One last look at the Wyse 2112-40 before I pass it on to, hopefully, greener pastures. Farewell, dear Wyse PC. You have certainly been a learning experience.

The machine is now in a much healthier state than when I first planned to strip it for parts. Both floppy drives are working and bootable, one at a time of course, and the 40 MB hard drive is up and running as well.

Getting everything back into the case was considerably more entertaining than I expected. The floppy drives have finally been lined up properly, although their mounting brackets seem determined to make life as difficult as possible. There’s remarkably little clearance inside this machine, and I’ve spent a good half an hour putting things in, taking them out and rearranging them.

We’ve also got the original expansion hardware back in place, including the EGA card, an 8-bit mouse card, the MFM hard-drive controller and the expanded memory. The hard drive is mounted upside down, which seems an odd arrangement until you see how neatly everything fits together.

The next challenge is getting the system to boot. At first the machine doesn’t recognise the fixed disk because the BIOS configuration needs attention. This old Wyse uses a Phoenix setup utility loaded from floppy, rather than the convenient built-in setup screens we tend to expect from later PCs. After a little fiddling with the drive types, I get the hard disk configured as type 8.

I’ve also discovered that the machine isn’t particularly fond of having both the EGA and VGA cards installed simultaneously. Since I don’t have the appropriate EGA monitor available, I’ll use VGA for testing and remove the other card for now.

Then there’s the matter of the floppy drives. It turns out that the machine wants to boot from drive A, regardless of which drive I happen to think should be drive A. Swapping the connectors around on the ribbon cable makes a difference, thanks to that interesting twist in the cable. Never trust the labels!

After sorting out the drive configuration and loading DOS, we’re finally getting somewhere. The hard disk boots, and there’s even a copy of Paku Paku to play with. Excellent! Nothing quite like a little DOS gaming to celebrate getting a computer back into a useful condition.

I also manage to format a 5.25-inch floppy under DOS 4.01 and transfer the system files so it can boot on its own. I’ve been making bootable DOS disks for both drive types, which should give me a useful fallback if the hard disk eventually decides it’s had enough. With the drives behaving themselves, things are looking much better than they were earlier in the project.

Then comes Alley Cat. What a magnificent little game! I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing half the time, and I still haven’t worked out how to quit properly without restarting the computer, but it’s running beautifully.

I had considered installing Windows 3.1 as well, although that will have to wait. For now the important thing is that the hard disk and both floppy drives are operational, the machine boots into DOS and I can actually run some software.

So that’s the Wyse 2112-40 restored to a much healthier state than when it arrived. It’s been quite a project, and I’ve certainly learned a few things along the way. Now it’s time for this old beast to head off to a friend who will hopefully give it plenty more years of use. Just remember to play some Alley Cat!