Michau's CBM-II page
Making the Commodore CBM-II computer PC compatible

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Some images to show the project in action:

FreeDOS booting from the SD card

Norton Commander 4.0

Turbo Pascal 7.0

Commodore CBM-II

The Commodore CBM-II was a business computer released in 1982 as a successor to their PET/CBM line. It featured a 2 MHz 6502 CPU and 256 kB of memory.

Unfortunately, at the same time the IBM PC was gaining popularity as the business PC platform, and Commodore wanted to jump on the bandwagon with their 8088 CPU card that ran a specially crafted version of MS-DOS 1.25.

The platform was, however, not PC compatible, and did not gain any popularity. As with other MS-DOS computers of the era, the CBM-II quickly faded into obscurity.

But did it have to end like that? Would it be possible to make the computer PC compatible, despite its vastly different hardware architecture? It turns out that, after 40 years, the answer to this question is a resounding “Yes”…

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