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Olivetti S-2260 - a japanese Personal Computer from Ye-Data? (F-MD680/MC680)

1ST1

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I got this one from a colleague which worked for a japanese electronics supplier in the automotive industry. This is the computer he used to work with and he got it in the mid 1980's from his headquarter. Does anybody here knows more about this system? It's made in Japan.

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The slots are non standard, the square socket could be a 80286. Unfortunatelly the st-506 harddisk is missing.

If I google for Olivetti S-2260 I only get two japanese online actions, nothing more. If I search for Ye-Data F-MD680/MC680 I get nothing.

The red capacitors might be tantalum, right? Then I should not try to power up before replacing them...
 

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I can't read the AMD chip lying between the memory and the BIOS chips but I suspect it is an 808x with the 8087 socket adjacent. I have not seen any Olivetti machine with that case style so I will observe the thread.
 
The problem with identification is that this is a two-tier motherboard, so we don't know what's under the upper tier. The lack of visible support chips (8259, 8237) makes me wonder if this might be an 80186 board (early 80186 chips came in CLCC, just like the 80286).
The Olivetti catalog has this described as an M4-class system, which is clearly not right (80486/Pentium 1).
The curious thing is the connector setup--blue ribbon for printer and external floppy-DB25 for serial and 2 CRTs. This is a strange bird, indeed.
 
Ah, you mean the pocket service guide. No, that BA-2260 is something completely different. BA-xxxx is always a mainboard, not a system.
 
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Yeah, I realized that. Strange that this would have a model number of CPU2260/M4 with all other Olivetti (as far as I can determine) M4 class systems being 486 or better.

At any rate, there are some clues from the labels (see Yahoo auction here).

The nameplate power rating of 100-120V would indicate that this is a system intended for use in Japan.

There's also the YE Data BFM 186, an 8086 box. YE Data also made the YD8110, which was also sold under the C Itoh brand.
 
The cut-outs for the ports on the back don't look original. Are you sure the mainboard wasn't just replaced?
 
I have dismantled the machine and it's a quite crazy PC...

Chipsets on the mainboard
  • NEC D72065 = Floppycontroller
  • NEC D8237AC = DMA-Controller
  • AMD Z8530AP = Baud Rate Generator, and Digital Phase-Locked Loop for Clock Recovery
  • 2x NEC D8259 = Intel 8259 = programmable interrupt controller
  • NEC D8251AFC = Programmable Com. Interface
  • NEC D8253C = Programmable Interval Timer
  • NEC D8255AC = Programmable Peripheral Interface
  • AMD AM2964 = Dynamic Memory Controller
  • i80286 8 MHz = CPU
  • 9 x 4 pcs of 50256 RAMs = 1 MB RAM
As you can see at the above pictures, the mainboard has expansion slots, but they are proprietary layout and pinout.

Harddisk-Controller:
  • NEC D8237AC = DMA Controller
  • HN5264LP = statisches 8 kB RAM
  • NEC D726140 = Integrated Circuit Microprocessor for Hard Disk Controllers
Serial IO card:
  • AMD Z8530AP = Baud Rate Generator, and Digital Phase-Locked Loop for Clock Recovery
Graphics card
  • 2x NEC D7220AD see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_µPD7220 - so this PC is designed to work with japanese fonts on up to two monitors.. German Wikiedia also tells something about possible resolutions and colors:
2048 × 2048 in monochrome
1024 × 1024 Pixel in 4 color/greyscale bitplanes, 16 colors or greyscales
256.000 words (16bit) frambebuffer
  • 12x 41465 DRAMs = 384kB framebuffer on addon card
  • 6x Fujitsu 83100 128kB ROMs on another addon card - enough for Video BIOS and some japanese characters...
Unfortunatelly the harddisk is missing and that I don't have the monitor, keyboard and 110V input voltage. It would be interesting to see this one running.

It would be interesting to find out more about that machine. I think it's a pc made to be used in japanese kanjii characters.
 
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Your idea with Epson PC286 points to the japanese PC-98/9800 standard, but following this I only can find descriptions of NEC, Epson and Toshiba as manufacturers. Not Ye-Data and Olivetti. My machine is technically quite similar to those from NEC (and full of NEC chips), but the PC-98 has so called C-Bus expansion slots (and later NESA which is similar to EISA) which is totally different from my example. Anyhow, the PC-98 also used two of the NEC 7220 display controllers like my machine. So now I assume that this Olivetti S-2260 also belongs to the group of PC-98 computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98
https://www.giantbomb.com/nec-pc-9801/3045-112/
 
Well, the test is to see if it will boot a regular copy of MS-DOS from floppy. PC98 systems can't do that--they require a special version that's often referred to as DOS/V. A PC98 has very different BIOS interrupts. It could also be a very different machine entirely, such as the Mitsubishi Multi-16.
 
To do so I need voltage adapter 230V AC to 110V AC, pinout of the monitor, compatible keyboard and DOS/V images.

1-2 years ago I discovered a japanese website dedicated to Olivetti computers, it was completely in japanese language so I was not able to read it, but I found a few usefull diskimages over there. Unfortunatelly I did not bookmark it. Now it would be interesting to contact this person and ask what he knows about that machine, but unfortunatelly I can't find the website anymore. Does anybody here knows it?
 
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