Sanyo 55x detractors (was:RE: IBM Floppy...)

From: Bill Sudbrink <bill_at_chipware.com>
Date: Mon Jan 18 16:43:55 1999

Russ Blakeman [rhblake_at_bigfoot.com] wrote:

> Sanyo MBC-55x-2 series had a 4 floppy controller but DOS saw only
> A: and B: and it's hacked DOS used it quite well. The bum end of
> it was that RAM disks and hard drives went to E: by defualt. An
> aftermarket DOS (name escapes me now) made use of them and even
> pushed the hard drive drive (if equipped) to C: and routed the
> others around rather than trying the tricky "assign" command to
> do this. That was the only real nice thing about that silver piece
> of human waste. Who would have thought a PC level machine would
> have no ALT key?

Come on now, what you don't seem to remember is that it was less than
half as expensive as any other similar machine at the time. And no,
I'm not prejudiced because I wrote the Byte magazine review of it. :)
It's a great hackers machine because almost nothing is in ROM and with
a little hardware hacking it could be made pretty close to an IBM PC
in terms of compatibility and a heck of a lot faster.

Bill Sudbrink
Received on Mon Jan 18 1999 - 16:43:55 GMT