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An incompatibility list for the Olivetti M24, AT&T 6300, Xerox 6060, Logabax 1600

Trixter

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I've been doing some restoration work with my 6300s and thought I'd define a list of oddities and issues I've seen over the years. These are valid for any of the four systems in the title of this thread, as they are all the same system, but I'll refer to them . In no particular order:

If you replace the 8086 with an NEC V30:

  • Geoworks Ensemble fails to load. Likely due to a faulty detection routine, but nobody has debugged it and come up with a patch.
  • The AT&T Enhanced Memory Expansion Board (a version of the AST Rampage AT board modified for the M24's 16-bit bus) will not work. The driver loads, but then hangs. This might be due to timing issues in the driver. Subsequent REMM.SYS drivers were attempted but all fail to interact with the board.
The M24 can't process 16-bit I/O requests properly; they get transposed, but this can be fixed with a bus correction kit. Related to 16-bit I/O transfers failing:
  • You cannot use an Intel Etherexpress 8/16 series NIC in an M24. While that NIC is capable of memory-mapped transfers, it only performs them on AT-class hardware. Without memory-mapped transfers, it falls back to 16-bit port I/O, which fails on M24 systems as previously noted.

The embedded floppy controller is not 100% NEC765 compatible. As a result, some low-level floppy tools such as ImageDisk, Teledisk, and others fail.

If anyone else knows of any, please comment on this thread.
 
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I can't get the palmzip.sys driver for iomega ZIP 100 drives to work with the M24. The effect is that it can not find a drive. I think this is because of some parallel port anomaly. Fortunatelly when using a NEC V30 instead of the 8086 them iomega's guest.exe works fine, so I don't care much.

8088mph demo doesn't work properly, 8086 / V30 is toooooo fast and the OGC video card is not very compatible to original IBM CGA. (Atari PC 3 does much better)

"keyb gr" of MS-DOS 5 hangs. But using "keybgr" from MS-DOS 3.20 in MS-DOS 5 is just fine.

The floppy tools failing on M24 are: teledisk, imd, 22disk, omidisk and some more. PC-Alien and Anadisk are working fine.
 
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8088mph demo doesn't work properly, 8086 / V30 is toooooo fast and the OGC video card is not very compatible to original IBM CGA. (Atari PC 3 does much better)

I wrote part of 8088 MPH, I owned a 6300 decades before that, and even I've never tried running 8088 MPH on my 6300 :) But it should run at least until the rotozoomer, which should indeed look much smoother on a 6300.
 
The M24 adds the following over a 4.77 MHz 8088 CGA system:

- 8 MHz 8086
- 32K of VRAM (and it is addressable in 2 x 16K areas, so could have real 320x200x4 hardware page flipping)
- 640x400x2 graphics (only one video page though)
- The ability to show true underlining (like MDA does) in color text modes

Unfortunately, it suffers from CGA "snow", so this limits the amount of truly cool stuff a demo could do. Also, the internal speaker is barely audible; it's a tiny piezo tweeter with no volume control. Other than a demo 100% in 640x400x2 mode, I'm not sure anything amazing could be done, really.

If you want to see an M24 do neat 640x400x2 stuff, here's a list of software you can grab that fully utilizes that mode: ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/drivers/ATT/6300/Software/
 
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