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18 thoughts on “Addition – RM Nimbus PC-186”

  1. I’ve also got one of these (from the same source as you 😉 ) I tried mine last night, and it boots from the floppy, but I’m unable to get a picture that’s not b&w and rolling (don’t have a suitable cable/monitor)

  3. I have a couple of these machines, both with hard disks, that I got from the college I used to work at.

    Not bad for their day, and yes they run windows (windows 1.03 !!!!).

    Phill.

      1. I have the manuals for this machine which I believe has the pinout for the monitor connections, I could look them out if you need.

        Do you have boot disks, I can do you an image of those also.

        Cheers.

        Phill.

    2. How many do you have these RM Nimbus machines? And which ones?

      As for me, I have RM Nimbus X10 – http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10c.jpg with 10MB Hard Drive with Windows 3.0 installed, manuals, as well with Welcome disks – downloaded from: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/pc/nimbus/

      Would you sell one of them to me?

      Ah! I just remembered do you have any copies of the following:

      1) Adventures I for RM Nimbus containing two games:
      1. The Lost Frog
      2. Merlin’s Castle
      2) MicroSmile for RM Nimbus containing a game called “Boxes”
      3) Look and Read: Through the Dragon’s Eye: Nimbus Pack
      4) Treasure Hunt or Treasure Island for RM Nimbus – the one with a big Blue background square grid marked with numbers 0 – 9 on both the X & Y axis center on the screen, as well with a hot & cold gauge on the left hand side of the screen, plus a status showing your acquired Gold bars stored on the right side of the screen.

      You have to make a guess where the gold is e.g. Enter co-ordinates: (3 , 2), then it will come up on the screen with a white X marked on the screen where you wanted your co-ordinates to be.

  4. I have two machines, both have internal hard disks, one is like your X10, which has a 3.5″ miniscribe IIRC SCSI, the other has a 5.25″ ST225N, oddly the hard disk and floppy are the other way round (floppy on the right, hard disk on the left).

    Also have an XW40, which is a big full height 5.25″ MFM drive and Xybec SASI to MFM card in it’s own case, looks like a Nimbus but without the floppy drives or front panel ports.

    Andyt31,

    Depending on what ports your floppy controler has you may be able to retro-fit a hard disk, if you can find one of the correct type, I’ll see if I can dig out one of the controler cards from my box of spares and take a photo, so you can see what is neeeded, you’d also need to make up a special scsi cable but that should be easy enough.

    Jonathan, you don’t happen to have the Windows 3.0 install disks do you ? I only have Windows 1.x for the Nimbus, I did try installing a copy of normal 3.0 but could not get it to run.

    Cheers.

    Phill.

    1. Hi Phil,

      Do you still have one of the controller cards from your box of spares? If so, please sell it to me because I’m very interested to buy one of you especially the fully populated card. Also, do you have a spare RM Nimbus 186 Memory Expansion board PN.12859 to sell? I’m very to interest to buy one of you as well.

      By the way, me too, finally I’ve got XW40 with external HDD cable connected to RM NImbus supplied as part of the purchase – https://bit.ly/3cDuGUD

      As for your RM Nimbus with floppy on the right, hard disk on the left, it looks like you’ve got RM Nimbus PC20, fitted with 20MB HDD & Ye Data YD-645C Floppy Drive – https://bit.ly/3cGLlqk

      Regards,
      Jonathan.

  5. That’s odd! Just exactly I thought, normally the floppy is on the right and hard drive on the left like my Amstrad PC1512 – http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/Amstrad/PC1512/PC1512setup.jpg

    As for me, I have the following with my RM Nimbus:

    * External 360 KB 5.25″ Floppy Drive Unit
    * Internal 3.5″ DD Floppy Disc Drive – Left hand side
    * Internal 10MB Hard Drive – Right hand side
    * Expansion Slot #:
    1. External 5.25″ FDD unit Connector Card
    2. Hard drive / Floppy Disk Controller Card
    3. Data Communications Card (DCC)
    4. Parallel I/O Port Connector Card along with +5V and +12V output jacks
    * IBM Utility Board Card – Fitted without the 8087 Maths Coprocessor
    * IBM Mode Firmware Version 1.32D – Fitted
    * RM Nimbus Mouse
    * Non working 512KB On-board RAM Card

    Software:

    1. 3.5″ disk: IBM Mode Software For Nimbus PC Version 2.61 – PN 23074
    2. 3.5″ disk: Microsoft Windows Release 1.01 Stand Alone Disk – 2 Disk set
    3. 3.5″ disk: Microsoft Windows ISV Toolkit Release 1.02 – 4 Disk set
    4. 3.5″ disk: Microsoft Windows Release 1.03 Stand Alone Disk – 3 Disk set
    5. 3.5″ disk: Microsoft Windows 2.03 For Nimbus PC System Disk – 4 Disk set
    6. 3.5″ disk: Microsoft Windows 3 Standalone PC 186 – 5 Disk set
    7. 3.5″ disk: Parallel Driver Driver Parallel Board For I/O Board Version V 1.06 – PN 23863
    8. 3.5″ disk: RM Nimbus General Utility Disk – PN 19327
    9. 3.5″ disk: RM Nimbus PC Upgrade Disk DOS 3.1 Rel 3.10.A – PN 21345
    10. 3.5″ disk: RM Nimbus Welcome Disk Ver. 3.00C from RM Nimbus PC186 Software – B (500K)
    11. 3.5″ disk: RM Basic V 1.0F
    12. 3.5″ disk: MS-DOS V3.10 System and Welcome Disk Release 3.02A
    13. 3.5″ disk: Release Disk Setpc V2.90 IBM Mods Disk – PN 24778
    14. 3.5″ disk: Steed Ver 1.4A
    15. 3.5″ disk: Wordstar Rel. 3.30
    16. 3.5″ disk: XFERCPM V 1.0A

    Books/User Manuals:

    * RM Nimbus – Owners Handbook
    * Nimbus PC – How To Use IBM Mode
    * RM Nimbus – MS-DOS 3.1
    * Nimbus – Microsoft Windows 3 Users Guide
    * RM Nimbus – Steed by Solomon Systems
    * Nimbus – Microsoft Windows Users Guide
    * MicroPro Wordstar

    Pictures:

    1. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10.jpg
    2. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10b.jpg
    3. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10c.jpg
    4. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10bkside.jpg
    5. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10inside.jpg
    6. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/X10under.jpg
    7. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/Software.jpg
    8. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/Software2.jpg
    9. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/512K%20RAM%20on-board%20-%20front.jpg
    10. http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Computers/RMNimbus/512K%20RAM%20on-board%20-%20back.jpg

  7. i doubt you will even read this let alone respond. i cant find through the dragons eye anywhere n it would bring back so many memories to play it again and you would be my new hero if you could send me it 🙂

  9. thanks andy, it would be apriciated, loved playing this as a kid. beleive it was written in bbc basic so if i get hold of it il have a go at making it run under windows too 🙂

  10. Oh just remembered from back in the days when i used to have one. regarding windows 3.0. i didn’t even think there was a special nimbus version, always usef the standard version in ‘real’ mode, and it run, but took a while.
    anywy to run in real mode, type:
    win -r
    standard windows 3.0 and if my memory is right so does 3.1 (or it might of been 3.1 i done this with, was years ago lol)
    zlso due to the lack of software out there, and the recent RM Nimbus driver additon to the M.E.S.S emulator, i think this software should be dumped as there is a lack of it. if it wernt for my dad being a b***ard back in the day in a incident involving drunkenness, and ignorance he would of realised i knew what was about to happent, removed the bootsector from the hard drive and hidden the only bootable floppys. nope instead he thought the welcome screen would go away if he pulled it apart and tried to fix it. nevr worked again :(.

    anyway life story over, it needs to be done, who agres ? 🙂

  11. I’ve some good news regarding Microsoft Windows 3 for Standalone RM Nimbus PC-186. I’ve managed somehow to make a copy of disk images of all 5 disks using FDCOPY via Sony VAIO PCG-FR415B laptop – http://on.fb.me/1wMS8P6 with Windows XP installed onto my 128MB MAXDRIVE USB Flash Drive – used for my Sony PS2.

    All these images are located in my PC186 folder via Google Drive – http://bit.ly/1wMSfKu as well FDCOPY.com file.

    To make copies of these disks, take five 720k formatted floppy disks and then give the following command:

    FDCOPY WIN3Dn.CFI A:

    where n is 1-5 and A: is the drive containing the 720K floppy disk, e.g. in my case with disk images on my 128MB MAXDRIVE using Sony VAIO laptop: FDCOPY H:PC186WIN3D3.CFI A:

    I’ll try to make more disk images of my other RM Nimbus Software and added them into the same PC186 folder for everybody to share / use for RM Nimbus Emulator and as a back-up copy for myself, just in case my new identical set of copies purchased from Queensway Computer Market (they were about to throw all of them in the bin) gets damaged some point in later future – similar to my set of original floppies I used to have.

    Please let me know when RM Nimbus Emulator is fully completed, I love these RM Nimbus computers so much!! That reminds me… Is it possible to make *.DSK image files because I don’t have the software to create *.DSK images files from my set of RM Nimbus software on floppies.

    Regards,
    Jonathan.

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