My first (x86) PC was a IBM 55SX 386 - 16 mhz 4mb ram 60mb hdd with a nice IBM VGA screen
I payed for it with thousands of golf balls.
It must have been ~1992

I played lots of games on that machine.

I was first introduced to several DOS games on my friend's PS/2 386. Police Quest 3, Willy Beamish, Star Trek 25th Anniv., etc. I'm pretty sure some of my earlier BBS memories were on that system. There was also an after school group that got together and played Space Quest 1-3 and KQ 1-4 on PS/2s. I know it's kind of a gimmick but I like the systems that booted into GWBasic (I was an Apple II guy before PC). Good times.

I wish my family never got rid of ours. I originally only lamented that the Model M was gone...but now I lament that the whole system, mouse and monitor is gone too.

All I remember from that machine is Freddy's Rescue Roundup and CASTLE. Don't know anything about the specs other than it had a 20MB hard disk. All I have that's left of it is a cardboard IBM box that I'm saving, and some fresh unused 720kb floppies from Verbatim.

I found a model M at a local thrift store last week, but I never see the monitors. With all the original IBM parts it looked like a really solid system. I remember on my 386 I always had to delete something to install a new game and that was on a 100MB. 20MB would be a real challenge.

Great Hierophant wrote:

The MCGA adapter is unique to the 8525 abd 8530, but it is not paired well with the processor and it is not compatible with EGA, the prevailing standard at that time...

Although the MCGA adaptor works just fine for AGI and early SCI games (Sierra issued MCGA updates for almost all of the pre-87 titles), the video system of the 25 and 30 disappoints in some surprising ways.

Because the only high-res VGA mode that's part of MCGA is 2-bit black and white, there's essentially no way to get a color graphical interface on these machines. The DOSSHELL that's part of IBM DOS 4, for example, can only show colors when run in text mode -- graphics mode must be 2-bit 640x480 because the other modes DOSSHELL supports fall outside of MCGA. The same restriction applies to Windows 2/286, essentially the only version of Windows that makes sense on the 8086-based 25 and 30. Paint is not so impressive in black and white...

This put IBM in the odd position of shipping a significant part of its initial PS/2 lineup with a 256-color display and mouse - but no color-capable GUI, even in DOSSHELL!

There's a remote possibility that some MultiMedia Extensions drivers applied to Windows 3.0 (not 3.1) would allow 320x200 at 256 colors, even in MCGA. See this page for details: http://toastytech.com/guis/win3mme.html But good luck putting all that on a 30mb hard drive...

The notion that MCGA doesn't seem well-paired with the lowly 8086 is an insightful one -- even games that happen to align with MCGA's support for VGA often run pretty slowly on it.

IBM systems are great in quality and compatibillity, yet I remember a running joke, that IBM machines would not run Os/2. 😉

Great Hierophant wrote:

The only question is do games that support these SVGA-like resolutions work with the XGA adapters?

Probably not, although in 1992 IBM released the VESA SVGA BIOS Extension TSR for the IBM XGA/A and XGA-2 Adapter. It's a TSR (sigh) that "makes your XGA/A or XGA-2 Adapter VESA-compliant for SVGA." According to the readme:

1This TSR supports the following standard SVGA VESA modes for the XGA/A adapter:
2
3   VESA mode        Description
4
5   100h             640x400x256 color packed pixel mode
6   101h             640x480x256 color packed pixel mode
7   105h *           1024x768x256 color packed pixel mode (requires 1 Meg VRAM)
8   10Eh             320x200x64K color packed pixel mode
9   111h             640x480x64K color packed pixel mode (requires 1 Meg VRAM)
10   108h **          80  column 60 line text mode
11   109h **          132 column 25 line text mode
12   10Ah **          132 column 43 line text mode
13   10Bh **          132 column 50 line text mode
14   10Ch **          132 column 60 line text mode
15
16   *  This mode is only supported on the XGA/A adapter if an 8514, 8515, 8516,
17      or 8517 monitor is connected.
18
19   ** These modes are only supported if an XGA in the system is initially
20      brought up in VGA mode.  Therefore, systems that have a VGA on the
21      planar must not have a monitor connected in order for the TSR to
22      provide support for these modes.

If you have an XGA-2 adaptor you also get 102h, 103h, and 104h.

Somewhat predictably, the TSR won't do anything in a Windows 3.1 DOS box. And as you would also expect,

1Any VESA SVGA application that accesses the hardware directly, instead of
2using BIOS, will not work because the SVGAVESA TSR is implementing the SVGA
3modes with the XGA adapter in XGA mode.  When the adapter is in XGA mode,
4the VGA registers are not available.  Therefore, applications that try to
5update the VGA's Video DAC via direct hardware writes instead of using BIOS
6INT10 calls will fail.  Also, applications that attempt to wait for a
7VGA-style vertical retrace signal will lock up the system.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Neither XGA adapter is the fastest around compared to some SVGA card's advanced features.

This is true, for example the XGA adaptor scores 20/50 on the Gabriel Knight 1 compatibility test for Windows 3. Of course the immature, pre-DirectX environment takes a toll here. Laura Bow 2, for example, is pretty painful when run under Windows 3.1, but perfectly acceptable under DOS 5 on a PS/2 Model 57M Ultimedia with a XGA card.

sound hardware for the PS/2, huh?
you've got the SB ChipChap!
and the Adlib Gold MC2000
in the way of soundCARDS. remember that a few companies made Parallel port addons like Disney's Sound Source or covox's speech thing. but, if memory serves, my PS/2 70 386 could do sound effects in Win3.1 just with the speaker.

armankordi wrote:

but, if memory serves, my PS/2 70 386 could do sound effects in Win3.1 just with the speaker.

Yes, there was a PC Speaker sound driver for Windows 3.x, but to the best of my knowledge it would work with absolutely any PC (provided it's fast enough, of course) as the PC Speaker is standard hardware. Its output is of course very low-fidelity.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Creative did produce the Sound Blaster MCV and Sound Blaster Pro MCV, essentially Microchannel versions of the ISA Sound Blaster 2.0 and Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 respectively.

I thought some folks might appreciate a relatively detailed photograph of the Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, CT5330. Click through for larger:

Creative Labs SoundBlaster Pro MCV CT5330 (Microchannel)

Hello,

I'm searching about replace MCA riser from my IBm ps/2 model 56 with a riser from another IBM model with ISA slots, What do you think about it? Is it possible? My objective is install a ISA sound blaster in my machine 😀

Regards,
TuberViejuner

Thanks for the picture, pleonard. Do you actively use this sound card? How do the games work with it? How would you judge the general compatibility from your personal experience?

tuberviejuner wrote:

Hello, […]
Show full quote

Hello,

I'm searching about replace MCA riser from my IBm ps/2 model 56 with a riser from another IBM model with ISA slots, What do you think about it? Is it possible? My objective is install a ISA sound blaster in my machine 😀

Regards,
TuberViejuner

Impossible. The BUS technology is determined by the chipset. One cannot use ISA cards in MCA machines.

@ PS/2 model 30:

I own some selected IBM machines myself. I really like the Model 30 computers (8086 and 80286) for their cool form factor. They are so small! But the ESDI technology is some kind of drawback. Fitting hard drives and floppy drives are hard to get, but of course one can plug some SCSI controller into these machines and use them. XT-IDE also works fine. Another drawback are the PSUs used in these machine. While their quality is great, their components are really long living, there are NO molex power connectors available at all. So one has to modify the rails that to to the motherboard. Not a problem, but not suited for anybody.
PeterLI already mentioned, how fast the Model 30 8086 gets when you plug in the NEC V30 CPU. With only 10MHz it feels almost as fast as a low end 286 machine. It is a great CPU upgrade for this machine and so simle to perform. One only has to swap the CPUs, that's it. No other changes are required.

Then... if I want sound in my IBM I must buy some MCA sound card like these:

AdLib MCA Music Synthesizer Card
ChipChat Sound-16
ChipChat Sound-32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster MCV, SKU:CT5320
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, SKU:CT5330
IBM Audiovation, SKU: 92G7463, 92G7464
IBM Ultimedia Audio Adapter 7-6, only compatible with RS/6000 systems, or PS/2 systems under NT with a special procedure
Reply Reply SB16
Roland MPU-IMC
Piper Research SoundPiper 16

Isn't It?

Regards,
TuberViejuner.

tuberviejuner wrote on 2016-03-24, 11:01:

Then... if I want sound in my IBM I must buy some MCA sound card like these: […]
Show full quote

Then... if I want sound in my IBM I must buy some MCA sound card like these:

AdLib MCA Music Synthesizer Card
ChipChat Sound-16
ChipChat Sound-32
Creative Labs Sound Blaster MCV, SKU:CT5320
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, SKU:CT5330
IBM Audiovation, SKU: 92G7463, 92G7464
IBM Ultimedia Audio Adapter 7-6, only compatible with RS/6000 systems, or PS/2 systems under NT with a special procedure
Reply Reply SB16
Roland MPU-IMC
Piper Research SoundPiper 16

Isn't It?

Regards,
TuberViejuner.

This is a big bump for an old post but for the sake of search engines, I wanted to put the link to the Texelec Resound 2 Adlib MCA card. I have one and it works perfectly.

https://texelec.com/product/resound-2-opl3-mc … nnel-computers/

There's also another freshly produced MCA sound solution: the "Snark Barker". It's a reverse-engineered rebuild of the original Sound Blaster 2 MCV:

https://hackaday.com/2020/12/01/giving-micro- … d-blaster-bark/
https://monotech.fwscart.com/Snark_Barker_MCA … 4_21247195.aspx