Wildcard 88 Project
A few weeks ago I was at my parents' house and came across my old Leading Edge Model D that my violin teacher gave me around 1998. It was already a 13 years old when I got it, but it had DOS and Basic and that was all I needed. I spent many happy hours copying code from library books and making ASCII art. At some point, it got put in a closet and remained there. When I got it home and cracked it open I found that, unfortunately, the NiCd CMOS battery had leaked and dripped into a number of components on the board. The capacitors in the power supply also leaked and so my options were either to look for another motherboard, which are not readily available, or to try to make another projects with the parts that could be salvaged.
Unlike most other 8088 based machines at the time, the Model D used a Wildcard88, which is basically a PC on a card. Fortunately, someone with way more knowledge and talent than me wanted to preserve these cards. Check out the project here.
Sergey Kiselev’s Wildcard88 Motherboard
I was able to get several boards printed for around $4 each, which is way less than it cost a decade ago when Sergey first created them. My next steps are to salvage whatever parts I can from the Model D board, especially the 68-pin DIN connector.
tags: wildcard88, 8088, x86, pc, xt