probably right. Could there be something like the J0 jumper the 1600 has, maybe on a different part of the board? If not, there's probably not an always-on turbo setting.

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There are two actual jumpers on my board: JP3 - near floppy and power connector, 2 pin JP5 - near DIPs and RAM, 2 pin JP5 skips the memory test, and as far as I can tell JP3 causes instability (POSTs, indicates lack of floppy drive, and then locks up with a random R below the floppy message). Btw testing conditions are just mobo, video card, monitor and keyboard, no extra peripherals installed. I'm thinking any sort of turbo configuration may be in one of the DIP switches but I have no way to learn their function. I guess I could write down current positions and then test but I imagine it isn't just one switch per function, they would go in combinations.

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Did you try the CTRL-ALT-<PLUS> and CTRL-ALT-<MINUS>? If that works to swap between normal and turbo then you could just leave it as it is. Do you have any dos software to check the cpu speed? If not, norton utilities sysinfo will do it. You can download the 3 sysinfo files from an old dos version here: http://192.100.195.208/temporal/sof... I think those are the only ones you need, although some of the utilities need nlib200.rtl. It's there too, if needed.

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Ah, thank you, however we're still a step or two before that...recall that I can't boot with my current drive hardware. Still need to monkey around with my 16 bit drive controllers and see if one will work in 8 bit mode, and then see if the board will automatically boot to the card or the integrated controller without changing DIP settings. I'm directing people at old-computers.com to check out this thread; hopefully someone may be able to help me with the DIPs. I really don't think it's optional to know their configuration anymore.

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Uh oh...POST issues. It worked, and then it didn't work. Something tells me the ATI video card somehow roasted my motherboard. I tried it out just to see what would happen on a TV connected to the RCAs and of course nothing was visible. So, I put back in the 16 bit Trident video card (previous configuration) and I have no video out and beep codes. The usual beep code is 7 medium beeps, a pause, and then it repeats over and over. Occasionally it makes a different one though. No configuration differences from when it did work. Only change has been the installation and removal of the ATI EGA Wonder, that is all.

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Alright, that went away...on it's own! I'm guessing now it's just an 8/16 bit glitch, like someone mentioned the cards will either work or not, I guess this will only sometimes POST. Good to know.

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