Apricot PC Xi

[NeXT]

I've been chasing down a Xen for nearly 20 years now with no success but I was surprised when recently I was offered this little machine which I really couldn't nitpick. It was an Apricot.
The PC Xi is the Apricot PC, but with a 10mb hard disk, more ram and in charcoal black, otherwise it was still the same under the hood.

It's very clean, came with piles of documentation and software, it has an aftermarket V30 and BIOS upgrade and best of all it works! I don't think I've ever seen a Rodime drive behave this well. The floppy drive likewise needed the usual regreasing but reads and writes diskettes fine.
It also came with some REALLY nice product pamphlets and a brochure for the Apricot Portable. I am currently hunting down a scanner large enough to take it because while I can find the pamphlets I ahve never seen the brochure.

 

[NeXT]

Whoops! Migrated a photobucket account and it broke all the image links. Here. lets try this again.

I've been chasing down a Xen for nearly 20 years now with no success but I was surprised when recently I was offered this little machine which I really couldn't nitpick. It was an Apricot.
The PC Xi is the Apricot PC, but with a 10mb hard disk, more ram and in charcoal black, otherwise it was still the same under the hood.

It's very clean, came with piles of documentation and software, it has an aftermarket V30 and BIOS upgrade and best of all it works! I don't think I've ever seen a Rodime drive behave this well. The floppy drive likewise needed the usual regreasing but reads and writes diskettes fine.
It also came with some REALLY nice product pamphlets and a brochure for the Apricot Portable. I am currently hunting down a scanner large enough to take it because while I can find the pamphlets I ahve never seen the brochure.

 

[ika]

That's a nice find! If my memory serves, the Apricot is a rebadged & upgraded version of the venerable Victor 9000/Sirius 1 but with 3.5" floppy instead of the 5 1/4". It was available in the European marketplace. Can anyone confirm this?

I have a Victor 9000 waiting to be restored. I'm still missing the keyboard for it. I miss the 5 1/4" floppy sounds from the Victor 9000 as it increased/decreased the rpms for the inner/outer tracks!

-ilkka

 

[NeXT]

That I can find the Apricot PC maintained Victor compatibility, but I'm not sure how they expected someone to overcome the physical media differences. Until the Xen, Apricot never shipped an Apricot product with a 5.25" floppy drive.

I really want to find a place to scan that Apricot Portable brochure. It is beautiful but wider than any of my scanners can take.

 

[mark0x01]

That's a nice find! If my memory serves, the Apricot is a rebadged & upgraded version of the venerable Victor 9000/Sirius 1 but with 3.5" floppy instead of the 5 1/4". It was available in the European marketplace. Can anyone confirm this?

I have a Victor 9000 waiting to be restored. I'm still missing the keyboard for it. I miss the 5 1/4" floppy sounds from the Victor 9000 as it increased/decreased the rpms for the inner/outer tracks!

-ilkka

They weren't related, Victor was from the USA and Apricot from the UK but often distributed via the same channel

Trained on Victor 9000 and serviced Apricot as well in their day.

I also have a Victor 9000 waiting to get some love.

 

[AngryBirb]

This is in such a great shape. A couple of my PC's are 30 years older and don't look as good as yours...

 

[8bitMark]

That looks in great condition. Have you got the keyboard working? I’m about to attempt keyboard repair but need to get power supply recapped first as a cap has blown

 

[NeXT]

I keep forgetting to order replacement Keytronic pads when they come back in stock. They sell fast.
I'm tempted to make more again like I did with my Lisa but its a very time consuming task.

 

[yottatsa]

Hiya, could you please dump and share the alternative BIOS? I have Xi that I've upgraded to V30, and with stock BIOS it makes horrible noise on start (presumably, something something PSG).

 

[NeXT]

Hiya, could you please dump and share the alternative BIOS? I have Xi that I've upgraded to V30, and with stock BIOS it makes horrible noise on start (presumably, something something PSG).

I was under the impression one of the Apricot user groups might still have it but if not, sure I can try and get the chips pulled out again.

 

[yottatsa]

I was under the impression one of the Apricot user groups might still have it but if not, sure I can try and get the chips pulled out again.

I would be really glad, because I didn't see any mention of this bios anywhere on this side of the pond.

 

[NeXT]

Are you by chance atsukoito5186 on Youtube?
I now see your message over there but Youtube did that thing again where I get the email notification and see the comment but it vanishes completely off the video.

Yeah, an Apricot PC / PC Xi will screech and be angry with a V20/V30 installed because the factory BIOS doesn't know how to handle the different timing of the new chip, hence the AUG BIOS.
I do also have a dump of the original BIOS as I was given them in a separate bag as well, in case you need that as well.

So right now the table is covered in Xen-I so I can't get this done immediately but I can get to it probably by next week or so. Keep an eye here and I can attach it to a post or something. If I forget, just nag me again because the system isn't packed away.

 

[yottatsa]

Are you by chance atsukoito5186 on Youtube?
I now see your message over there but Youtube did that thing again where I get the email notification and see the comment but it vanishes completely off the video.

Yeah, an Apricot PC / PC Xi will screech and be angry with a V20/V30 installed because the factory BIOS doesn't know how to handle the different timing of the new chip, hence the AUG BIOS.
I do also have a dump of the original BIOS as I was given them in a separate bag as well, in case you need that as well.

So right now the table is covered in Xen-I so I can't get this done immediately but I can get to it probably by next week or so. Keep an eye here and I can attach it to a post or something. If I forget, just nag me again because the system isn't packed away.

Yeah, that's me. Tho I removed the comment there to post it here, in more relevant space. I do have quite a few copies of original BIOS, but not the AUG one. Thank you for your effort to review this series and help to collect bits and pieces!

BTW, that Apricot user group, do you refer some specific one? I'm only aware of mostly UK-based group at FB.

P.S.: if you need to expand your Xi up to 896K, I can send you a freebie memory expansion card, https://github.com/yottatsa/apricot-mem

 

[NeXT]

I don't mind dumping it if it doesn't already exist online. It's more or less required to perform a CPU upgrade and I'm not the person who sees value in it only existing on my machine and nowhere else.
My machine did some with a small stack of usergroup newsletters which may or may not be related to AUG, but I can clearly tell this BIOS was their thing because it replaces the Apricot logo at the POST screen. This is very likely a group from the mid-80's that before this I have never heard of.

I do appreciate the offer of the memory expansion, but I think 768kb is more than enough for the spreadsheets I'm using.

 

[NeXT]

@yottatsa The ROM dumps are done. Attached are the two original Xi BIOS images (VE009, 2764 EPROM) and the AUG BIOS (two 27C128's)
Do me a favor and make sure they were dumped cleanly. I did verify them but I had no checksum to compare against.

 

[yottatsa]

Thanks! v009 is matching to what is available online and flashed in my machine. I also have v007 from what I had originally.

Gonna check AUG one..

 

[startaq]

This is very likely a group from the mid-80's that before this I have never heard of.

Inside the BIOS you can find the text:

Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F

00000100  45 50 52 4F 4D 20 61 6E 67 65 70 61 73 73 74 20  EPROM angepasst
00000110  66 81 72 20 4E 45 43 20 56 33 30 20 20 20 20 20  f.r NEC V30     
00000120  61 70 72 69 63 6F 74 20 75 73 65 72 20 67 72 6F  apricot user gro
00000130  75 70 20 64 65 75 74 73 63 68 6C 61 6E 64 20 20  up deutschland 
00000140  42 65 72 6C 69 6E 2C 20 30 36 2E 31 32 2E 38 35  Berlin, 06.12.85
00000150  4B 6C 61 75 73 20 4E 65 75 6D 65 69 73 74 65 72  Klaus Neumeister

So it's from a german user group.

Thank you for dumping it.

Maybe one day someone can tackle dumping the keyboard MCU, so it can be emulated as well.

 

[startaq]

Would you be able to read the disks it came with as well? For example, I don't think WordPerfect is available online anywhere for the Apricot.

 

[shattered]

bitsavers has it -- check out /bits/ACT/Apricot/ folder

 

[shattered]

Inspired by recent port of Apricot display drivers to Windows 2 (https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2apri/ + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403915), I did a quick experiment with vector font drawing (display memory layout sure is funky!)

Also, haven't figured out how to cleanly reset to text mode (CONTROL device only programs the CRTC and doesn't fill text buffer with pointers). This code should also work on Victor (but it does not seem to have an equivalent BIOS call to switch modes?)