IBM PC Compatibility
The manufacturer did not completely clone the IBM BIOS, so although it ran MS-DOS and CP/M-86, it was not IBM PC compatible as the underlying system BIOS and hardware is very different. An Intel 8089 I/O controller was used, instead of the Intel 8237 DMA chip used in IBM computers; the ROM was only a simple boot loader rather than a full BIOS; and there was no 640k barrier. The floppy disk format was "not quite compatible"; attempting to read an ordinary PC FAT floppy in an Apricot, or vice versa, would result in a scrambled directory listing with some files missing.
Apricot later offered the possibility of converting the computer into an IBM compatible PC by replacing the motherboard with one equipped with an Intel 80286 processor.
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