This machine was originally earmarked to be stripped for parts.

Then curiosity got the better of me.

Instead, I spent the last couple of days getting the thing back into a workable state.

The Wyse 2112 is built around a 12.5 MHz 80286. This particular machine has a 40 MB hard drive and originally used a 720 KB 3.5-inch floppy drive.

I also noticed that the case and internal arrangement look remarkably similar to the Amdek 286. I still haven’t found enough surviving documentation to say exactly how closely related the two systems actually were.

Getting into setup

Configuration turned out to be another adventure.

The machine does not have the sort of built-in setup utility I have become accustomed to, so I used a bootable setup program instead.

GSETUP also appears to be suitable for this sort of AT-compatible machine.

I temporarily connected a 1.44 MB floppy mechanism from another PC and the Wyse was happy enough to operate the drive hardware.

That does not prove the machine can natively format or correctly use 1.44 MB high-density media. All I established was that the replacement mechanism itself functioned in the system.

Convincing it to use the 40 MB hard drive

The hard drive was more troublesome.

Its geometry is 820 cylinders, 17 sectors and 5 heads, but there was no exact match in the BIOS drive table and the user-defined option was not cooperating.

I therefore selected a predefined drive type with the same heads and sectors but a slightly smaller cylinder count.

Type 8 was the closest usable match I found.

That sacrifices some capacity, but it got the machine booting and made the drive useful.

The VGA card was making everything worse

A lot of the trouble turned out to come from the VGA card, which also contains floppy and hard-drive controller circuitry.

If I’d simply installed my Trident 9000 VGA card first, I probably would have saved myself quite a few hours.

With no documentation for the controller-equipped card, I experimented with the mid-board jumpers and found that moving them from positions 1-2 to 2-3 disabled the unwanted controller functions.

Trial and error, but it worked.

I later identified the card as a Pine Technology PT-604.

Somehow the machine I was going to strip for parts has become another functioning 286.

Funny how that keeps happening.

Here is the thread I created on the Vintage Computer Forums dedicated to this powerhouse of a machine.

Here is a bootable setup disk that can be used to get into the configuration utility.

Sources