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
[docs/pocketguide-olivetti-m6-420-440-450-460.pdf]
Personal Computer - Pocket Service Guide (long, many machines)
[docs/pocketguide-olivetti-m.pdf]
TODO: Find the mythical file with BIOS and other Olivetti utils, it's called
pi1ud108.zipDRIVERS / UTILS
286, 386 Gene4ric BIOS Setup Program [software/gsetup.zip] (50 Kib) Works for
the M6 460 if you don't have the Olivetti SETUP program.
Realtek RTG3105B SVGA Driver [software/Realtek-RTG3105B03_Win3_English.zip] (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.
