Picked this machine up locally among a pretty large lot 15 machines and tons of parts back in November. It's a US model, ex-Uni of Michigan. Someone had unceremoniously written $1 in texta on the cover! Gave it a clean and took some pics, but unfortunately I don't have a transformer (yet) so I haven't fired her up.
The speaker has a May 1984 tag on it, and there is a sticker under the motherboard with a 9 August (IIRC) 1984 build date. The motherboard is a 64-256kb version, with all banks populated, and it has an 8087 installed as well.
The good:
The lack of dust on the PSU fan (and the PSU date code of T8340 - maybe week 40, 1983?) suggests that it's had virtually no use. The system came with 5 expansion cards (CGA, floppy, hard disk, parallel, serial) so the basic IO is covered, and there are slots left over.
The bad:
There's a slightly disturbing bowing to the motherboard on one side, hopefully that doesn't affect the chances of it booting up. The case is clean, but has a knock to the back corner near the power switch, and the backplane is slightly bent too, so it's not quite a perfect fit. Will need a bit of panel beating to get it right.
I've got a 5153 CGA Monitor (it has CGA onboard), a clone XT keyboard (Model F is on its way), and some additional ISA cards to add some 80s multimedia. VGA might be out of character for this build, but I'll test out a couple of cards in any case.
The goals for this project are:
- Buy step-down transformer, and power up! (and then sort out any issues, such as dried out caps, etc.)
- Fix up dented case
- Add 8-bit multimedia
- Test VGA cards out