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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.

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It is an "XT clone" in the sense that the term was used back in the 1980s. In that era, there were a whole bunch of "IBM PC clones" "IBM XT clones" "IBM AT clones", all different in some ways than the original IBM brand computers from which they "cloned", but, at least in theory, all providing compatibility with at least all the features of their namesakes, and usually some additional features or performance improvements as well. Including XT clones with V20, V30, and 80186 processors. So in this "traditional" sense, this is indeed an "XT clone", in that it will run all the software that would run on an XT, plus it has many additional features as well. Likewise, I can't call it an "AT clone", because it can't run all the software that an AT could run.

I was thinking the same thing when I saw 80186 and the display.

I had an XT in high school and used to hit up the BBSs at 2400 baud watching each character light up on my green monochrome display. It was glorious!

It's some XT++, but it's below the AT specs. That's the material difference.

It also sort of sets the expectations for the sloooow screen.

This one has ESP32 just running 80186 emulator.

Still, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.

Fully upgraded, my XT had VGA, 1MB including extended memory shenanigans, a sound card, a SCSI card, and Ethernet.

I threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.

Ye olde XT I had topped out with 640KB of RAM, a 20 megabyte and 15 megabyte MFM drives (ST-225, ST-419), two power supplies (the big full-height 15-meg drive needed extra time to spin up), one 16550 serial port card, no mouse, a SoundBlaster 1.5, a clock card, and a 2 megabyte EMS expansion card (with 72 individual DIP chips on it)....with a 10MHz 8088.

Weird times.

Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.

but no 80186 (not that it matters much, but you started it :)).

It's true. Just an 8087 for companionship.

TIL: NEC V20 was 80188 compatible.

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