🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9258@dime.cs.umass.edu> fawcett@CS.UMASS.EDU (Tom Fawcett) writes:
>I recently inherited an XT clone from a friend.  It's made by Eagle [deleted]
>
>1) Is Eagle even still in business? 

No.  The day their stock went public, the president (accidently?) drove
his sports car off a cliff.  The story is longer than that, of course,
but that was the turning point, I think.  At the time, the Eagle Turbo
was getting rave reviews and was one of the fastest machines available.

It has an 8086, with some engineering trick to get the single-byte wide
bus to work with it.  The turbo switch on the front ups the CPU to 8-MHz
instead of 4.77.  It also comes with a fast disk controller from Adaptec
and a fast hard drive from Miniscribe.  My dad's Miniscribe drive began
having motor problems and broke a year or two ago.  In order to use a
standard Seagate drive, he had to buy a standard WD controller and upgrade
the BIOS roms on the motherboard.  Last year he also had to replace the
power supply.  Fortunately, there is a company in Garden Grove, CA.
that services Eagles and maintains their BIOS.  They are quite competent
and are easy to work with:

   K.E. & C.
   714/895-1759

The new BIOS ROMs cost only about $35.  It would be a good idea to upgrade
even if you don't have to right away.

>2) Are there any known (notorious) incompatibilities?  In particular, it came
>with DOS 2.11, which I'd like to upgrade to 3.0.  Is there any reason I
>couldn't/shouldn't do this?

Nope.  But you may have to get the ROM upgrade first.  In general, it is a
very compatible machine.

>3) It has a card with 2 serial ports on it, made by Eagle, that says
>"RS232/2".  The Norton SI program confirms that 2 serial ports are present,
>but I can't get my modem to work with it, and I have a serial port debugging
>program which tells me there's nothing there.  My friend told me the card is
>"probably nonstandard"; anyone have any ideas?  I thought RS232 was pretty
>standardized.

I haven't had any problems with the RS232 card on my dad's.  Ask the guys
at K.E. & C.

>4) My friend told me that EMS probably wouldn't work on it, meaning I'm stuck
>with the 640K limit.  Is this true?  Is there any way of confirming this?

Your friend sounds rather pessimistic.  EMS was designed to work on almost
all XT class machines.  I would think your chances of getting it to work
would be quite high.  The only way to tell for sure is to try it.  But there's
no reason it shouldn't work.  There is no memory address conflict in the
D000 and E000 pages to worry about.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Pipkins
pipkins@imagen.com