7 Mar
2005
7 Mar
'05
6:48 a.m.
At 12:00 AM 3/7/05 -0600, you wrote:
I am intimately familiar with the 6300 because it was
my first PC, and
my only PC for 5 years until I went to college. I upgraded the BIOS and
DMA controller so I could run a later version of Microsoft Word (the DOS
version, not the crap windows version), I cut a hole in the case to add a
3rd 720K floppy drive, bored out a hole to add a headphone jack, replaced
my 8086 with an NEC V30, added an 8087, and a hard-drive-on-a-card.
Short of replacing the video card (which was ironically much harder to
do properly than all of the other things I just mentioned), I tricked
that thing out years before adding blinkenlights to cases was cool.
I even found a lower DRAM refresh rate that didn't lock up the
machine so that I could get an additional 10% out of it.
As XTs go they ran quicker than a 5160 just simply because of the 8086 and
16 bit memory, the V30 made things even better.
I don't know why but around here they rarely ever retained their original
monitors, back when an XT based system was still viable for daily use most
of the ones I saw had Taxan Supervision monitors hooked to the original
video card with a custom
cable. Most had the 12" Taxan Supervision IV, but there was also a 17"
Taxan Supervision 770 (I may have the model wrong, but it was definitely
TTL RGBI at SuperCGA resolution, not a Multisync or SVGA).
I did similar tricks back in the day with an Amstrad 1640, which was in
someways more difficult to work with as it had onboard video, and the power
supply was in the monitor. It did have a 640x200x16 color mode before EGA
though (though a version with EGA did come out later). Would have been a
nicer machine if it wasn't stuck with such an awful keyboard and monitor,
though I guess it's to be expected at that price. One company even came
out with a 386 motherboard to fit the oddball case. Being stuck with the
1640s EGA display kind of doomed it though. If I found one I'd be tempted
to stick one of those 486 upgrades in it.