Scor­pio News

The general standard of construction is very high, and the unit is quite heavy. Personally I prefer this, unless the unit is to be moved around a lot, since it makes the machine less prone to knocks and bumps, and to external fields. The Fan, Floppy and Winchester drive ran quite quietly, and the machine also felt quite cool, with the air emanating from the fan being just slightly warm. As an Electronics Engineer I have always preferred ‘cool chips’. The temperature at which some equipment runs never ceases to amaze me. I have burnt my fingers on chips in some equipment, and I wonder how long they are going to survive.

I would however have liked to have been able to have seen some minor alterations such as:

a) A hardware ‘Go slower’ switch, on the rear panel.
b) Provision for bringing out drive connector cables at the rear. This may be non-standard in compatibility terms, but it would allow temporary connection of alternative drive types, to give ease of inter-format copying.
c) A more easily removable second floppy panel cut-out.

These points are minor however, since it is possible to get software to make the system run slower, or one can re-configure the EEPROM, and one can find ways of bringing out a lead to connect an external drive – see below.

Software and Documentation

Possibly because the system is a new product and things are not yet fully organised, documentation and software was conspicuous by its absence. The only software supplied was a disk with Hard Disk support, and a ‘Utilities’ disk, with just ONE program – SETUP.COM. Documentation consisted of three A4 sheets with brief details of switch settings, I/O port addresses and connections. There was also a manual on the Hard Disk unit. There was no information on the I/O devices used and their programming in low level languages, nor on any other hardware. Most important, there was no programme to allow user configuration of the system defaults held in the EEPROM.

I understand that these problems will be rectified in the future.

Initially, MSDOS 3.2 was not available but I was able to ‘borrow’ a copy of PCDOS version 2, to start testing the system, and later a copy of PCDOS version 3.2, which allowed me to format floppies correctly and to access the features of the system.

My first exercise was to format and partition the Hard Disk, and to edit CONFIG.SYS to allow the Hard Disk to be recognised. Since DOS cannot access disks larger than 32Mb, the hard disk was set up as two drives, C: and D:, each of 22Mb. System files and DOS files were then copied to the ROOT directory of C:,