First post, by derSammler
Finished my Alcatel ALC 8551. 😀 This is a nice little PC in a plastic housing, reminding me of the Schneider Tower AT series of PCs.
It seems this was was originally released in 1991 or 1992. My unit is the 1993 version with the 486 upgrade and was sold in 1994 with an updated PSU.
The basic specs of the unit are:
* Custom-made Acer mainboard with on-board 386SX-25 (base config)
* Intel 486 DX/2-50 on socket 1 (upgrade option)
* 8 MB RAM (2 MB on-board, 6 MB as additional SIMMs)
* ATi VGA Wonder XL on-board, upgraded to 1 MB
* All important I/O stuff on-board
I've added some goodies:
* DOM-style IDE->CF adapter with a 1 GB card set up as 504 MB
* ESS 1688F-based soundcard with Hizon DB333 wavetable; also interfaces the CD-ROM drive
* Mitsumi FX-400 CD-ROM drive, early one from 1995 with round eject button
* 5.25" disk drive
* internal 3 watt speaker connected to the corresponding header on the sound card - turns itself off when connecting external speakers
* 2 the max "MPEG Wonder" decoder card
When I got the Alcatel, it had an AMI IDE extension ROM added to the option ROM socket on the mainboard that adds LBA addressing. Decided to pull that, as it did not belong there. While I'm now limited to 504 MB, this is plenty for such a system.
It's running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and feels very responsive, despite lacking L2 cache.