I've been sitting on one for a long time now, can't remember where I got it from, but last night I decided to finally power it up and see if it works. After modifying an ATX PSU to work with the AT connectors, and verifying all the voltages were correct I finally got to flip the switch. And I got nothing, nada, not even a beep.
So after some scouring of the net I was starting to loose hope, till I stumbled upon this page, where it said "The failure of any chip in the 5170's first bank of RAM (bank 0) results in what appears to be a 'dead' motherboard."
So hope renewed I painstakingly removed all the chips from bank 0, and then moved all the chips from bank 1 to bank 0. And the thing posted, and happy with it's 256KB of working RAM. So now I knew I had one or more bad chips on the table in front of me. So I pulled the top most chip in bank 0, and started cycling in the pile of chips I had before me. Install chip, power on. Good chip? Move it to bank 1, bad chip? Add it to the "bad chip" pile. Took me a while, but I finally narrowed the problem down to a single stacked chip!
I consider this a victory, and have put a giant check mark in the "Win" column.
Now, the real reason for my post here is, where on earth do I procure a working replacement? What do I need to search for to find one? Or should I just scrap that idea completely and look for an ISA memory board with 384K of RAM to bring the system up to 640?
Once I have that working, the next step will be to locate one of my AT keyboards, then procure an IDE controller of some sort to go with this system. And then maybe I'll look for a genuine IBM 5170 case, or just use the flip case I already have. I do like the idea of having a 5140, 5160 and 5170 in my collection.
So after some scouring of the net I was starting to loose hope, till I stumbled upon this page, where it said "The failure of any chip in the 5170's first bank of RAM (bank 0) results in what appears to be a 'dead' motherboard."
So hope renewed I painstakingly removed all the chips from bank 0, and then moved all the chips from bank 1 to bank 0. And the thing posted, and happy with it's 256KB of working RAM. So now I knew I had one or more bad chips on the table in front of me. So I pulled the top most chip in bank 0, and started cycling in the pile of chips I had before me. Install chip, power on. Good chip? Move it to bank 1, bad chip? Add it to the "bad chip" pile. Took me a while, but I finally narrowed the problem down to a single stacked chip!
I consider this a victory, and have put a giant check mark in the "Win" column.
Now, the real reason for my post here is, where on earth do I procure a working replacement? What do I need to search for to find one? Or should I just scrap that idea completely and look for an ISA memory board with 384K of RAM to bring the system up to 640?
Once I have that working, the next step will be to locate one of my AT keyboards, then procure an IDE controller of some sort to go with this system. And then maybe I'll look for a genuine IBM 5170 case, or just use the flip case I already have. I do like the idea of having a 5140, 5160 and 5170 in my collection.