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Zenith 286/12 (Z286LP-Plus)

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First post, by Caluser2000

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Currently having lockup issues with my Zenith 286/12 (Z286LP-Plus)system. An interesting thing about this is Zenith advertised this as an Windows 3.0 system giving it the ability to have 8megs of ram. It would normally freeze after 10minutes or so and not turn on occasionaly. A few weeks ago I tried to sort it out but gave up in frustration. Tonight I decided to fire it up again to give it shot. I thought what dos application could I use to do some testing and fired up Star Goose. It's one of the earliest vga scrollers that will just keep running without interruption. Fired it up to let it run. Sure enough the system froze and gave a nice parity error.

Another issue I had was that for some reason the fdd cable was faulty this seems to be why the system wouldn't start. Replaced the cable and it is booting fine.

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It is a slimline design with two serial ports, one parallel port and VGA video on the planar. The cpu is on a card the lays flat at the front LH edge of the planar. There is an option to replace it with a 386SX/16 board. The keyboard port to the left of that on its own card. Looks like it could be upgraded by just replacing the card and setting some jumpers. You plug the AT keyboard into the DIN socket in the front of the machine. There is room for one 3.5" fdd and one 3.5" hdd. These have a guide that is fitted to the LH side and screws on the RHS as you'd expect. It does have 3 ISA slots on the riser.

The bios is gotten at by holding down the ESC key on start up and then typing SETUP at the prompt. Typing a ? gives a few more options and typing TEST brings up a list of advance diagnostics tests you can do on the system. When in setup you can change the usual stuff such as fdds, hdds, ports etc. The hdd area has something like 60 hdd type selections but no option to set your own parameters that I could find. Most likely will have to set up any drives bigger than about 240megs using DDO software or other means. Not a problem really. The ribbon cables in it currently are fairly long so I'll fit some shorter ones.

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Current setup:
286/12 cpu
256k vga, IDE, FDD, two com ports and one parallel port built in to the mobo.
8 megs of ram
240 meg hdd on internal controller
3.5" 1.44 meg fdd on internal controller
Serial mouse on com2
Generic AT enhance keyboard
Parallel port LS120 drive
Parallel port Back Pack CDROM drive
MS Dos 5a
XTree Gold
Some Dos hdd tools
Some Dos games
Windows 3.1 with PFS:Window Works 2.0
CT 1740 sound card
GE2000 (KYE)Genius Lan nic with rj45 and bnc connectors. Set to auto detect media type
Networking using packet driver, mTCP suite, Trumpet Winsock, Wfw 3.11 telnet/ftp programs and WS_IRC.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 1 of 4, by Caluser2000

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Oh well that was an easy fix. Turns out two of my 1meg 30 pin simms were faulty. Star Goose ran for a couple of hours with out incident so time to lock the old girl up for the night.

Edit- Spoke a bit too soon. Dos was fine but when I went to load Windows 3.1 it locked up at the loading logo. Tried in EGA mode and it showed a parity error. Ran Checkit and sure enough another stick of faulty ram. After about two hours of mucking around I decided to look though my drawers to see what was there. In the bottem one was was a 386dx40 bourd and a number of 486 mobos with 1meg 30 pin simms including a vlb board, a 486 board that takes 72pin simms and a nice Socket 7 board I use to use for testing cards bacause it's fitted with pci and iSA slots. Knowing 4megs in the 286 were fine I took four out of a 486 board with eight in it and fitted them to the 286. Now no problems at Windows loads all programs work fine. Found quite a few other items I'd forgotten I had.

Anyway fun n games.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 2 of 4, by Caluser2000

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Found a pdf with an old advert in US newsletter.

The attachment zenith add.jpg is no longer available
Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2019-06-01, 11:22. Edited 1 time in total.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 4 of 4, by Caluser2000

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keropi wrote:

nice that you sorted the ram issue ... yeah 4MB is more than enough for a 286 so not a big loss IMHO

Thanks. Yeah I maxed out my original 286/16 with 4megs of sipps. I just have a nostalgic feeling for 286s. I'd like to get a Harris 20mhz or 25mhz one.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

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