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Have been playing around with a couple of my luggables. The Nixdorf and the Sharp 7000 386. They both have started well, asking for the boot disk. The Nixdorf does not have one, the Sharp had a boot disk in drive A, but does not boot the system.

Frustrated but not defeated, cleaned the drive heads in both machines, disk seemed to have no deterioration using magnifying glass. Still no boot either machine. Both machines tried to boot but each came back with non system disk message.

After a bit of headbanging on desk and putting grey matter in gear a bit, decided to try all disks to see if I could get any to boot the systems. Tried all DOS version disks, and utility disks with no luck. Put a disk in named mean 18 and lo and behold it boots both systems. Going through the steps to get the game up and running, ( golf looks so good in orange and blue ) the game played and I am a lousy golfer.

After fooling around for a bit I exited the game to the main menu. It has 5 options with 5 being quit to DOS. Quitting to DOS, i ended up with the A prompt. Success.

Able to load PCTOOLS deluxe, and DOS RX, I verified and did a system check with them. Disk showed no bad sectors, the Nixdorf is slower than the IBM benchmark, and the Sharp is considerably faster.

So, I am assuming the boot disk may be OK, just not for either system?

Decided to read directories on disks that loaded and played, but would not boot the systems and compare to what was on MEAN 18. There is not much difference in the directories, that I noticed. However looking at MEAN 18, I see two files that seem not to be related to the game.

They are Command.com and Ramkey.com or .exe. My plan of action is to now format a disk and copy these two files to see if they will create a boot disk for the system without the golf game. And then just copy files from MEAN 18, to see what creates a boot disk without the golf game hopefully.

Am I on the right track here or wasting my time?

Command.com is the DOS kernal and is required in order to receive a DOS prompt. The other file is a memory handler designed to use 'Upper' memory in machines that had it. Upper ram was anything above 512KB.

It is great you are working on these old machines.

Hot Trout wrote:Command.com is the DOS kernal and is required in order to receive a DOS prompt. The other file is a memory handler designed to use 'Upper' memory in machines that had it. Upper ram was anything above 512KB.

It is great you are working on these old machines.

I will be doing a format and copying of a disk today, hopefully and see how it goes. I would like to be working on these more, but am in the process of building a new home and hopefully in it by fall, weather permitting and contractor cooperation, and material suppliers delivering on schedule.

But my relaxation time is the old computers and gaming systems, I am enjoying the challenges they present, and trying to get them up and running.

Thanks for the info, HT, I suspected that Command. com was one I needed and had dug out my dummies and idiots books for DOS to see if I could find anything useful. Ramkey would be good on the Nixdorf as it has 640KB but the Sharp has very limited memory, less than 512KB.

The Sharp is almost certainly an XT machine then and the Siemens is an AT.

If you format a floppy disk with the boot option, all you have to do after this to get it to boot is copy over the command.com
.

Problem solved, temporarily. Found a boot disk that works for both computers. The Commodore PC-10 MS DOS 3.2 disk boots both systems. So the Nixdorf and the Sharp are now Commodores, depending on the disk I use I can even Have them boot with Commodore logo.

Have not tried a format as yet as I have to dig my blank disks out. But works fine for now.

Nixdorf :

PC Tools- System Information Service

Computer - Panasonic Sr. Partner
Number of logical disk drives - 5
Logical drive letter range - A thru E
Serial Ports - 1
Parallel Ports - 2
User programs loaded at HEX paragraph OEBO
Operating system memory - 60160 BYTES
Total memory reported by DOS - 512KB
PC Tools has found total memory to be - 640KB
CPU -8088
Relative speed (orig PC = 100% ) - 100%
Math co-processor present - No
Memory available for user programs - 46412 BYTES
Color Graphics adapter present

Sharp PC-7000 :

System Memory - 344 KB
Math Co-processor - No
Central Processor - V20 /8086 Portable PC
Video Mode 80x25 Color
DMA Present - Yes
Serial Ports - 1
Game I/O Port - N0
Parallel Ports - 1
Machine ID - XT/ Portable PC
System Release 08/30/85
DOS 3.20

using computers like those just makes me giddy. i hope you can make boot disks for them.