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Olivetti M19

choas75

choas75

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 31, 2024
Messages
118
Location
Netherlands
Proud owner here of an M19 with extension box and colour monitor supporting 640x400. Unfortunately no dual speed kit.
Let me first say that my first encounter with the M19 was when my father got a two 5,25" floppy drive version and monochrome monitor, 256kB and 4.77Mhz.
It was soon upgraded with a 20MB harddrive and extended to 640kB for an outrageous amount of money (ripped off by a neighbor, payed by my father's work).
Anyway, the harddrive failed due to temperature problems and was soon replaced with a slower model and an MFM 90° turned ISA card.
Man, I had fun with this thing. GW-BASIC, digger, sopwith Antix, Larry I and 2, Police Quest and playing mod files via LPT1. I also remember typing in a hex dump from a magazine that could decode NOS beeldkrant and Basicode. Which turned out to crash. When I bought the software instead (there were no CRCs printed) it still crashed. This was the first and only time I ran into compatibility issues with the M19. The author let me fire up debug.com and we applied an easy workaround. Later, assembler and poking directly in video memory. And the 2400 baud modem I borrowed from the HCC Olivetti user group fitting with the case open. Keeping the phone line busy for hours to the horror of my sisters. Being point, visiting BBS's for hours and reading Fidonet messages. I'm getting old...

The M19 came to its end when I tried to fit a hercules card. I misfitted it and the sparks flew through my bedroom (case was open of course, full size card half size case).
Feeling sorry I bought second hand stuff to replace the Olivetti but is was never so cool anymore.

Now, 38 years later I managed to get one again for €100. Capacitors look good but are old again (2004). Floppy drives don't turn anymore and I have no disks anymore.
The system hangs every so many minutes but I'm eager to give it a second life.
I should have sorted out the PSU first but instead I bought a rgbtohdmi and a raspberry pi zero II. Bought a ps/2 to xt keyboard convertor (the ANK1926 was missing), an ISA 8 bit network card and a Lo-tech ISA XT CF adapter rev 3. It boots and the rgbtohdmi works like a charm.
Only 640x400 (screen 3 in GW-BASIC, I thought it was 4 on monochrome but not sure anymore) allows plotting 400 lines from 0 to 639. However, the text is mangled which I do not remember from the monochrome version. Turns out the mangled text is also present on the colour monitor.
Any chance that we could reverse engineer the Dual Speedkit that Oliviera has? I do have a Fujitsu 8088-2 in the M19. Can't find the black part that reads '1OT466 Kappa Taiwan B640B'. Also there are some ICs that are covered by a sticker. Anyone?
Any change I can revive the disk drives?
BIOS mentiones RT clock ready but starts at 1980 like my father's M19.
Network card and NTP will solve this.
One last thing. I saw the jumper settings, but some jumpers do no longer exist. I have 512kB and want to upgrade to 640kB with parity. Two banks are taken (32kB per chip) 9th socket empty hence no parity.
Third bank empty, fourth bank no sockets. Do I need 11 32kB chips or will I need a different config (7 chips).
The 256/640kB jumpers are missing.

Looking forward to any response!
 
Last edited:
choas75 said:
...visiting BBS's for hours and reading Fidonet messages. I'm getting old...
Click to expand...
Ah, you kids and your FidoNet! I remember when that came out and thinking it was a pretty nifty idea. Back in my day all we had was RCP/M.... :-)
 
cjs said:
Back in my day all we had was RCP/M.... :)
Click to expand...
Grin. I know what CP/M is. What's R?
I know, I'm a 49 gear old kid.
Using a raspberry PI that has 882 MIPS per core to sample and regenerate the screen output of a 38 year old 0.75 MIPS computer :)
 
choas75 said:
Grin. I know what CP/M is. What's R?
Click to expand...
The ancient BBSes ran on CP/M, and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't have an actual "BBS" part, where you could post messages and so on. But to transfer files they simply dropped you to a CP/M prompt and you'd run whatever CP/M programs were available, usually XMODEM to send a file on their system to yours, or to upload a file. The bigger systems would have four 8" floppy drives on line, making well over 4 MB of stuff available.
 
cjs said:
The ancient BBSes ran on CP/M, and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't have an actual "BBS" part, where you could post messages and so on. But to transfer files they simply dropped you to a CP/M prompt and you'd run whatever CP/M programs were available, usually XMODEM to send a file on their system to yours, or to upload a file. The bigger systems would have four 8" floppy drives on line, making well over 4 MB of stuff available.
Click to expand...
Wow, those were the days.. I also started with XMODEM when downloading, later ZMODEM.
What year was that?
 
1ST1 said:
You are so lucky! If you want to get rid of it one day, I would give it a new home, besides many other Olivetti computers. I am just the Maas/Rhine river upwards, and then a few kilometers the Main river upwards again...
Click to expand...
I checked your website. That's an impressive collection you have there.
If I ever get rid of it I'll let you know.
Is it a private collection? Museum?
 
Sorry, my responses seem rather slow because my first 10 posts need to be moderated. They want to make sure I'm not a spammer.
 
The most interesting thing to do is replicatie the Dual Speed Kit that Olivrea has one. I was at a computer fair in thr 80s where they sold those. But they were sold out.
Olivrea has pictures to which he pointed me after I asked on Instagram. The missing back side of the PCB and chips with stickers make it hard or impossible to decypher.
Is there an electronics buff around that could help me designing one?
 
1ST1 said:
You are so lucky! If you want to get rid of it one day, I would give it a new home, besides many other Olivetti computers. I am just the Maas/Rhine river upwards, and then a few kilometers the Main river upwards again...
Click to expand...
So I did not pay too much in your opinion?
 
choas75 said:
The most interesting thing to do is replicatie the Dual Speed Kit that Olivrea has one. I was at a computer fair in thr 80s where they sold those. But they were sold out.
Olivrea has pictures to which he pointed me after I asked on Instagram. The missing back side of the PCB and chips with stickers make it hard or impossible to decypher.
Is there an electronics buff around that could help me designing one?
Click to expand...
PL1W and PL1X are probably programmable logic chips. There are parts on the M19 main board with similar but not identical codes: PL1A, PL1B, PCF0, PCF3 and an (E)EPROM for which the sticker is hard to identify (PL1?P). Is it a dead end?
 
These chips are PAL or GAL programmable logic chips. Some have copy protection, so it's not possible to read the logics inside. But that board reminds me on a very simple accelerator for 68000 CPU in Atari ST. It's trick is to observe the bus signals of the CPU and when there is no access to external data/adress bus, then it swicthes from 8 to 16 Mhz, and back to 8 Mhz when the CPU uses the bus again. That accelerates the whole system by maybe 30%. Maybe that effect would be even better on 808x as the instruction set is less effective than 68000 as for many instructions it needs more clock cycles than the Motorola. It's maybe possible to make something similar for 8088 as well. And I think the board inside Olivrea's M19 is something like that. Maybne somewhere is something like that already available from a different maker.

The most easy to accelerate your M19 a bit is to replace the 8088 by V20.

But you bring me to another idea... Besides M19 I also have ETV 260 which is based on M19 mainboard. Besides two working ones I have a broken one, but the mainboard is fully working. Maybe I use that one to accelerate one of my basic M19, that then would be an ETV 500 which I still miss in my collection. Another project...
 
Wow, very envious of your setup :)

I would be highly interested to partake in a project of cloning the 8MHz board. It is also possible to measure the behaviour of the board when the card is plugged in. There is another project around the board with Pico or Teensy as an ISA debugger/recorder.

V20 with 4.77MHz comes as a slight upgrade but you're able to run 186/286 code which comes in handy with XT-IDE BIOS.

choas75 said:
Only 640x400 (screen 3 in GW-BASIC, I thought it was 4 on monochrome but not sure anymore) allows plotting 400 lines from 0 to 639. However, the text is mangled which I do not remember from the monochrome version. Turns out the mangled text is also present on the colour monitor.
Click to expand...

400 line modes only work on monochrome. 16 color graphics work only on colour. If you request 400 line mode on colour the video controller just gives you 200, if you request 16 colours on mono, you just get the normal 4.

choas75 said:
Any change I can revive the disk drives?
BIOS mentiones RT clock ready but starts at 1980 like my father's M19.
Network card and NTP will solve this.
One last thing. I saw the jumper settings, but some jumpers do no longer exist. I have 512kB and want to upgrade to 640kB with parity. Two banks are taken (32kB per chip) 9th socket empty hence no parity.
Third bank empty, fourth bank no sockets. Do I need 11 32kB chips or will I need a different config (7 chips).
The 256/640kB jumpers are missing.

Looking forward to any response!
Click to expand...

MFM drives are formatted by the controller. Unless you're pretty sure the HDD is dead, like it sounds very weird or doesn't spin, you also need to check if the controller works. RT clock is available but has no battery backup.
There's an exact combination of chips for third row for 512->640 but you can just put another 8x32kB in there and it'll work fine. Don't change the jumper settings.
 
By the way, @choas75 I'd really appreciate if you try running 8088mph demo sometime on the original colour monitor.
I have V20 in that skews the demo, and RGB2HDMI that takes seconds to properly set up the mode switches in demo phases, possibly due to faster hsync than usual CGA, who knows...in any case I'd like to know whether colour M19 is 100% IBM PC CGA compatible.
 
1ST1 said:
But you bring me to another idea... Besides M19 I also have ETV 260 which is based on M19 mainboard. Besides two working ones I have a broken one, but the mainboard is fully working. Maybe I use that one to accelerate one of my basic M19, that then would be an ETV 500 which I still miss in my collection. Another project...
Click to expand...

If that's a M19 mainboard and the CPU is running at 8Mhz without the card, that means you probably have a Faraday FE2010A chipset in there. Please when you find time make some nice pictures of the board front and back.
If it's indeed the same board, traces are same, etc. that's a huge step forward in making M19 go turbo XT without reversing the original CPU card.
 
Thanks for the link. I'll do some research on the chipset when I get to it. Need also to pull out the machine. Once you start on your ETV project please take a more detailed photo of the chipset because image on the link can't be zoomed enough.
 
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