First post, by keenmaster486
- Rank
- l33t
As you all know, the IBM 5150 only has 5 expansion slots. This makes cramming as much functionality into as few cards as possible key to getting as much as you can out of the machine.
The motherboard only has at most 256K of RAM. Early MBs have 64K. There is no onboard I/O except keyboard and cassette.
This means everything has to be on the expansion cards, including RAM to expand to full 640K.
The typical loadout might consist of:
-Graphics card
-Floppy controller
-MFM HDD controller or XT-IDE
-Network card
-Multi-expansion card: RAM+RTC+serial+parallel (e.g. AST SixPakPlus)
This leaves no room for any other cards.
In my machine I have a combo HDD+floppy card. That leaves me one slot open, for experimenting with things such as sound cards. However, that wouldn't be possible if I weren't using an original MFM hard drive. XT-IDE + CF card would not allow this.
What are the options? Anything better than SixPakPlus out there? Seems like the holy grail card would be a combo that contains RAM+RTC+2x serial+2x parallel+XT-IDE+QuadFlop+Ethernet. Lmao. Waiting for someone to build this and charge $200 for it (I would purchase)
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.