Scor­pio News

In the binder, as supplied, there are several sections:

Plus you could TRY to add the “Colour Monitor Operating Instructions” manual into the binder if you wish, as it is also A5 and is correctly punched.

I have to confess that I have not read the manual in any great detail yet. I have, however, managed to find everything that I have wanted to know so far. I have shown the manual to a few people who have bought various other clones, and the general reaction has been very favourable, as some of these other systems have apparently come with next to nothing. However, as I have said, I cannot really vouch for the quality yet. Sere are a few impressions:

The EGA Manual doesn’t appear to be very good at all. There are various link and switch options on the board, and the manual shows you where they should be in normal use. However, in general it doesn’t say why or when you may wish to alter then.

The Serial Card Manual is better, although still rather terse. It does have the advantage of containing a circuit diagram, and as it’s a very simple board, this could be a good way of confirming that you’ve interpreted switch positions, etc, correctly.

The PC-286 Manual is better still. It too comes with full circuit diagrams. Various drawings in it of the system show that the front panel has had things moved around, but this shouldn’t matter. The manual does NOT assume that you have a Winchester, but that you may have either one or two floppy drives only. Therefore various sections are more complicated than they need be, as it describes loading programs from the master floppy disk, then removing this disk and inserting another, etc.

I have so far spotted two errors in this manual – one gave me a good chuckle, but other readers may not have been so impressed if they actually followed the instructions! The section went:

Formatting Using Two Drives

If you have two disk drives, follow the steps below:

1. Insert the DOS diskette into Drive A.     (Ed. – your MASTER disk)
2. Insert the new diskette into Drive B.
3. Type:

A> FORMAT A: [enter]     (Ed. – your MASTER disk!)

The other error is in the section on the wait-state link. It refers to a diagram, but the diagram shown is the wrong one and is to do with connecting an external battery. I then used the circuit diagrams to work out where the correct link was. I later discovered that there was a drawing of the main board at the very beginning of the manual that showed the correct link anyway. The MS-DOS manuals actually have “Microsoft” on the cover, and inside “Printed in Taiwan under the licence from Microsoft Corporation”. Between them they are a good couple of inches thick, and I have yet to wade through them, but they do look fairly comprehensive. Unlike the other manuals, though, they do not appear to suffer from any Taiwanese English.

Using the system

As stated earlier, there is a program available that purports to show the speed of the often relative to the PC. Once the wait-states had been made software switchable, I got the following results: