Zenith Z160 Luggable PC aquired

[Fred Cisin]

On Sun, 11 Dec 2016, Devin wrote:
> 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.

1.2M will NOT WORK!
720K will

There are some aftermarket floppy disk controller cards that would work in 
that machine that can handle high density drives, but the stock controller 
CAN NOT.

> 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.

Get ZENITH ("Z-DOS") MS-DOS 3.31
There might be more than one version of THAT, so get one explicitly 
intended for that machine.
Although MODE.COM from any DOS version that was intended for THAT machine 
is likely to work.
It may be a trivial BIOS call. 
Besides special video capabilities, that MODE.COM may have other machine 
specific capabilities, and some other aspects of Z-DOS Zenith MS-DOS may 
not be the same as generic MS-DOS.

I think that the Z160 is based closely enough to the Z100 that
http://planemo.org/retro/downloads/z100/manuals/Z-100%20Programmers%20Reference%20Manual-OCR.pdf
is likely to be the correct one.

In stock configuration the video is CGA, so it is POSSIBLE that connecting 
a composite monitor (if the Z160 has the connector) might not require any 
additional software.
Do not connect an MDA monitor unless you are sure that the sync frequency 
is right.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=465&st=1

Don't those machines have a debugging monitor in ROM?  (something that IBM 
does NOT)  Otherwise DEBUG.COM should work.