BASIC rom compatibility

On 13 Jun 2012 at 12:20, Chris Tofu wrote: Nope--I'm referring to the 1982 8086 system brought out by Eagle Computer. IIRC, the MS-DOS floppy format was 800K (8x1024 byte tracks). Not many probably survive, because it was followed in a few months by the utterly-PC-compatible Eagle PC. At one time, Eagle was the darling of retailers--with the later Z80-based models, you opened the packing box, took out the computer, plugged it in and turned it on. Everything was pre-loaded and configured. The word processing program offered with the Eagles was Spellbinder--a very fine bit of software. Eagle used to hold public contests to determine what was the fastest a first-time user could get the hardware up and running. I seem to recall times around 45 seconds. If you don't know the whole story of Eagle and Dennis Barnhart and the bright red Ferrari, you owe it to yourself to read up on it. There were other 8086-based clone-ish systems at the time of the 5150. One was the Stearns PC that came with a copy of MS-DOS, but also something called ST-DOS that addressed a number of compatibility issues with the 5150. Call it a semi-clone. As far as ROM sockets, well, that's a system-by-system thing. Many Taiwanese clones had 5 or 6 28-pin ROM sockets for 64Kb ROMs. Later ones went to one or two 256Kb sockets. You could take one one of those and play with the PROM binaries a bit to get IBM BASIC to map in at F6000 and be good to go. --Chuck --Chuck