Thank you so much for your content. If I remember correctly I had this PC growing up from 1989 to more or less 1996. Lost it to time a lot of years ago, your video gave me a lot of memories, good to see it in some way.
Remember it complained about battery problems and stopped booting DOS from hard drive and only giving some weird prompt at boot. Work in IT nowadays but never really understood what happened.
Maybe BIOS settings for the hard drive were stored with the battery and once it was gone could not boot? And always wondered what this special promot was - some commands were similar to MSDOS but was quite weird. Thanks
I bought three ST157A drives on eBay once. Two of the three were usable. I’ve still kept the third as a source for parts if needed. They are 45 MB. I like the size and shape of them too.
Hi! Great video! For the limited hdd options in the bios, you can use Ontrack Disk Manager Dynamic Drive Overlay software. With this, no matter what hdd fixed model is selected in the bios, the computer will work fine and will be able to use the full capacity of the drive (unless it is larger than FAT16 limit, then you'd have to split partitions...)
Great advice. I'd suggest 9.x.x or 10.46, as these support FAT32 and booting from a CD-ROM. 10.46 apparently requires extra RAM, I'm not sure how much. I believe the earliest versions (3.2 and up?) only support FAT12, not even FAT16. Many of these are available on winworld.com (except version 10). I forgot about this gem, I'm only recently back into retro PCs, but I had a small collection back in the late 90s.
@@RetroSpector78 looked like it pooled on top of the metal, especially if there was an indent very possible none hit the edges/cracks that led inside the system. Good thing too lol, much more of a mess or damage
I'd like to have a modern PC inside a retro case with an actual working 1.44MB floppy. I'd also like it to say, "Hello Dave". Which is weird being that my name is not Dave.
Really nice looking case. As far as I know, we didn't have Phillips machines imported here in the states. It's always nice to see overviews of the machines that I have never seen in person before.
:) Well .... whoever came up with soldering them directly on to the board even more. I don't really mind if they are socketed. You can still buy them new and they are part of computing history I guess so I don't really mind them in that way.
@@RetroSpector78 How much do they cost? It's probably not comparable to a cost of a coin cell today but I bet coin cells were more expensive back then.
It had a very short lifespan... I believe the IBM PC compatible division only lasted for a couple of years before it was sold to Digital Equipment Corporation and subsequently dismantled.
Philips as an IBM PC compatible brand certainly lasted for more than a couple of years. I used my dad's IBM PC compatible Philips that was made in 1986 (I still have one of the manuals), and in the 90s the local book store was selling Philips MPCs - a standard which dates it to no earlier than 1991.
Very strange that you seem to have had bad luck with the ST--157A models. These are usually very reliable drives. I own 5 of them and only one is faulty but seems to work OK if I cool a certain chip using ice spray so I think it would work just fine with a different PCB. One had a problem with a misaligned connector (the one on the LED side of the drive). After disconnecting it and using contact spray it works like new. This exact drive was shipped to me wrapped only in ONE(!) layer of thin cardboard and survived! I would definitely not recommend this shipping method, that's for sure! These drives are still quite available on eBay. Prices are starting to go up, though. So if you want an original drive for this PC you might want to look for it sooner rather than later ^^ Good luck! P.S.: There are plenty of other nice options in the 40MB range. Check out my video on 40MB drives if you like ...
Philips is a dutch company, but it had a plant in Montréal (Québec) to assemble their PCs. That's probably why the setup program that you found is in french.
@@RetroSpector78 If you look in the back of the computer, you will probably read: "Assemblé au Canada - Assembled in Canada". Unfortunately, Philips closed the plant after a few years of operation. Why? I don't know. Corporate decision? Too much competition in the IBM PC compatible market?
Philips came to Montréal because it bought Micom which was making computers here. After the deal, the computers were sold under the name Philips-Micom, and eventually Philips. pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=151 Comment from Michel Dupont on Wednesday, December 28, 2016: " I remember going to the opening of the brand new Philips factory in Ville St-Laurent after they bought Micom."
Comment from Jane Blake on Saturday, May 14, 2011 "I worked at Philips,in the Medical Systems Divison. For its time, the Micom was a revolutionary breakthrough in word processing."
Hehe ... thx ... it’s just a really small random sample ... should put my marketing department to work and have all my really cool and historically relevant cases always in frame :)
I have a few 157's here. Often they're left unparked and don't fare well and have head crashes and they often seal poorly and have moisture damage. Of the many I've worked through, some are salvageable after a low-level format. These things seem particularly seceptible to de-MFM/RLL encoding due to age which the low level format to re-map out the defect list can help with. I have two that work now. Nice video and nice system!
there does seem to be substantial surface damage on the platters so I doubt I'll ever get them to work again. There was also a sticker "Do not low level format !" on it but in this case I will gladly ignore it. Given that this is an IDE drive, what tool would you recommend for this ?
@@RetroSpector78 The "Do not low level format!" is because if the geometry is set wrong in the BIOS, then it will be used during the CHS translation and mostly brick the drive. This caused a lot of returns, and given they came pre-LLF'd at the factory Segate decided to put that on some. Docs specify it should be LLF'd in some circumstances but this sticker scared off most plebs. I use an old Commodore 286 as it has a utility in the BIOS to do it. MFM's I LLF using a VAXStation2000. They have routines in the PROM. RLL's and DOS MFM's if they're hanging off a WDC controller card you can do from inside MessyDOS's debug.exe utility. You fire it up, jump to the routines in the card PROM and go from there. That's discussed here: web.archive.org/web/20071109070112/support.microsoft.com/kb/60089
I've done lots of LLFs on MFM and RLL drives using a variety of controllers (Western Digital / Seagate / Adaptec / IBM), but never with an IDE drive like the Seagate 157A.
The ST157A has an auto-park feature so there is no need to park the heads manually. The ST157A can be low level formatted but from what I read it just pretends to do so and reports the status of each sector back to the formatting tool since it is the IDE variant which has it's own dedicated controller. Only MFM / RLL drives with external MFM / RLL controller can do a real low level format. At least that's what I read. I'm not sure if this applies for the stepper motor IDE drives which this one is.
This NEC monitor at the end looks beautiful, but the settings seem odd, the image might be too bright and something's wrong at the right of the picture.
I forgot to clean it actually :) And indeed brightness was set too high. I was hoping this one would be able to sync up an EGA videochannel but I unfortunately only the NEC Multisync 3D does that.
@@RetroSpector78 EGA/CGA monitors are so hard to come by nowadays :/ Also I think a very old standard of VGA also used the 9 pin connector. That makes me wonder if my one and only EGA/CGA/MDA monitor (that's a nice multisync monitor ... with some issues with colors) can display VGA as well, because it has a "Analog" setting on the back amongst other settings.
It’s a weird thing .... I have 2 identical cases. One is yellow and the other is not .... I have a mouse that is yellow on the right hand side, and looks brand new on the left. I have keyboards where some random keys are completely yellow and the others are not.
@@RetroSpector78 you may have figured this out, but the yellow is from sunlight on plastic that was "fireproofed" with Bromide(I think?) Plastic without this treatment, or if entirely kept out of sunlight, remain white. The apparent "randomness" is simply from odd sunlight angles from nearby windows.
Hi, just viewed your video. I've 1 of this PC from work in 1999 and just dig it out from my basement. I managed to do add a CMOS battery holder on top of the dallas RTC and downloaded the setup software and everything was working fine. I was tried to use the 5 1/4 inch floppy but it wouldn't work at all and after a few attempts the 3 1/2 inch floppy failed too. I've tried a few (working in another PC)spare 3 1/2 inch floppy drives and they all failed afterwards. I just wondered is there something I missed, or the drive controller failed !
Ever since the 8-bit guy has shown that the original factory where these Dallas chips were made has since been destroyed, I take great pleasure and see it as karma ;)
You state a couple of times that there is only one expansion card in this computer but at the start of the video, when you first remove the case, there is clearly two.
16:08 nope...those matsushita 5 inch floppies they develop poor contact on the sqaure chip next to the power connector...tap on the chip and the problem comes back...it appears to be the stepper driver or something like that...just reflow the solder to permanently fix the issue
Hello, I'm really liking most of your videos and I'm learning a lot, so thank you very much for such a great content! One question, have you ever replaced a BIOS battery with something like a capacitor or a rechargeable battery? Any pros/cons?
It looks like the marks on the platter of the ST157A is from moisture on the platter possibly. Very odd. Do you still have both of the failed ST157A drives?
Just burn XTIDE-Bios to a 27c256 and drop it in an old ethernet nic bootrom socket. After that, the PC can use every modern ide drive / cf card without any problems.
I can totally recommend the cheap TL866II (aka MiniPro 2 / XGPro).When everything fails, i can send you a preprogrammed one. Another great alternative is the Lo-tech ISA ROM Board.You can flash it from DOS and use it to map anything inside your memory. www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_ROM_Board Flashing EPROMs (not EEPROMs) - which are mostly used on older network cards - often requires UV light to erase them. You can also use 28XX-eeproms but have to interchange some wires. (see datasheets)
its like tandy machine with memory errors don't matter what memory you add to machine...it only recognize default memory settings just philips thought it one step ahead by including setup for cmos since tandy don't setup cmos...something what IBM jr do well in regards ...CMOS beginnings to support all kinds of memory
That is a much better 286 than mine, 30 Pin Sin Modules, Onboard IDE an I/O Ports, I have just onboard DRAM of 640K and i can´t Upgreat (or i do not know how) Great Video. But my 20MB MFM HDD Works well 100%
Hello ! I have a similar computer, and i get the error POD: Keyboard error detected (test 3B) What could be the problem ? I saw you also had this problem...
Hello Retrospector, I recently got a Philips P3230 and am also having problems with the Bios. Can you tell me where you found the setup disk because I can't find it. Thank you very much in advance for the information. (My 3230 has an Rodime 3088A Harddisk)
@@RetroSpector78 Checked out some. Good work on that nice decked out 486 rig. That corroded IBM with the battery mod worries me a little though, because i'm planning that exact same mod on my 286 right now with 3 aa rechargeables.
Philips 286, oh the memories.... was one of the more common "ibm-clones" locally here in Norway but i notice some differences. here none was installed with the 5,25" floppy and just the 3,5". and also never seen em with Chips VGA cards here, only Paradise cards. also a lot of WD 48MB drives here, no Seagate's and every single one had Windows 3.0 installed though many never even booted into it
wait... never booted from it? Linux requires a 386 and "paging memory" I believe, so Swedes were in love with MS-DOS? There was in '99 a great essay online called, "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" by novelist Neal Stephenson. He wasn't just praising linux, but also DOS over Windows. It takes longer to learn, but it's much more efficient once one learns the commands.
@@squirlmy old post but hey... :P "never even booted into it" as never starting up Windows 3.0 but staying in DOS. it wasn't before later systems that going right into Windows became a thing when systems wasn't completely skimped on RAM, though there are 286 systems that can handle not just an upgrade to 2 or 4MB but even 8 and 16MB as 16MB is the limit of the 286 itself. i personally have an PC-Chips M216 system with an Harris 286 25MHz with 16MB of RAM, extremely overkill but it means that i can run any game in Windows mode and with CD-ROM and Audio at all time. back in the day that would been extreme waste of recourses and better to just use a command to disable un-needed stuff to free up RAM.
I suggest swapping the BIOS in 286s to ones that have setup utilities built in, unless of course originality must be retained. It's just much easier in my opinion
Not really .... it's nice to have it time period correct but not all that important for these 286 machines. bought an eeprom reader/writer recently so might give that a try indeed. Been also thinking about using the xt ide universal bios in a networking card for this one.
@@RetroSpector78 If you do end up trying other 286 BIOSes, I recommend the AMI one. It has custom hard drive support and low level formatting built in.
Philips pcs of that style of case have a very rough finish on the paint , the paint is rough and porous and it always picks up dirt moisture and mold and its very very hard to remove with normal methods...the same happens with the Philips nms9100 xt clone...if you use concentrated oven cleaner (red in colour) and let it soak for 10 minutes then pressure wash it it comes out like new no scrubbing required...or you can use concentrated wheel cleaner for cars...dont use the supermarket crap, buy it in auto detail store or parts store
i hate those Dallas/ODIN/Benchmarq RTC batteries but they are not as bad as those barrel batteries, those things are the cancer, they'll leak all over the motherboard and damage them.
Tell me about it ... have this IBM 5170 desktop here that was probably stored upright, and the barrel battery on the top expansion card leaked and due to the orientation of the case all of it leaked on the expansion cards below it, creating these weird stalactite structures on the expansion cards .... hope I'll be able to get everything up and running again.
I've seen this so called "water damage" before its actually some sort of oil lubricant or wd40 resuidue, as water would corrode or rust the steel chassis as opposed to an oily residue which would look like some kind of wet spot or liquid was spilled.
I heard "Lo", maybe because I'm used to it? It comes from King James Bible Genesis 15:3 "And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir." In those times of handwritten Bibles, look was shortened to lo, but not much since, except for this exclamation.
I find the "magic eraser" sponges are great for pc case restoration; www.mrclean.com/en-us/shop-products/magic-erasers The head shaft freeze up is just dried up grease, I think. A little wd-40 dissolves the grease.
Thank you so much for your content. If I remember correctly I had this PC growing up from 1989 to more or less 1996. Lost it to time a lot of years ago, your video gave me a lot of memories, good to see it in some way.
Remember it complained about battery problems and stopped booting DOS from hard drive and only giving some weird prompt at boot. Work in IT nowadays but never really understood what happened.
Maybe BIOS settings for the hard drive were stored with the battery and once it was gone could not boot? And always wondered what this special promot was - some commands were similar to MSDOS but was quite weird. Thanks
I bought three ST157A drives on eBay once. Two of the three were usable. I’ve still kept the third as a source for parts if needed. They are 45 MB. I like the size and shape of them too.
I have a sea gate st-157 and it hasn't skipped a beat
Hi! Great video! For the limited hdd options in the bios, you can use Ontrack Disk Manager Dynamic Drive Overlay software. With this, no matter what hdd fixed model is selected in the bios, the computer will work fine and will be able to use the full capacity of the drive (unless it is larger than FAT16 limit, then you'd have to split partitions...)
Great advice. I'd suggest 9.x.x or 10.46, as these support FAT32 and booting from a CD-ROM. 10.46 apparently requires extra RAM, I'm not sure how much. I believe the earliest versions (3.2 and up?) only support FAT12, not even FAT16. Many of these are available on winworld.com (except version 10). I forgot about this gem, I'm only recently back into retro PCs, but I had a small collection back in the late 90s.
Honestly it doesn't look like water damage. On metal it wouldn't stain like this I think. I think it could've been some oil or electrolyte whatever.
Possibly ... weird how there wasn’t any damage to the mainboard. Everything inside actually looked brand new.
If water had been sitting on the metal for a long time it would have at least started to rust.
@@RetroSpector78 looked like it pooled on top of the metal, especially if there was an indent very possible none hit the edges/cracks that led inside the system. Good thing too lol, much more of a mess or damage
I'd like to have a modern PC inside a retro case with an actual working 1.44MB floppy. I'd also like it to say, "Hello Dave". Which is weird being that my name is not Dave.
ua-cam.com/video/tgI7kIkwca8/v-deo.html
Nice reference dude!
Really nice looking case. As far as I know, we didn't have Phillips machines imported here in the states. It's always nice to see overviews of the machines that I have never seen in person before.
That is a beautiful PC, I really enjoyed the video :)
Whoever came up with the Dallas Real-Time Clock Chip should be beaten.
:) Well .... whoever came up with soldering them directly on to the board even more. I don't really mind if they are socketed. You can still buy them new and they are part of computing history I guess so I don't really mind them in that way.
Great business model though if they're still being made today because people are having to replace them every 5-10 years lol.
@@RetroSpector78 How much do they cost? It's probably not comparable to a cost of a coin cell today but I bet coin cells were more expensive back then.
Still a nice looking pc. Never knew that Philips made pc’s, except from the msx line.
It had a very short lifespan... I believe the IBM PC compatible division only lasted for a couple of years before it was sold to Digital Equipment Corporation and subsequently dismantled.
Philips as an IBM PC compatible brand certainly lasted for more than a couple of years. I used my dad's IBM PC compatible Philips that was made in 1986 (I still have one of the manuals), and in the 90s the local book store was selling Philips MPCs - a standard which dates it to no earlier than 1991.
Very strange that you seem to have had bad luck with the ST--157A models. These are usually very reliable drives. I own 5 of them and only one is faulty but seems to work OK if I cool a certain chip using ice spray so I think it would work just fine with a different PCB. One had a problem with a misaligned connector (the one on the LED side of the drive). After disconnecting it and using contact spray it works like new. This exact drive was shipped to me wrapped only in ONE(!) layer of thin cardboard and survived! I would definitely not recommend this shipping method, that's for sure! These drives are still quite available on eBay. Prices are starting to go up, though. So if you want an original drive for this PC you might want to look for it sooner rather than later ^^ Good luck! P.S.: There are plenty of other nice options in the 40MB range. Check out my video on 40MB drives if you like ...
I love pc restorations. but to unstiffen floppy drives, use lithium spray or something ( I've seen it before but idk what it's called)
Lithium Grease
Philips is a dutch company, but it had a plant in Montréal (Québec) to assemble their PCs. That's probably why the setup program that you found is in french.
Did not know that. Thx for the info.
@@RetroSpector78 If you look in the back of the computer, you will probably read: "Assemblé au Canada - Assembled in Canada".
Unfortunately, Philips closed the plant after a few years of operation. Why? I don't know. Corporate decision? Too much competition in the IBM PC compatible market?
Philips came to Montréal because it bought Micom which was making computers here. After the deal, the computers were sold under the name Philips-Micom, and eventually Philips.
pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=151
Comment from Michel Dupont on Wednesday, December 28, 2016:
" I remember going to the opening of the brand new Philips factory in Ville St-Laurent after they bought Micom."
Comment from Jane Blake on Saturday, May 14, 2011
"I worked at Philips,in the Medical Systems Divison. For its time, the Micom was a revolutionary breakthrough in word processing."
Philips Computers :
www.wikiwand.com/en/Philips_Computers
How did I not find your channel earlier? Your content is great.
Greetings from a fellow Belgian!
Blame google :)
6:12 So many great cases in the background. Thanks for the video. Good job on the restoration!
Hehe ... thx ... it’s just a really small random sample ... should put my marketing department to work and have all my really cool and historically relevant cases always in frame :)
@@RetroSpector78 From the videos I've seen, you've got a pretty sweet collection. Look forward to seeing more.
I had a P3202 and a P3204. Still have. No IDE, but MFM.
I have a few 157's here. Often they're left unparked and don't fare well and have head crashes and they often seal poorly and have moisture damage. Of the many I've worked through, some are salvageable after a low-level format. These things seem particularly seceptible to de-MFM/RLL encoding due to age which the low level format to re-map out the defect list can help with. I have two that work now. Nice video and nice system!
there does seem to be substantial surface damage on the platters so I doubt I'll ever get them to work again. There was also a sticker "Do not low level format !" on it but in this case I will gladly ignore it. Given that this is an IDE drive, what tool would you recommend for this ?
@@RetroSpector78 The "Do not low level format!" is because if the geometry is set wrong in the BIOS, then it will be used during the CHS translation and mostly brick the drive. This caused a lot of returns, and given they came pre-LLF'd at the factory Segate decided to put that on some. Docs specify it should be LLF'd in some circumstances but this sticker scared off most plebs. I use an old Commodore 286 as it has a utility in the BIOS to do it. MFM's I LLF using a VAXStation2000. They have routines in the PROM. RLL's and DOS MFM's if they're hanging off a WDC controller card you can do from inside MessyDOS's debug.exe utility. You fire it up, jump to the routines in the card PROM and go from there. That's discussed here: web.archive.org/web/20071109070112/support.microsoft.com/kb/60089
I've done lots of LLFs on MFM and RLL drives using a variety of controllers (Western Digital / Seagate / Adaptec / IBM), but never with an IDE drive like the Seagate 157A.
The ST157A has an auto-park feature so there is no need to park the heads manually. The ST157A can be low level formatted but from what I read it just pretends to do so and reports the status of each sector back to the formatting tool since it is the IDE variant which has it's own dedicated controller. Only MFM / RLL drives with external MFM / RLL controller can do a real low level format. At least that's what I read. I'm not sure if this applies for the stepper motor IDE drives which this one is.
This NEC monitor at the end looks beautiful, but the settings seem odd, the image might be too bright and something's wrong at the right of the picture.
I forgot to clean it actually :) And indeed brightness was set too high. I was hoping this one would be able to sync up an EGA videochannel but I unfortunately only the NEC Multisync 3D
does that.
@@RetroSpector78 EGA/CGA monitors are so hard to come by nowadays :/
Also I think a very old standard of VGA also used the 9 pin connector. That makes me wonder if my one and only EGA/CGA/MDA monitor (that's a nice multisync monitor ... with some issues with colors) can display VGA as well, because it has a "Analog" setting on the back amongst other settings.
Usually cases of computers tend to be yellow but this one is clean
Except the botttom
It’s a weird thing .... I have 2 identical cases. One is yellow and the other is not .... I have a mouse that is yellow on the right hand side, and looks brand new on the left. I have keyboards where some random keys are completely yellow and the others are not.
@@RetroSpector78 you may have figured this out, but the yellow is from sunlight on plastic that was "fireproofed" with Bromide(I think?) Plastic without this treatment, or if entirely kept out of sunlight, remain white. The apparent "randomness" is simply from odd sunlight angles from nearby windows.
This is like electronic archaeology but the only difference is that you bring the mummy back to life.
Hi, just viewed your video. I've 1 of this PC from work in 1999 and just dig it out from my basement. I managed to do add a CMOS battery holder on top of the dallas RTC and downloaded the setup software and everything was working fine. I was tried to use the 5 1/4 inch floppy but it wouldn't work at all and after a few attempts the 3 1/2 inch floppy failed too. I've tried a few (working in another PC)spare 3 1/2 inch floppy drives and they all failed afterwards. I just wondered is there something I missed, or the drive controller failed !
Really enjoy your videos! Subbed
Thx a lot ... appreciate it ! Spread the word ! :)
Ever since the 8-bit guy has shown that the original factory where these Dallas chips were made has since been destroyed, I take great pleasure and see it as karma ;)
You state a couple of times that there is only one expansion card in this computer but at the start of the video, when you first remove the case, there is clearly two.
16:08 nope...those matsushita 5 inch floppies they develop poor contact on the sqaure chip next to the power connector...tap on the chip and the problem comes back...it appears to be the stepper driver or something like that...just reflow the solder to permanently fix the issue
Hello, I'm really liking most of your videos and I'm learning a lot, so thank you very much for such a great content!
One question, have you ever replaced a BIOS battery with something like a capacitor or a rechargeable battery? Any pros/cons?
It's not worth the trouble. Rechargable batteries fail way earlier than primary cells here, since the load current is super low.
It looks like the marks on the platter of the ST157A is from moisture on the platter possibly. Very odd. Do you still have both of the failed ST157A drives?
Just burn XTIDE-Bios to a 27c256 and drop it in an old ethernet nic bootrom socket. After that, the PC can use every modern ide drive / cf card without any problems.
Yep ... also on my to-do list .... but need to order an eeprom programmer first
I can totally recommend the cheap TL866II (aka MiniPro 2 / XGPro).When everything fails, i can send you a preprogrammed one.
Another great alternative is the Lo-tech ISA ROM Board.You can flash it from DOS and use it to map anything inside your memory.
www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_ROM_Board
Flashing EPROMs (not EEPROMs) - which are mostly used on older network cards - often requires UV light to erase them. You can also use 28XX-eeproms but have to interchange some wires. (see datasheets)
its like tandy machine with memory errors don't matter what memory you add to machine...it only recognize default memory settings just philips thought it one step ahead by including setup for cmos since tandy don't setup cmos...something what IBM jr do well in regards ...CMOS beginnings to support all kinds of memory
I'm guessing these head crashes occur because people don't park the hard drives before moving the computer/putting to storage....?
If it is mold, it can easily be removed with chlorine based bleach. Just try it on a small part first to see that it does not affect the paint.
That is a much better 286 than mine, 30 Pin Sin Modules, Onboard IDE an I/O Ports, I have just onboard DRAM of 640K and i can´t Upgreat (or i do not know how) Great Video. But my 20MB MFM HDD Works well 100%
look at texelec.com and Lo-tech, you might get up to 2MB with just an ISA card.
I'm looking for that BIOS setup for my 286. Where did you find your version?
Hello ! I have a similar computer, and i get the error POD: Keyboard error detected (test 3B)
What could be the problem ? I saw you also had this problem...
Made by Philips and still working!
Hello Retrospector, I recently got a Philips P3230 and am also having problems with the Bios. Can you tell me where you found the setup disk because I can't find it. Thank you very much in advance for the information. (My 3230 has an Rodime 3088A Harddisk)
It's oké, I found it
Could you share the setup utility, please? It's only fair to give back to the community that gave you an entire vintage computer :)
Couldn't you make a socket of some kind for a replaceable battery? As in something similar to what people do to Sega Saturn and I think DC consoles.
Infamous Dallas? Wait until you meet Mr. Barrel battery. :P
You should check out some of my other videos... have met him a couple of times already :)
@@RetroSpector78 Checked out some. Good work on that nice decked out 486 rig. That corroded IBM with the battery mod worries me a little though, because i'm planning that exact same mod on my 286 right now with 3 aa rechargeables.
Philips 286, oh the memories....
was one of the more common "ibm-clones" locally here in Norway but i notice some differences.
here none was installed with the 5,25" floppy and just the 3,5". and also never seen em with Chips VGA cards here, only Paradise cards.
also a lot of WD 48MB drives here, no Seagate's
and every single one had Windows 3.0 installed though many never even booted into it
wait... never booted from it? Linux requires a 386 and "paging memory" I believe, so Swedes were in love with MS-DOS? There was in '99 a great essay online called, "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" by novelist Neal Stephenson. He wasn't just praising linux, but also DOS over Windows. It takes longer to learn, but it's much more efficient once one learns the commands.
@@squirlmy old post but hey... :P
"never even booted into it" as never starting up Windows 3.0 but staying in DOS.
it wasn't before later systems that going right into Windows became a thing when systems wasn't completely skimped on RAM, though there are 286 systems that can handle not just an upgrade to 2 or 4MB but even 8 and 16MB as 16MB is the limit of the 286 itself.
i personally have an PC-Chips M216 system with an Harris 286 25MHz with 16MB of RAM, extremely overkill but it means that i can run any game in Windows mode and with CD-ROM and Audio at all time.
back in the day that would been extreme waste of recourses and better to just use a command to disable un-needed stuff to free up RAM.
8:35 Made in Canada!
I suggest swapping the BIOS in 286s to ones that have setup utilities built in, unless of course originality must be retained. It's just much easier in my opinion
Not really .... it's nice to have it time period correct but not all that important for these 286 machines. bought an eeprom reader/writer recently so might give that a try indeed. Been also thinking about using the xt ide universal bios in a networking card for this one.
@@RetroSpector78 If you do end up trying other 286 BIOSes, I recommend the AMI one. It has custom hard drive support and low level formatting built in.
Your health is very nice Video
Philips pcs of that style of case have a very rough finish on the paint , the paint is rough and porous and it always picks up dirt moisture and mold and its very very hard to remove with normal methods...the same happens with the Philips nms9100 xt clone...if you use concentrated oven cleaner (red in colour) and let it soak for 10 minutes then pressure wash it it comes out like new no scrubbing required...or you can use concentrated wheel cleaner for cars...dont use the supermarket crap, buy it in auto detail store or parts store
hi any chance you have the jumper layout for this one? or any other helpful mb info bits -
i am attempting a restoration on the same machine :)
I also saw one of my fondest childhood memories in your videos! I'll also give you a box of mould and water damaged electronics for it!
i hate those Dallas/ODIN/Benchmarq RTC batteries but they are not as bad as those barrel batteries, those things are the cancer, they'll leak all over the motherboard and damage them.
Tell me about it ... have this IBM 5170 desktop here that was probably stored upright, and the barrel battery on the top expansion card leaked and due to the orientation of the case all of it leaked on the expansion cards below it, creating these weird stalactite structures on the expansion cards .... hope I'll be able to get everything up and running again.
Hi! Im looking for a Philips P2230 286 if you have seen one
I've seen this so called "water damage" before its actually some sort of oil lubricant or wd40 resuidue, as water would corrode or rust the steel chassis as opposed to an oily residue which would look like some kind of wet spot or liquid was spilled.
its near the keyboard socket so maybe someone had problems with bad connection and gave it a squirt of something 😉
2A monitor it works with Amiga /ST too :)
Board says made in Canada, perhaps that is why the utility is in French.
@10:24, oh god it's like the sound of them cleaning your teeth at the dentist! D:
It's not 'Lord and Behold' but 'Lo and Behold' - 'Lo' comes from the word 'Look' ;-)
I heard "Lo", maybe because I'm used to it? It comes from King James Bible Genesis 15:3 "And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir." In those times of handwritten Bibles, look was shortened to lo, but not much since, except for this exclamation.
3:46 I see one boulched cap up
Love your image.
There are indellible marker markings on the tops but none of them looked bulged to me.
i didn't know sans had a hard drive
Ooooooh Philips 😜
I find the "magic eraser" sponges are great for pc case restoration;
www.mrclean.com/en-us/shop-products/magic-erasers
The head shaft freeze up is just dried up grease, I think. A little wd-40 dissolves the grease.
Why on Earth would anyone integrate a battery into a chip? That's awful design.
Also, it's a Seagate drive. It's guaranteed to fail.
it was created by satan
Seagate of this era was not great, but it was not that bad, compared to, let's say Quantum hdd
;)
Use some lube on that drive or it's gonna get stuck again
Yeah ... should have done that. ordered some now and will apply it to the fleet ...
@@RetroSpector78 Very nice. That drive is gonna thank you for it. :)
im dutch philips is not a great pc manufactor lets make things better medical and home stereo the are really good pc hellno