and today it's this thing, the IBM PC AT thing

that I unboxed a little while back

and when we left off there

I had just added everything to it that

you would expect for it to have when

this particular one was manufactured in

1988 so I thought it was a really

interesting video. If you want to see

that unboxing, there's links, they exist.

but today I would like to upgrade it to

a few things!

One being RAM, right, 640k ought to be

enough for anybody, so goes the saying.

But this doesn't even have that so this

actually right here I was clearly lucky

to be able to source. This is an original

128K IBM expansion board for the AT

And a user on Reddit actually actually

contacted me and said "hey I don't need

this if you want it I'll give you a good

price" and he did, so thank you sir! I also

have the official IBM 512K upgrade

board and both of them together should

combine to give it over a meg of memory

which would be sweet. 512K is, I mean, it

does a lot of stuff, but I added an EGA

card to this on the last video. And for

example, yeah do you see that?

So 640K is required to run a game like

SimCity in EGA graphics. I could run on

CGA or Hercules or whatever with the 512K

that's in there but I don't want to

man, I want all my 16 colors at once!

Another thing I do want to upgrade is

an 80287. And it's matching 8MHz

to this and it's a coprocessor

a "math copro." Not necessary but it helps in

certain situations for calculating

things. I just want to benchmark stuff.

I'm not sure if I'm going to use this

but I do want to mention it at least.

This right here was sent to me by a

viewer of mine, David. He actually sells

these on his eBay Shop and it's just

a CMOS battery for double A's. You know, the

lithium battery that's in there and 30

years old still works, but who knows how

long it's going to last. So that'll be a nice

easy thing to swap out for just AA

batteries. And I also have this Sony

3.5" 1.44 meg floppy disk

drive, model MP-F17W-T6! So, that'll go

quite nicely. I mean it's the same color

and everything it's like it's made for

the IBM AT. because it is. And then also

last but not least is an Adlib card and

while this is the sound card that would

have made a lot of sense for a lot of

users in 1988 when this computer was made,

this is introduced in 87. And yeah it's, you

know, still in the box I've had that for

a while. I always wanted to put it in the

AT so let's just stop talking and just

do it, I'm excited! Right so first up is

this 128K board and yeah there's the

thingy. Well I've got five extra slots

here so I'm just going to stick the 128K

right here and then the 512K right

here. I'm going to do one at a time

because there was some question as to

whether this one worked or not.

First time these little brackets have

been removed since it was assembled 30

years ago!

Pretty crazy. Whoo yeah that's a tight

fit. Installing RAM isn't quite as

straightforward as it might be in a

modern system. We're actually going to

need to run the diagnostic disk to set it up

*floppy disk and beeping noises*

Yes it still said 512K there at the start

okay so it is not seeing the

expansion memory yeah, all right.

So okay. All right I just tossed the 512K

one in there and it does seem to have

detected that one so we'll see

what it does

but yeah swapped all the chips and um

Guy I got it from said he had replaced

'U8' here and I had no luck getting it to

work so I mean. That maybe this is just

dead or something. I don't know if that

means a game like Keen will work, that

requires more conventional memory. Yeah

it doesn't doesn't make a difference.

Right okay, well in the meantime I can

start at some of the other upgrades

the sound card upgrade right now would

be kind of pointless without this RAM

thing sorted so I'm gonna go ahead and

add a three and a half inch floppy disk

drive which is going to be interesting

I've never actually put one in a

computer of this age before. "Remove the

two screws and faceplate," oh

uh yep, there's that

You know I didn't even think to

look to see if I had the right cable

Man there's so many things packed in here, as-is

check this out, all these other

connectors for five and a quarter inch

drives so I don't I don't need all this

I just need like the one cable going to

the one drive I had in there. And I'm

going to need a little, you know, adapter

thingy for the power on here to hook into

the regular molex, but you can see how

it's going to to fit, basically. The

colors actually are slightly different.

Uh it's close enough. Just proving that I

have not done this with this particular

machine before, so, this drive bay does

not have any way to connect

or mount inside there. Floppy drive is

just sort of flopping around and if you

look at the side of this drive look at

this thing

you'll see these metal rails, and it just

sort of slides into these two little

grooves, makes it really easy. I don't

have those rails to put on to the side

of this I'm gonna have to look and

figure out what I can do to get this

properly mounted. You know, I don't know

why I didn't think to do this before but

I have this dead IBM AT that I've been

meaning to restore for a while but look

it has one of those 128K boards

I'm sure this drive itself also has the

rails that I'll need but you know I'm

just going to go ahead and make some and

the way I'm going to do that is just by

cutting up some of this flexible PVC

board. And then we really just you know

cut out the same shape and stick some

holes in it, I mean it's just plastic.

There's one. Looks pretty good to me.

And now we have two shoddily made rails, let's see

if this works

screw heads are little bigger than I

thought...

on the other hand I mean, it looks like

it's going to work. Yeah I mean that's

that's going to hold, sweet. Data cable

right here, well how is this going to be

held into place then? Oh yeah I guess I

need this one for the other side, yeah

that's how that works. You can check the

manual and that's what it says to do

"Take this bracket apart and use it for

the pieces for the bottom drive if you

choose to install one" the heck, IBM?

Oh yeah I almost forgot I have the other

128K memory board to test, may as well

okay so this is where the 287 goes in

pretty straightforward all we need to do

is match up that little notch right

there with the notch on the socket that

it goes into, which is facing this way.

Okay!

Well that's that! Right so we've got the

287, 128K board, and a three and a half

inch drive to turn on to see what happens.

oh the memory is still going up

sweet, yay! Okay that's cool don't see the

three and a half inch drive powering on... all

right what's the holdup?

All right unplugged the three and a

half inch drive for now because I don't

know what it's doing. I don't know it's

just not detecting, it's either detecting

only that drive or not at all. Well let's

get into the setup and see if we can

get the RAM board and 287. Ahh "the math

coprocessor has been added to your

system options" yay! Okay should have 640

base memory now that's good. See if it

reboots and takes it. Awesome freakin

finally! Alright well we're getting

somewhere here. So yeah we've got the 287

and hopefully 640K of RAM

Yes, 594K free so let me see if

Keen works because now I mean I'm just

I'm curious

oh EGA card detected oh yeah it looks

like we're doing it man that's crazy

that it requires that specific card in

order to get 128K added to it to get

the full 640. Interesting, a little slow

down there.

Gameplay seems to be fine now actually

never played this on a AT 286 eight

megahertz like this, so that's awesome

I think this is the slowest machine

that I played this on, this is so cool. Yeah,

that's like the only part that seems a

little slow is loading, but I guess that

makes sense. I don't know. "You hear in

your mind it's too bad that you can't

get the three and a half inch drive

working," yes I know, that is

unfortunate. Glad that'll be the next

order of business. Don't need that

anymore so back to the three and a half

inch drive here. I'm just going to go

with my sort of other instinct, here's

the one that connects to the top five

and a quarter inch drive and it has the

secondary one here, "B." And obviously

that's a different connector than what

is on the three and half inch

drive that uses a 34 pin

kind of more standard thing. So I have

this adapter here and this is just

converting the edge connector to a

standard 34 pin thing. Oh my god

it doesn't fit. I don't know how well you can see

this but this little overhang on the

left-hand side of it goes up against the

metal part of the drive. It physically

doesn't fit, this is... it doesn't even need

much it just, yeah, there that should do

it! Bet you can fit now aren't ya! See now, if

if you can fit now actually wanna see if

that were an original part to this

AT and I would not have

bent it but I mean this is just a

generic drive that I picked up years ago

so who cares. Oh they're both making

noise now, that's a thing. Okay please

tell me that that's working

Is it double-sided, no

so is, okay this is supposed to support

1.44 meg, why is it not showing up

you know I thought for sure... okay so see

here's the thing... there's certain

versions of the AT that support a 1.44

meg floppy disk drive. I thought for sure

that this one did, so it's either the

setup program that is like, not

up-to-date, or its... I hope it's not the

BIOS because... *mumbles with irritation*

gonna try SimCity at this point

it's a double sided double density disk which

is 720K. You can tell because it only has one