The PC-RETRO Kit Beta (Catalog #PC-RETRO) is a hobby electronics kit for building a faithful reproduction of the classic IBM PC 5150 motherboard from 1982. We have been in development on this new product offering for over 1 year. We started with the original circuit diagrams, as published by IBM in their Technical Reference Manual. These open source circuit diagrams launched the explosion in PC clone products that followed the IBM PC introduction. Reverse engineering the original IBM board was a substantial undertaking, as we found many differences between the ‘official’ circuit diagrams and actual board construction. Additionally, you can imagine the complexity of trouble-shooting this board and verifying the correct operation! Not to mention the logistical challenge of sourcing the original vintage electronic parts. You will receive all the components to build a PC Motherboard exactly as shown here.
At a mere $189.50 (including international shipping; $149.50 for domestic US customers), this is an absolute steal. I’m very tempted to look into getting this, but my utter lack of even the most basic soldering skills makes me a little nervous. Might be a better idea to get some soldering test kits before attempting a project like this.
It sounds like an interesting project, though I’m not sure I would call that price a steal considering I can go on eBay and get a genuine working 5150 motherboard for around $50.
Yeah, I don’t get it myself. I’ve never liked paint by numbers kits, weather electronic or pigment based. Maybe this might be cool to use as a starter for a ultimate early pc kit.
This would be my dream:
5150 motherboard
Apple II board
Commodore 64
TRS-80
Amiga 500
In a single nice encloser, like a rackmount with kvm switch .
I’m not sure all of the keyboards speak the same protocol, In fact I’m sure they don’t. So the KVM would have that built in as well.
Yes, I’ve been hovering over the paypal button for the last day or so. Every time I do though, I realize that to do anything beyond building this board (which is in itself worth the cost) I’m going to have to dig out an ISA graphics card, ISA disk boards and scrounge up a bunch of 4264-10 memory to get it to 256K (minimum).
I did get myself an XT-IDE card a while ago, and would be glad to get another. The memory and display are going to be a pain.
There are a few people making an 8 bit ISA VGA card kit (some SM components). I’ll see if I can remember, look for SMBaker, the guy who did Land of Devastation back in the day
And even at the low-low price of $15/64K listed on the kit site, it still comes out to $240/MB for 100NS memory, or just about what RAM cost in 1988. I really want to do this, but the numbers are pushing me toward my many other waiting projects.
If you want to learn about soldering, it’s not particularly difficult at that scale.
To get experience I’d recommend picking up a very cheap arduino nano. The board usually comes with pin headers that you’ll need to solder yourself. The nice thing about arduino is that you can get up and running with little more than a usb cable and the arduino programming IDE makes if exceptionally easy to get started with simple microcontroller projects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HonKIngjZX0
One warning, most arduino boards I’ve bought from sites like ebay are actually clones. These work fine but require a different driver to be installed before windows will recognize them properly, which can be confusing for those who are not aware.
I find that a temperature controlled soldering station helps considerably. It’s very difficult to solder when the temperature is too low (duh), and although I’ve never had an issue, temperatures that are too high can theoretically damage components. I used to only have fixed wattage soldering irons, but variables like tip size, ambient temperature, solder melting points, make it more difficult to use a fixed wattage soldering iron effectively.
You’ll absolutely want some soldering flux to make the solder flow to the pins. Sometimes you can buy solder with builtin flux, but I recommend you get plain soldering wire instead and apply flux separately with a small paintbrush. The solder will flow almost magically to the pins covered in flux.
There are different opinions about how to apply the solder, but if you’ve already applied the flux separately I find it doesn’t make much difference. What works best for me is to melt some solder onto the soldering tip and then apply it to the pin. Just remember that the pin&pad being soldered need to come up to temperature to form a solid joint. A bad joint often leaves the solder looking like a ball whereas a good joint looks very smooth and melts evenly across the contacts. It’s often very easy to fix a bad joint simply by touching the pin with the iron and turning up the temperature a bit as needed.
While soldering is very forgiving, I find desoldering is quite a bit harder for components with a lot of solder joints, so it’s best not to have to do that
A magnifying glass on a stand is useful for fine detail, though not necessary at this scale. I would highly recommend an adjustable desk lamp since soldering in the shadows absolutely sucks. Maybe a fan wouldn’t be a bad idea to remove fumes, and maybe an old-school stereo from the 80s, haha. Maybe someday I’ll post a picture of my setup, it’s quite the chaos room.
Two magical words for the world of soldering : ‘flux’ and ‘heat’
You linked to “honking video”! ;D (and I’m thinking about picking up solderin skills myself, so thanks for posting
)
PS. Hm, odd, OSAlert colour-coded your post as if we were no longer mutual friends …but it’s OK now.
Edited 2018-08-15 23:10 UTC
zima,
Oh no, it’s our batman-v-superman moment
PS. I haven’t watched it…
So I won’t spoil it (I was at it in the cinema)
Soldering small details, ohh boy, it reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
I’m not good at it at all and just watching it already kind of scares me.
You might indeed want to practice soldering on smaller projects before tackling one this large, but I think you could handle it. I learned to solder on a project nearly as complex as this one (building an 8088 based test bench computer in 1996). I only screwed up a couple of times and I was able to recover with no issues once I got the hang of it.
Just go slow, use a proper soldering station with temp control, and use a good solder that doesn’t spit flux all over the place.
it would have been so much more usable if they made this a 386 PC. While I understand the PCB would be a little bit more integrated with an higher pin count CPU and system controller / memory controller thing, it would have been so much more usable to play all the great and slightly more demanding graphical DOS vintage / retro games, … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88AiZvAKt_I PS: maybe they plan to make a 386 kit next? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8-ONga-3BY&t=19m44s
Edited 2018-08-14 13:10 UTC
AFAIR, given a 486, you could run a modern BSD but perhaps headless.
The old 8088/ 8086 systems worked with MFM (and RLL) hard disks rather than the IDE and SATA ones around now. MFM (and RLL) drives are rare and showing a reliability reflective of their age. Getting hold of a 5150 motherboard is the start of the challenge: those 8 bit ISA slots look like PCI slots but they really aren’t.
As always, it depends what your objective is.
Well no, they’re 8bit wide XT slots, which went on to be standardised as ISA and then extended into EISA. They’re very clearly not PCI slots.
I’ve learned to not question the vintage/nostalgia crowd.
I get the draw, I feel the tugs as well.
At least classic cars can do the speed limit on freeways (save, perhaps, Model T’s and that era), even though they’re all death traps compared to what we have today.
I get the collector gene, but computers are tools for me. Whether it’s a game or anything else. And these things are just worse than useless.
They present themselves as computers, we project our computer experiences on them, and then they deliver that classic computer experience.
That classic computer experience is that these things are big, hot, and slug slow.
You know what you get when you fire up a 16MHz Sun 50 workstation?
A shell prompt.
With a $.
Just like you do today on your 4GHz linux box.
ls works, it’s just slow. cp works, it’s just slow. make works, it’s just REALLY slow.
In the end, you get perl. Just like you have perl now. \o/
“Now what.”
Slow DOS, Slow C64s, Slow PDPs (oh man, are those slow. It hurts. It manifests as physical pain they’re so slow).
“I have a machine that does .1 MIPS, and just under 2000 watts!”
I know, I sound all anti-curmudgeonly. I don’t mean to, I hope folks really enjoy these experiences. I just know that I don’t seem to. I have no problem with Open CDE on modern hardware. Or running Emacs, or 40 year old vi. But, I’m flat out jaded. Completely jaded.
The machines are just flat out slow as molasses and don’t offer me anything more than what I have now. I can run nostalgic software at top speed today.
Raspberry Pi and modern micro controllers just completely obliterate these old experiences to me. I can simulate these systems from the comfort of my enormous iMac.
Better solution would have been a mini-replica, that had the same functionality – cpu speed, memory – but used a flash disk for hard drive and output to modern screens. Make it look like the original, but smaller, and sell it for $49.99.
Once you have it put together and running, it’s all DOS. And only DOS. Not Windows. Not Linux. It’s 8-bit? 16 colors?
I’d buy this and go bare metal using the ROM. Screw running DOS on such a old CPU.
In uni we built a small 8088 board which was about 5×5 inches. It only had 8 LED’s for output and 8 dip switches for input. You wrote very small programs in hand coded assembly and burnt the machine code to a 2k eprom. You also had no ram so everything used registers. The idea wasn’t to make a fully functional computer but a trainer to understand the low level operation of the CPU and it various signals. Erasing an eprom took 20 minutes so if you made a mistake you better hope there were a few chips ready to go from the eraser otherwise you were SOL.
I hated the limited use case for the board so I redesigned it on my own with input from my professor. I bought the bus to a 50 pin header so you could stack small peripheral cards like pc104 cards. I mapped out some IO ports to devices like a standard lcd header so a 16×2 lcd could be plugged in for output beyond the crude 8 bar led readout. I also switched to a 32k eeprom so programming wasn’t as painful. I designed two peripheral cards. One was a ROM/RAM board with an 8k sram chip and socket for a 32k eeprom that bought out the write enable pin so it could be used to store data (I toyed with a battery backup for the sram but skipped it). The other was an IO card with digital IO’s: 8 bits in, 8 bits buffered output, a simple 8 bit pwm with prescaler as well as a crude 8bit SAR ADC and 8bit R2R analog output. Everything was designed with discrete logic chips. The IO cards were also addressable so they could stack for more inputs and outputs. Two other cards I planned were a serial card with a uart and a dual axis stepper motor board but never got that far. It was more of a PLC design as industrial automation and mechatronics are passions of mine. I even had a crude C tool chain worked out using BCC on linux and tested some code in emmu8086.
I made it to the board fabrication stage, ordered a two and discovered a glaring error in the board design that initially slipped past me. I fixed it but moved on to other projects before committing more money to the design and that was that. Still sitting in a box somewhere.
Honestly, these little 8 bit systems are *THE BEST* way to learn computer architecture. It was immensely fun and satisfying to build a computer with your own two hands and it greatly helped me understand how a computer actually works under the hood. Today it’s all SoC’s and arduino boards with full tool chains that hide all that wonderful complexity under a cute little interface. FPGA’s are a modern analogy but the learning curve is too steep and let’s face it, just not as exciting as watching your hand soldered board come to life with assembler you painstakingly coded by hand.
Some time ago I saw here an ad for Arduino-based PLC.
And I suppose there are RPi/SoC-like ones, too.