Schneider Euro PC: Restoration Part 6

We are almost complete with this Euro PC restoration after the previous ROM upgrade. Now we need to do some finishing touches and then close everything up.

Parallel Port Testing

As mentioned in a previous post, I was a little wary that I might have caused damage to the parallel port IC when the tantalum capacitor popped. My original plan was to buy a parallel port sound card and try that, unfortunately shipping of this is taking a really long time. So, this will be for a follow-up video.

I realised recently I have a printer I’m using almost every day that has a parallel port. That is the label printer I use for shipping Amiga parts orders, a Zebra ZM400.

If you send raw text to this printer it will be ignored, but you can download ZPL files for it all over the internet. I downloaded one from here. This can then be sent directly to the printer using:

COPY /B PIRATE.ZPL LPT1

The printer almost immediately fired up and printed this:

I think that is a win!

CF Hard Drive

I was wondering for a while what to put into the ISA slot in this machine. At first I considered a sound card or VGA, but then I figured I would add a compact flash based hard drive to boot from. I figured it would save the floppy drive from constant use. I bought an XT-CF-Mini which is a variant of a generic ISA IDE board.

The one I bought came with this 64MB CF card which already had DOS 6.22 installed on it. When plugged in the onboard ROM will configure itself and boot from the CF card.

The screenshot above was taken after I updated the ROM on it to a version optimised for the NEC V20 which uses 80186 based instructions to improve performance.

Of course something like this should be benchmarked. I used Norton Sysinfo 6.0 to benchmark the drive.

Not going to break any speed records, but this is crazy fast for 1988.

Reassembly

Time to reassemble the machine. The top part clips back on, unfortunately when disassembling one of the clips around the floppy drive broke, so that corner can pop open easily. But the top still went on OK.

The ISA port cover was pretty corroded, but I found a nice black one in a parts drawer, so I installed this.

Then the battery is secured using a Velcro pad and a cable tie is used to keep the wiring for it a little neater. After this the panel cover can go back on.

With that, the machine restoration is complete! This is a before and after.

Final Thoughts

Schneider put a lot of thought and effort into designing this machine. The keyboard feels exactly like an Amiga 500 and that is to be expected given that the keycaps are the same type. I suspect the following decision would have been difficult in Germany (thanks to Paulee Alex Bow for this photo):