Microsoft Xbox One

The beat down looking old PC40-III. Click for more images.

Commodore might have made their fortune with calculators, VIC20s and Commodore 64s, but in the late 80s the Amiga had come along and even with a wonderkind in your product lineup, there's always that one client demanding something IBM compatible. So they let the German engineers loose on the project and lo, the Commodore PC family was born.

These machines are very strange. They have MOS specific chipset parts, NEC and AMD CPUs, oddball hard disk interfaces... they share a lot of infrastructure with the Amiga bridgeboards too. Heck, most these machines have a dedicated port labelled MOUSE that is indeed an Amiga joystick port in disguise. Other fun features are adjustable clock frequency via keyboard shortcuts on the fly... handy for old games that don't want to play nice.

This specific example is the 286 variant Series III PC40. It has the same nifty little chassis as the PC10/20 8088 variants which are quite a bit more common. It featured a factory 40MB hard disk drive, a high density Chinon floppy drive, built-in VGA graphics, a 12MHz AMD-sourced 286 and 1MB RAM onboard.

Specifications

AMD 80286 @ 12MHz (selectable 6, 8 or 12MHz)

1MB RAM

80MB Conner hard disk

Paradise VGA graphics

MS-DOS 5.0 (upgraded from 3.30)

Unique features

The MOS "Frankenmouse" mouse port controller which converts Microsoft Bus Mouse signals into Amiga mouse signals is pretty slick, the variable frequency tomfoolery works a treat too. It allegedly even has an RCA mono output on the back for the PC speaker sound, although that doesn't appear to work on my example at this time.

Personal history

This particular machine was given to me by a client about 15 years ago as he was about to huck it in a skip!