VOGONS


First post, by mwdmeyer

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Hi All,

Here is an interesting machine that I picked up off the side of the road when I was young and have kept it ever since. It still works great (although the BIOS battery is dead, and the BIOS is stored on a floppy disk, which I don't have) and has a few interesting features.

Specs:
AMD 286 10MHz
2.6MB Ram (640k onboard + 2mb ram module).
SCSI HDD
Western Digital 256K inbuilt VGA

So in my mind there are three things of interest

1) It has PS/2 Ports
2) The ram modules are very small and I've never seen anything like it before.
3) The video card uses some PCI looking proprietary connection, the actual VGA connector is on the motherboard.

Photos!

286%20VGA_small.jpg
286%20SIMM_small.jpg
286%20SCSI_small.jpg
286%20RAM_small.jpg
286%20PS2_small.jpg
286%20Motherboard_small.jpg
286%20CPU_small.jpg

Reply 2 of 6, by mjnman

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Hi,
I have the same EPSON model but without memory simm. It's very hard but where i can find this kind of memory? 😊

Reply 3 of 6, by mwdmeyer

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Sorry not sure, I haven't specifically looked for it. Let me know if you need any other photos.

Can you post photos of yours? 😀

Vogons Wiki - http://vogonswiki.com

Reply 4 of 6, by mjnman

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I'm sorry some photos is bad.

Reply 5 of 6, by yawetaG

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keropi wrote:

interesting... too much custom made, looks like an industrial/controller pc converted to desktop or something

Looks like Epson applied the same design logic found on many Japan-exclusive systems (NEC PC-88/98 and clones...which Epson also produced) to their regular AT systems... 😀

Reply 6 of 6, by Capsndave

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I have one of these Epson EL2’s in the garage and a spare MB. It suffered from low base memory and I enquired about one of the proprietary memory modules in the early 1990’s. Spare parts were very expensive and hard to find and I gave up when I found one with a distributor and got a price that was way too expensive. I opted for an add on memory card slotted on to the ISA riser card populated with memory chips. I can’t remember the amount of Ram but I think I doubled it from 2MB to 4MB. The problem with this upgrade was that speed of the onboard memory was 60ns and the add on card was 100ns which hampered the overall performance. In short I was trying to squeeze more performance out of this system than it was capable of.

The design of this system is really neat and compact. I was going to re-engineer the case to create something more powerful but the isa riser card format presented too many obstacles to finding an alternative MB that would work in this case.

It is probably worth a restoration to return it to its intended use with DOS. I can’t remember if I installed Windows 3.1 on it or not, but it still contains its original 20 or 40MB hard disk. Will I do this before I retire? Who knows, it could be sitting around for a long time yet.