IBM 5150 Tecmar Captain RAM Card Upgrade 

That silky smooth 1 frame per second

I actually had Vette and Stunts on a 4.77 MHz XT with CGA and 1 MB. Eventually it was a lot better on a 286 with VGA. My little brother (maybe 9 or 10 at the time) even took apart a Kraft 2-button joystick and made an extremely usable steering wheel and brake/gas pedals.

Small tip for future videos: When you get something, tell us with few sentences, where and how did you get it. ;) In this case, the memory chips: Where did you get them? Was it maybe ebay/aliexpress? Are they new or old? Old stock or today's alternative that is compatible? etc...

I just bought a PCjr yesterday, from a farmer. He bought it new in 84 or 85 and had it in the closet for the last 25 years. I'm still giddy that everything works. I have a trick up my sleeve, which if it works, I'll be posting a RU-vid video about it!

This video brings back memories, specifically of the first PC my dad and I built. It was an 8088 clone, and the motherboard supported 640K of ram on the motherboard. (Four banks of 8 chips each... and we had two bad chips in one bank. FUN!) This also reminded me of the time (a few months later), when I first edited the autoexec.bat file... with Wordstar!. Yeup. encoded the entire file and borked it. Learned how to use Edlin than night. Yeah...

Those...are...long...sticks...of...ram............. it’s beautiful!!!!!* starts crying* 2:05

I have to say, the PC/XT/AT style power switch is THE MOST satisfying switch to turn on!

The 5160 must handle RAM counting/checking differently than the 5150. It's been YEARS since I have used it, but it has 640k, and it actually does the RAM count on the screen when you turn it on, and yes, it does take forever! It also has an internal, full-height MFM hard drive in it. I tried to fire it up the other day, but I think it being lost for YEARS, in a storage shed, has gotten to it. I can't get error beeps or any display or anything, and I can't find the keyboard, either! It's driving me crazy as my aunt bought the thing brand new back in the day, and the last time I had fired it up in the early 2000s, it was still working fine :(

3:39 such a great poetry. Took me a second to catch it.

To see a relic of these in the video left me with a certain nostalgia ... As much that is not of my time.....

Hearing a dot matrix printer doing its thing, so many memories. Love it!

Perfect demonstration of 80's anti-static handling procedures.

Hi All, My first PC was a commodore PC 10 , XT Clone with 512k ram and 2 x 360 floppy, all in green text. I realy loved that machine, it has the combo hercules / CGA card that was very crispy in font and simulated CGA colours in shads of green, later a real CGA monifot was used and i had to find the jumper settings, but all fine. I remember buying a real time clock for @ $30 and about $50 for a adlib card. Later i purchased a Extended I/O card to run the 1.2Meg 5.25 floppy. it was very good and ran just about everything i could get my hands on - 512K who needed the ful 640k. You can use laplink or similar ( FXlink i think ) Laplink V3 fits on 360k floppy, V5 on a 1.2M, use the paralell interface it is much faster, yo can remote map a drive basically For Dos, i found 3.2 the most stable, and 4 gave issues, but it possibly supported multi threads, 5 was good and pretty and the memmaker feature cool, of cource 6.22 is the best and buy them you have the multi boot option and multiply config sys option on boot up, or use a collection of boot floppies. Multiplayer dos games are around, scorched earth and civilization are the early ones i remember, As you metioned the most basic is Trasmit to Recieve, crossed over and join the earths. I also used a null modem cable and comms programs ( procom then telix on the PC ) and i used to send text files from my amiga 500 to my PC, even multiplan and unicalc files, that were saved as (symbolic ?? ) transfered over and ran, later with a 386 laptop i used just Microsoft works for DOS There was a share ware game, lazer wars or similar, shareware but with pages of tech info on setting up multi player and lan and pages on how he coded the joining of the 2 pc etc with null modem cables. ie the control codes of PC1 - object move left and how that was sent to the other pc. there was a rouge based game with multi player,then later on doom and descent, this was the time everyone was installing co-ax in the house, mum still has the co-ax cable under the house and between 3 rooms I am not sure if you can upgrade these with a USB Gotek floppy emulator, my oldest machine these days is a Pentium 100 Regards George

Love the dot matrix. That sound. My 8088/640k/CGA portable has a plotter built in. My cats and I can watch it for hours. Thanks for the vid.

Came for curiosity on the RAM card, stayed for the vintage printers and serial multiplayer! The Vette frame rate is actually an advantage when you think about it, pretty easy to have a sip of tea between a couple frames, I like that!

Epson badged one of their dot matrix printers for the Commodore 64. The MPS-1000 Printer works with both IBM and Commodore computers. And it will run on just about any generic DMP drivers with anything that has a parallel port. So you could have the one printer for a whole range of different computers. Basically all the Commodore machines and any machine with the port.

I only ever used the LPT port for 3 things. Printers, Scanners and a pre-USB MP3 Player. If you do ever find yourself wanting to send files via the com port, I suggest you find a copy of LapLink, it's the best tool I ever used for that, giving you full access to the file system on both machines. It even had instructions on how to use the mode and copy commands to upload the binary from one computer to the other.

I use LPT extensively to connect PCs in my collection using DOS's Interlnk-intersvr. Works faster than RS232. In 'pre-xtide days' my 5155 Portable acted this way as a 'file server' for my 5150, where DOS would assign a new drive letter and it worked (and works) like a dream!

AkBKukU takes really long sipp here in screen reflection 4:46

You hope I enjoyed it? You're goddamn right I enjoyed it!

That 5150 brings me warm memories of my childhood. Great video!

I would rename this video, you buried the lead. I found the multiplayer aspect was the most interesting and unique part of the video. Thanks!

I'm getting some real Dr Seuss vibes around 3:38

You could put in an OPLPT2 on the printer port and play some games with nice AdLib sound...

I think you could say our expectations were set a bit lower back then eh :-)

I bet you can get a brand new ribbon for it. A lot of old printers have new ribbons available, suprisingly enough.

That rhythm was awsome

Love the sound of dot matrix printers.

I used to use null modem cable to transfer files using Norton Commander link. It was quite convenient when my friend was to floors away from me. It worked fine using off the shelf phone cable at 19200 bps.

HOLY CRAP! I sold one of those on ebay a year ago for $15! Buyer was tickled...I was pleased to get rid of it.

Got some good info for setting up the Captain in my XT clone, thanks!

Mighty fine video as always :) that 5150 setup is so cozy, I imagine it would be fun even just to mess with QBasic, not to mention classic CGA games... Try Test Drive next :)

It must have been very satisfying to populate those empty sockets.

Great videos man. These things are challenges that's for sure. Glad you got it rockin'. Beautiful machine. I have an old Compaq Deskpro 386s with what appears to be a 32-bit ISA Memory Expansion Card with 1MB of RAM on it. I believe the motherboard also has 1MB of onboard RAM. I was just curious if ISA memory expansion cards are somewhat universal on IBM compatibles? I've been having difficulty finding ISA memory expansion cards for a reasonable price. Mine has all the dang chips soldered in so unless I wanted to do some serious work, I might be stuck looking for a whole new card. They made 4MB expansions for my model, however they are extremely rare to find. There might be some hope if they aren't brand-specific. I'd also be curious to know if a 32-bit ISA Memory Card can be used at the same time as an 8-bit or 16-bit ISA Memory Card. Hope all is well and keep up the great work!

When I order RAM chips usually 20% are defective. So I was suprised it did work the first boot. I use a software to detect which chip(s) is the defective one. So I recommend ordering +20% of what you need.

i wonder what all of those ram chips would have cost back in the days...

I had one of those HP MX-80 printers with the GPIB/parallel interface. They changed out the internal ROMs so they only speak HPese. I swapped the ROMs with stock MX-80 ROMs and it worked normally according to the MX-80 manual.

Always great videos, man.

Damn, that explains why my PCjr keeps printing things out instead of being a computer. (jkjk)

The multiplayer game deserves a like 😂 15:30 a chess game would be a bit more interesting on these!

it is such a cool old pc

That Christmas-level poem though

If you wanna be cheap you can recondition old dried up ribbons with an oil & solvent mixture. Spraying it with WD-40 and then letting it soak for example works a treat for my typewriter ribbons.

aah yes, the good ole days, when you upgraded your memory per chip for $1500 each! :)

I think this right here is a prime example of why there was a chip shortage in the 80s

DOS shell?!? Kids these days. I swear! What next some kind of fancy GUI? (Wow I actually felt myself get even older saying that!)

Now for a sweet NEC V20 to get games running a bit smoother.

Awesome

You could use a sound source with the parallel port!

Love your channel

Little tip, when you're putting in fresh RAM chips from the factory, the pins are facing a bit too far outwards.press the chip's pins against a flat surface to uniformly angle them straight or even slightly inward, and they'll go in with a lot less fidgeting / resistance / problems. 'twas almost painful watching you trying to put in those last two rows.

"Killobytes" Gets me every time I hear it.

hi my friend, is possible buy any retropc from you ?

All that's missing now is an adlib sound card.

Now, find yourself an NEC V20 chip, and you will have the complete 80s, pushing the XT to the fullest experience. The V20 is a drop in upgrade and worth 10% performance upgrade

Network card...?

I accidently found out that dot matrix printers made cool custom stencils for the old gestetner duplicating machines

Memory accessed via the ISA bus, speedy

how much RAM does FreeDOS take up? it's meant to be able to be run on anything down to the 5150.

Tired of all the misspelled autoexec.bat comments from the last video?

wasn't paralel nul modem a lot faster then serial nulmodem connection. we always used the parralel port for that

Do you know the what kind of screws the case uses and a good way to get a new drive?

1 frame per second. You really needed some gaming skills in early 80s =)

Missed opportunity to get druaga1 in on this multi-player action!

Cheers! 4:46

Think there are any earlier games that would be playable and multiplayer?

Love that rail of ram :-)

You could put one of those nice LPT port sound cards on this thing now!

In my area used dot matrix printers are cheaper than the box of paper for them. I hate that.

My watch is exactly 2.8 million times faster.

3:40 that rhyme tho...

The first game I played in multiplayer was NFS2SE. And I used a nullmodem cable, because it was the cheapest way.

Ohhhh the joys of Tractor-feed paper... :-/

3:39 Anyone else swooning at that wordplay?

I remember installing many, MANY memory chips like those. If I recall correctly, DOS wouldn't natively use memory above 512K? I remember having to load HIMEM.SYS and then use LOADHI to move as many drivers and TSRs as possible up into higher memory to free up base memory.

Does anyone know the thereoretical maximum amount of memory the 5150 could support? (Including expansion cards)

Now host a Vette LAN party!

Sweet, sweet null modem goodness! LOL

From wo you can order this chips? i have an 286 PC with just 640 k of ram.

What about the real time clock?

What about using Telix?? It lets you use ZModem protoccol

Good vid. Please dial in modem.

What exactly is a null modem? I've heard it mentioned a few times and I don't really understand why a modem is introduced into a straight serial connection.

The,5150 can run both Extended and Expanded memory. The absolute maximum is 2048 k of ram. Yes, 2 Gig. Think the memory takes a long time for POST?

Got any *decent* 80's H/W? ... like Apollo workstations? :-) ...or Mac II or Amiga or Atari ST/TT?

can u make it play a eddie van hallen jump midi file true a peavey 5150 just for gigles

So just as a reminder: The 20-year anniversary New Build Win98 Machine has 2048 times as much memory... :-)

NICE IBM

that pc is for Windows 3.0?

nice 80s lan party :D

Just sold an AST Rampage 286 upgrade board with 2.5mb of ram for $80, I hope I made a decent sale

Odd, RU-vid just sent me a notification about this video that was uploaded 2 days ago.... GG RU-vid, your notifs are broken again!

or you buy a null-modem cable. Exists also for the parallel port.

Oops.

Now this 5150 yells for Covox/LPT

I have a working 5150 except mine has an AST 6 pack.

smooth 60 FPM :O

THE DOSS_HELL

Ha ha yu spent more time bending pins straight !!! oh my been there !! broken pins straight to the package is a nightmare

Kewl - blinged out with 640K... time to install Windows 1.0...