Vintage PC/XT revival
A project to revive my old (1984'ish) PC/XT clone motherboard – I only have the motherboard, no drives, no video card, not even the original power supply. The idea is to revive the motherboard to a functional PC/XT system with a console, emulated floppies and a fixed disk.
The first pass with this project included a VT100 emulation in BIOS INT10 to support a 80x25 character color text display on a Linux Minicom serial console. The floppy drives and the fixed disk were all emulated on a single 20GB IDE drive through the custom BIOS. The home-brew BIOS listing is here (https://github.com/eyalabraham/new-xt-bios). The systems was able to load and run DOS as-is, and a modified / hacked Minix 2.0.0 release.
The second pass at this project, now about four years after completing the first attempt, is a new approach at building a more complete PC/XT computer and implementing some of the ideas I collected going through the first iteration.
- Physical structure to properly house and brace the expansion cards
- CF Card replacing the 20GB IDE HDD
- Video display card
- PS2 Keyboard interface
- Program utility pack (graphics, IP network utilities like PING and NTP, disk IO)