NEC APC IV/ PowerMate I - Looking for Info

[ajacocks]

I just acquired an NEC PowerMate I 286, in relatively good condition. The case is pretty empty, though, containing only the motherboard and power supply. I'm looking for documentation on the system, other than the jumper settings, which are available in a couple of places. I'd also be interested in BIOS images, and the oddly-sized 3.5" floppy drive that the machine came with. I'm quite curious what the purpose of the offset 16 bit ISA connector is, though it seems likely to be a proprietary memory card or HDD controller slot.

I've read through the previous threads here, of course, and some of the others on Overclockers.au, and other sites.

Thanks!
- Alex

 

[jafir]

I finally found some time to scan in the manuals for mine. I think @dhau wanted a scan of these too. I've also got the MS-DOS 3.3 and GW-Basic 3.2 and the manuals, but I've not had a chance to scan those yet.

Here is a link to the ROM of one of my machines. I'll need to dig the second one out to see if it's the same:

nec apc iv powermate 1 rom.zip

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

Here is the owner's manual, the setup manual, and the diagnostics manual:

NEC APC IV PowerMate 1.7z

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

The strange floppy drive area is for a half height floppy drive, which I guess aren't that common these days. The manual also shows putting a 3.5" hard drive there instead, which based on the age, would probably also be half height. They should some nice white bezels for the 3.5 or 5 1/4" HDDs. I was thinking of cutting a flat piece of plastic/nylon the difference in thickness between a half height and a third height floppy drive (the common size) and then just using extra long screws to attach it to the mounting bracket... but I haven't done that yet. Maybe someone with a 3D printer could design something a little fancier?

There are more recent versions of these floppy disks if you search out an archive of ftp.necam.com. I'm not sure if it's a bug in these versions, but when I added a 16bit ISA MFM controller and an ST-251-1 and used the floppies I have, the low level format didn't work. I don't recall if it failed, or if it just didn't result in a drive I could format and install DOS on afterwards. I ended up using speedstor, I think, to do the LL format. Maybe a newer version of the NEC setup would have had better results?