Interesting. Wish there was some info on that. Right. Those aspects of typical pc hardware that had been integrated on the chip. Seemingly though, the Tandy 2000 ignored at least some of the extra facilities of the 80186 and simply utilized it as a fast 8086. That board has one of the highest chip counts I've ever seen. But it's also true that video and much else was integrated. DOS->formatted 1.44MB floppy drive that was part of the >unit. It uses an 80C188 and I recall looking at the >27C256 BIOS and noting that it implemented many of >the PC BIOS calls, particularly those for diskette I'd guess the bios was bought, or at least parts of it, from a supplier of such (AMI, Phoenix...). one-->runs Linux (just telnet to it and you get a login). I opened up a color IBM terminal years ago, mainly because I wanted to see if the monitor could be utilized as a vga (apparently had analog inputs, and only r,g,b, and sync lines). Phor phun. 3179 is the # sticking in my head, which might correspond to the model number. But then again it might not. I never actually bothered, but upon cursory observation of the logic board - 8088 based - I was amazed how much "pc stuph" was present. In other words most of the makings of a pc/xt motherboard were present as I recall. Of course there were no provision for disk drives and whatnot, and may not even have had a bios as we know it. I'd like to get another one. BYTE tried to deal with a similar issue issue years ago ~'85 in one of their special issues. They wanted a baseline for IBM compatibility. As loopy as it sounds, the Zenith Z-100 was elected a basis by which all others were compared. Funny that an incompatible was used to judge all the other compatibles. Someone told me that MINIX didn't deal with the bios at all. What about Linux? No, but they figured out a way of doing it w/o cracking the box. There was a couple of games with bugs that upon crashing (intentionally) made a back door available. You need some sort of usb device (a thumb drive was often utilized). Blah blah blah. I'm going there one of these days. I'm just hoping the release of the 360 brings down the price of the original ;). I wrinkled my nose when I found out a sort of special distro was needed, but I guess the hardware differed, however slightly, enough from a vanilla pc to warrant it. There's a kewell book called "Hacking the Xbox" that goes into different aspects of reverse engineering. Doesn't deal with installing Linux too much though. The TIVO's I looked at didn't use intel procs. I want to say PowerPC, but it might even be different from that. And I don't think any (other) game consoles used an 80x86. The Genesis used the 68000 I know. Show me wrong if I'm wrong. __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com