First post, by MMaximus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Two years ago I acquired this lot of systems from someone who stored them in his flat and apparently didn't use them for 20 years:
Among these were 3 computers assembled by a French company called "ADDX Systèmes". From what I've read they were around since the early '80s and were making Z80-based systems back then.
The three systems were fairly yellowed and smelly, having been stored in a kitchen for some of them. Two were 286-20 models with identical specifications (dated late 89 - early 90) and one was a later 286-12 model (dated 1991).
Last Christmas I finally had some time to look into them and decided to begin with one of the 286-20:
To my surprise it booted straight away - the rechargeable battery even remembering the CMOS settings for a few hours (not bad for a 1989 motherboard!).
There also seemed to be little to no leakage from the battery so the motherboard was in great condition.
Here's a picture before removing the barrel battery and cleaning the whole thing (I'd be grateful if one of you could identify the board BTW!)
The video card is an 8-bit Orchid Designer 800 (Tseng ET3000AX based) with dual DB15/DB9 connectors.
I haven't been able to trace the manual online so I don't know how to configure the DIP switches for EGA output (it is set to VGA at the moment).
We also have a parallel / serial interface card:
And a Western Digital Floppy / Winchester interface, driving a single 3.5" 1.44Mb FDD and a Kalok KL-320 MFM 20Mb Hard Disk.
The original Toshiba FDD didn't seem to work so I replaced it with a later model.
The Kalok HDD on the other hand works beautifully (no bad sectors according to Scandisk) and makes a very pleasing sound 😀
PSU is a "Soletek LYP-200B" - I cleaned the inside with compressed air.
What's cool is that the different parts are all dated with a sticker on each of them. This shows the system has been pretty much left in the state it left the factory in, and was never upgraded.
Once the photos were done I disassembled the whole thing, cleaned the mainboard and the expansion cards in soapy water, cleaned the case with CIF cream and then attempted the retrobright treatment on the case bezel. This got some of the yellowing out, but not all of it. However I'm glad I stopped at this stage as I found it's very easy to overdo it (as we'll see later).
After everything was clean and dry, it was time to reassemble the system and make a few upgrades, while keeping the period-correct look of the machine:
- Replacing the barrel battery with an external battery
- Adding a 5.25" FDD
- Replacing the Orchid 8-bit VGA with a Tseng ET4000 I found in another machine from the same seller
- Adding a Sound Blaster 2.0 CT1350B
- Adding a 3Com 3C509 Network adapter for easy file transfer using M. Brutman mTCP
Overall it's a nice little system - the case feels quite solid and makes all the right sounds (loud PSU and HDD). I suppose it wasn't so cheap back then. The 20Mb HDD is quite limiting but I only have a few games on it at the moment. It's been fun discovering a class of machine I've never had experience with - as a kid my parents went from XT to 386SX16 and we skipped the 286-era altogether.