Zenith Z160 Luggable PC aquired

[Devin]

Picture of the parallel port drive i am using is attached. Looks like it 
will be pretty nice if i get it working, i picked it up in box at a 
scrapyard, the driver floppy was destroyed beyond reading, and took me a 
while to find the drivers for.

https://s20.postimg.org/4t9067ka5/IMG_0026_1.jpg

I appreciate the advice on the drives. I do have some spare 720K and 
1.2MB drives, if one of those will work with the stock controller it 
will be of much better use to me. I do have interest in being able to 
use it on an external monitor  so ill look into tracking down a Zenith 
version of dos.

DOS software is the main focus, not really interested in windows. I have 
an 8 bit ISA sound blaster card, i want to see if i can get some music 
tracker software going on it, or perhaps a BBS / JNOS .

--Devin



On 12/11/2016 6:03 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
>> If it can run DOS 3.20, or depending on WHICH MS-DOS 2.11 is 
>> available, then the 360K drives can be trivially swapped out for 720K.
>
> Your picture shows "generic" MS-DOS 5.00
>
> So, you absolutely can connect 720K drives.  (a 1.4M drive will 
> prob'ly be seen as being 720K)
>
> It definitely can handle a hard drive.  (trivial GOOGLE shows that a 
> 20M drive was available, but ANY XT drive and controller should 
> prob'ly be usable.
> Your parallel port hard drive should be fine, once you make a SPARE 
> system disk with enough extraneous stuff deleted off of it.
>
> TRY to find a copy of ZENITH (NOT ANY OTHER BRAND!!) MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") 
> 2.11 or 3.31
> If you want to be able to switch between the internal monitor and an 
> external one, you will need MODE.COM from one of THOSE two versions.
> (and you will need to stetp on the INT21h function call 30h in 
> MODE.COM, OR MS-DOS 5.00 will need to run SETVER to keep from getting 
> a "Wrong DOS version" error message)
>
>
> If you are crazy enough to want to, you should be able to run Windows 
> 3.00 on it, but NOT 3.10 or above.   Windows, of course, will require 
> more disk space than you currently have.
>