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

From: Russ Blakeman <rhblake_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: Mon Jan 18 17:21:47 1999

Bill Sudbrink wrote:

> 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

Half priced because it was essentially a half done machine. No decent
docs, no support. I figure Sanyo made out great on that one. I did lose
interest in it really quick when Soft Sector Mag died one day without
notice though. You're right though - you couldn't do anything without some
sort of hack, to include the power supply not being triggered for more
than just 2 floppies and 640k memory. Put anything more in it like a video
board with memory and it would go into eternal reset/restart until you
pulled the board. Lots of fun with that wonderful 8251 UART too. I did
however like the keyboard mounted reset since it was in use almost more
than the enter key. faster than a PC? The PC was the same on Norton SI
until I added a V20 to both and the Sanyo came out fractionally ahead. The
only faster part was disk access, they did do that right. Of course Sanyo
had no slots for cards to slow it down with either so their wonder-bus
made it very expensive to add a hard drive until the big dump of machines
when all the dealer, magazine, BBS and software support died. I had a lot
of money tied up in mine but I did learn a lot about what a PC or XT does
since I had to try and make the Sanyo do that.
Received on Mon Jan 18 1999 - 17:21:47 GMT