Casey
Veteran Member
Most here would probably sneer at it, but I decided to pick up a "bargain" XT clone on eBay last week. Sold as-is, seller said he couldn't test it. System unit only, no keyboard or display. I figured if nothing else the case & power supply were worth it (~ $74 with shipping).
Got the box, opened it up, and the logo said "Triex Technology PCII." Only valid google hits pointed to the eBay auction. Got lots of hits related to Commodore 8088 clones.
It's a bit rough, definitely needs a cleanup, but I figured I would try to boot it just for laughs. My first guess as to the display (9-pin plus parallel port) was correct, and my old MGA 5151 worked. BIOS boot message displayed
"TRIEX TECHNOLOGY 1985"
"PCII/XT VERSION 4.0"
Got several errors (including memory), so I pulled all cards except the display card. The multi-function card has bad memory, but the 256Kb on the motherboard boots fine. I already mentioned the MGA clone, but what did I find but a Seagate ST-238 and an Adtaptec 2070a rll controller!! Had nothing but good memories about this combo back in the day. Also had a bog-standard XT floppy controller and 2 360Kb floppies.
Ran into trouble in that my old XT (MS-DOS 3.3) could not now create a boot floppy. Bad Tandon drive? Dunno. I'll look at that later. Didn't want to depend on my Zenith 3.2 disks. I dug up my Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 factory boot floppy and that worked. Had trouble getting the drive formatted, but Disk Manager fixed that. Now I have a properly booting ST-238 clone. Pulled the two original half-height drives and dropped in a half-height drive with full-height faceplate. I think it came from a Portable originally.
Found an old 384Kb memory card which worked. The system now boots to 640Kb. Nortons SI (4.5) reports 1.0 for system and 1.3 for hard drive.
I'm surprised to see it doesn't boot to turbo. I tried the standard key combinations (ctl-alt + or -, ctl-alt-/ or \ or Esc), nothing seemed to work. The cpu is a Siemens 8088-2, which according to my research is an 8Mz capable cpu.
The BIOS is on a single chip, with four sockets left open. Looks a lot like a straight XT clone in that respect. Has sockets for 4 banks of ram, one populated with 256K-150ns chips. Oddly enough the motherboard specifies 200ns memory.
Pretty happy with the purchase, all things considered. It would be nice to have an XT turbo motherboard in there with a V20, but that's in the future. Also thinking of picking up a baby-at format 486 board to drop in there instead.
Tried dropping in an "advanced" floppy controller which handles 1.2Mb & 1.44Mb floppies, but kept getting 601 errors. Perhaps the BIOS isn't equipped for that, given the above 1985 date? The hard drive wouldn't boot after I tried that. Ended up running FDISK /mbr which fixed that. Yay! Haven't tried dropping in a spare IDE controller yet, to see if that works. Does anyone here have spare 1.2Mb and/or 1.44 drive available? The only thing I have right now not plugged into another machine is an Epson dual-drive unit.
Also SI reports 32kb display memory. If memory (excuse the pun) serves an MGA card only needs 8kb. Haven't looked closely at dip switches yet, could this be an MGA/CGA switchable card, or Herc clone?
Got the box, opened it up, and the logo said "Triex Technology PCII." Only valid google hits pointed to the eBay auction. Got lots of hits related to Commodore 8088 clones.
It's a bit rough, definitely needs a cleanup, but I figured I would try to boot it just for laughs. My first guess as to the display (9-pin plus parallel port) was correct, and my old MGA 5151 worked. BIOS boot message displayed
"TRIEX TECHNOLOGY 1985"
"PCII/XT VERSION 4.0"
Got several errors (including memory), so I pulled all cards except the display card. The multi-function card has bad memory, but the 256Kb on the motherboard boots fine. I already mentioned the MGA clone, but what did I find but a Seagate ST-238 and an Adtaptec 2070a rll controller!! Had nothing but good memories about this combo back in the day. Also had a bog-standard XT floppy controller and 2 360Kb floppies.
Ran into trouble in that my old XT (MS-DOS 3.3) could not now create a boot floppy. Bad Tandon drive? Dunno. I'll look at that later. Didn't want to depend on my Zenith 3.2 disks. I dug up my Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 factory boot floppy and that worked. Had trouble getting the drive formatted, but Disk Manager fixed that. Now I have a properly booting ST-238 clone. Pulled the two original half-height drives and dropped in a half-height drive with full-height faceplate. I think it came from a Portable originally.
Found an old 384Kb memory card which worked. The system now boots to 640Kb. Nortons SI (4.5) reports 1.0 for system and 1.3 for hard drive.
I'm surprised to see it doesn't boot to turbo. I tried the standard key combinations (ctl-alt + or -, ctl-alt-/ or \ or Esc), nothing seemed to work. The cpu is a Siemens 8088-2, which according to my research is an 8Mz capable cpu.
The BIOS is on a single chip, with four sockets left open. Looks a lot like a straight XT clone in that respect. Has sockets for 4 banks of ram, one populated with 256K-150ns chips. Oddly enough the motherboard specifies 200ns memory.
Pretty happy with the purchase, all things considered. It would be nice to have an XT turbo motherboard in there with a V20, but that's in the future. Also thinking of picking up a baby-at format 486 board to drop in there instead.
Tried dropping in an "advanced" floppy controller which handles 1.2Mb & 1.44Mb floppies, but kept getting 601 errors. Perhaps the BIOS isn't equipped for that, given the above 1985 date? The hard drive wouldn't boot after I tried that. Ended up running FDISK /mbr which fixed that. Yay! Haven't tried dropping in a spare IDE controller yet, to see if that works. Does anyone here have spare 1.2Mb and/or 1.44 drive available? The only thing I have right now not plugged into another machine is an Epson dual-drive unit.
Also SI reports 32kb display memory. If memory (excuse the pun) serves an MGA card only needs 8kb. Haven't looked closely at dip switches yet, could this be an MGA/CGA switchable card, or Herc clone?
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