The Olivetti M6 460 suprema
This is going to be a ranting collection of random observations and thoughts about that machine. I didn't have one of these as a kid, but my VERY first computer (before I got the C64) was an Olivetti M24, so due to that, the Olivetti brand is slightly more interesting to me.
So when I got one for free, I was kind of happy about that.. It's been with me for years, but I've not actually had it powered on for any length of time before now. So this will be my observations, as I explore the experience of 1993s computing.
System Information
- IBM Compatible
- 486DX2 66 MHz
- 12?? MiB ram
Personal Computer - Pocket Service Guide (long, many machines)
TODO: Find the mythical file with BIOS and other Olivetti utils, it's called pi1ud108.zip
Drivers / Utils
286, 386 Gene4ric BIOS Setup Program (50 Kib) Works for the M6 460 if you don't have the Olivetti SETUP program.Realtek RTG3105B SVGA Driver (1.1 MiB) DOS/Windows 3/3.1/311 driver, press G to install after reading instructions!
BIOS
I don't have the BIOS Setup Utility for the machine, apparantly, it resided on a hidden partition (or something like that), but a program called gsetup was able to set both the time (the machine has y2k bug) and date.. On first run, I didn't realize that the program wiped the bios already! So I tried exiting it.. Resulting in a machine without harddrive (I had correctly configured the floppy drive before realizign I wouldn't know what to do with the HDD, and wanted to exit), so when I rebooted, no disk.. Okay.. I booted from a Win95 installer floppy, because it had a CD driver, and then I burned the gsetup onto a cd, and tried again, I cycled through harddrive options and I think it was option 25 that worked (the one reporting HDD size around 370 MiB), rebooted, memory-error.. okay, turned down memory to around 11000 kib, and then it worked perfectly! So the gsetup tool is fairly dangerous! I believe I could have been worse off, had I not configured the floppy drive.. in that case I don't know what would be required to recover? Maybe I'd have had to take it apart and desolder the bttery, or at best, reset the bios by jumper, hoping it would default to something sane, allowing at least booting from floppy, but I'm not going to find out.