Another NEC APCIII question.

From: Dean Davidson <ddavidso_at_metz.une.edu.au>
Date: Sun Feb 28 15:47:49 1999

At 20:54 25/02/99 -0800, Don Maslin wrote:
>On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Jason Willgruber wrote:
>
>> I got the NEC to seek the floppy. Sort of....
>>
>> Does the APC III Use a special version of DOS? If so, what version? I
>> tried 5.0, and it won't work.
>
>The original APC (8" disks) ran 2.11. I would guess that the APC III was
>not too advanced from that and may also have been slightly non-standard.
>

The problem with the APC III was that NEC decided that it wanted nothing
to do with IBM compatability. Therefore the BIOS was completely non
standard. For instance (say he typing with cobwebs on his hands after
getting down the APC III Programmers reference manual)

Keyboard is 18H
Video is 19H
COM1 is 1AH
Printer is 1BH
Timer is 1CH
Disk IO is 1DH
COM2 is 1EH

Consequently, any DOS that assumes IBM BIOS compatability won't work
The last version for the APC III was 2.11

NEC saw the error of their ways late in the life of the APC III and
released a board (the SLE board *) that made the machine (almost) IBM
compatible. If you have one of these fitted, later versions of DOS
should (may?) work.

Also note that to ensure incompatability, the disk drives are 80 track,
not the standard 5" 40 track. This means that the capacity is 720K

I might have (somewhere) the APC III DOS disk.

Note, even without the SLE board these were a great machine. They used
an 8086, not an 8088 and were quite fast for their day.

Dean

* short for Standard Library Extension (they really couldn't bring
  themselves to use that word ... IBM)
Received on Sun Feb 28 1999 - 15:47:49 GMT