I came across the PC Positive 286 quite by accident. I was scrolling through the Facebook marketplace and saw an ad for a TV set someone was selling. Way in the back of the image was a small nondescript beige brick, most people probably wouldn’t even have noticed this, but my eyes immediately zeroed in on it. after getting an affirmative from the seller on whether the beige object was an old computer and if it was for sale I was on my way and found myself the owner of a PCPositive 286
A Google search revealed nothing about the company, PC Positive, or its computers. I will say this though, out of the box, the PC Positive 286 is one of the best OEM 286 computers I’ve ever run.
The case itself is a lower profile desktop case with dual 3 1/2 and dual 5 1/4 bays. Mine is configured with a 1.44 MB and 1.2MB floppy drive but there’s nothing stopping anyone from moving the 3.5-inch drive to a smaller bay and installing a CD-ROM drive or using a combo drive in one of the 5 1/4 bays. On the left side of the case, there is a keylock as well as two large square power and reset buttons as well as LEDs for power, turbo, and HDD activity. There is no turbo switch so initiating the turbo function is likely to be done with some keyboard combo I have yet to try. On the far right of the case is a smaller red power switch.
On the rear of the case, we have a standard AT keyboard connector as well as two serial ports a parallel port, and a VGA port for the built-in video. Above the I/O are five expansion slots leaving plenty of room for adding cards.
Let’s take the top of the case off and have a peek inside.
being a later 286 board this one is fairly integrated and with no expansion cards installed everything on the board is easily assessable.
Inside this PC was a venerable 45MB Seagate ST-157A hard drive, still working and still booting to DOS. I attempted to replace the hard drive but unfortunately, the BIOS is quite finicky about hard drives and in the end, I decided to just let the Seagate drive live out the rest of its life in this machine. I do have the box to this machine which states the original specs. It does claim it came stock with a 40MB hard drive so this 45MB Seagate may be the original drive and it was just misstated a bit in the box.
Let’s take a look at the motherboard itself.
The motherboard is labeled as a “286 Genesis Board” but I couldn’t really find any relevant information on it.
Thankfully most of the jumpers on the motherboard are arranged in one area and are conveniently labeled so a jumper guide isn’t absolutely necessary.
1) CPU – Unsurprisingly the CPU in the PC Positive 286 is a 286, a 12MHz 80286 to be exact. The 12MHz 286 is probably the 286 I encounter most often, and OEMs seemed to of loved it. Although not the fastest 286 it’s generally the standard for this class of machines and can run most games from the late 80s without too much trouble considering they don’t require a 386. CGA and EGA shouldn’t give this CPU too much trouble. The CPU is soldered onto the motherboard so replacing it if it fails could be an issue.
2) NPU? – not far from the CPU is another socket. I’m putting a question mark on this one because I can’t actually confirm the socket is for a math co-processor. It appears to be one as it’s the right size and it’s fairly close to the CPU but as I can’t find a spec sheet or jumper guide for this motherboard, I can’t confirm this. There also isn’t anything silkscreened onto the board to indicate it’s an NPU socket nor do I see any labeled jumpers to enable/disable a math co-pro chip.
3) RAM – According to the box specs this machine actually came stock with 1MB installed which, for a 286-class machine would probably have been enough for most home users. The first 1MB is installed via DIP memory and thankfully is socketed.
Thankfully, there are also four 30-pin sockets for memory expansion. Generally, on earlier 286 motherboards you would have only found DIP and/or ZIP style RAM sockets but having later and more common sockets really makes expanding memory easy. I believe the maximum that the machine can be expanded to is 4MB but mine already came expanded to 2MB which should be more than enough for a 286 PC.
4) Video – The built-in VGA video is provided by the POACH 51 AA chip. This chip is more or less a clone of the Trident 8800CS video chip and is also provided with 256k of video memory. The 8800CS while not a very fast VGA chip does have pretty good compatibility with games and for a 286 of this speed is more than fast enough. It provides decent, though not perfect CGA compatibility and should be just fine for all EGA/VGA titles that would run acceptably on this machine.
5) IDE/Floppy – One very nice and seldom seen feature of the PC Positive 286 is built-in IDE and high-density Floppy connectors eliminating the need for a separate floppy and IDE controller card. As I mentioned earlier the IDE is a bit picky about what hard drives it will accept though and generally seems to prefer smaller drives under 100MB. Installing an ISA SCSI or IDE controller card should alleviate this issue though I had trouble getting anything other than the Seagate ST-157A working.
EXPANSION
Adding expansion cards is done via a riser card with three 16-bit ISA slots on one side and two 8-bit slots on the other.
Thanks to having so many things already built into the motherboard I really only found myself needing to install a sound card. The card I chose was a little unusual but it’s one I’ve had sitting in the stash for quite some time, the AV206 from Zoltrix. The AV206 is also known by the name Audio Plus card. Zoltrix wasn’t a very well-known brand name but the AV206 is a decent Sound Blaster Pro clone and perfect for something like a 286.
The card doesn’t have a genuine Yamaha OPL chip but the clone chip it does use is very good and during my testing, it seems you’d be hard-pressed to tell it wasn’t a Yamaha.
I have to say I had a very positive time with the PC Positive 286. The built-in features like VGA, floppy, and IDE are great, even though the IDE is picky. Coming with these features out of the box and 1MB of memory, you would have been set to play a wide range of software in the late 80s and even into the early 90s. I tested several games on this machine and even more action-oriented ones such as Red Baron and Test Drive III were found to be playable. Despite a few issues, this is a great 286 that will give you a very positive retro gaming experience.
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