Nar001 wrote on 2026-03-19, 13:35:

Honestly, I'm kind of at a loss, I've gotten retro computers before but I have to admit I've never dealt with one that couldn't be used with a hard drive, and it's hard to search for specific things related to that, since obviously most retro computers used now do at least support them

beside the obvious, what is the difference between have a floppy or a HDD? whatever software that will run on this computer is in kb size, not mb

Not really true!

Despite appearances, most of the systems with thar kind of display are cga compatible, so quite a few things can be run.

Dropping a v20 in it would give 186 instructions, so the 'patched for xt' thread's treasures would be up for a spin.

It likely would *not* run at 20mhz without a new crystal though.

I've thought about it a bit today, and I think the PicoMem would be a good all-rounder to start from, to build an interposer based upgrade for this thing.

It'd be able to run prince of persia and pals after that.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-03-19, 20:25:

Not really true! […]
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Not really true!

Despite appearances, most of the systems with thar kind of display are cga compatible, so quite a few things can be run.

Dropping a v20 in it would give 186 instructions, so the 'patched for xt' thread's treasures would be up for a spin.

It likely would *not* run at 20mhz without a new crystal though.

I've thought about it a bit today, and I think the PicoMem would be a good all-rounder to start from, to build an interposer based upgrade for this thing.

It'd be able to run prince of persia and pals after that.

Prince of Persia is more or less 500kb, still have size for make a boot disk and this game

you can even fit a very reduced windows 3.0 in to a 720k floppy

That machine has 512 KB of RAM, and no reasonable upgrade option.
I doubt if there's any software that requires HDD, but can run with less than 640 KB RAM.
So, attaching additional storage is only about convenience here.

Keep in mind that the software drivers for external storage also occupy some RAM.
I suspect that the least memory-hungry option would be the original DOS 2.11 + LPT NIC driver + NetDrive, which provides 32 MB HDD images, probably enough for such a machine.
With DOS 3.31, you can have 2 GB HDD images, but newer DOS = less free RAM.