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We’ve seen a lot of PC’s on this blog over the years from companies that you normally would not associate with the computer market attempting to get a slice of that yummy yummy PC market pie. Today we’re going to take a look at one from the Korean car manufacturer Hyundai.
Hyundai is mostly known for cars, at least here in the USA, but like so many others they actually had a line of IBM PC compatibles. Today we will be taking a look at one PC out of that line, the Super-16 Turbo. You may make the assumption like I did that this is going to be a 16MHz 286 based machine, but nope. The Super-16 Turbo is a completely bland, middle of the road but reliable and functional 8088 PC.
My Super-16 Turbo here has some uneven yellowing going on with the left side being noticeably darker than the right. The front of the PC is pretty bare bones. We just have the Hyundai badge on the left and duel 5 1/4 bays to the right. My machine came with a single 360KB 5 1/4 inch floppy drive (The original drive i’m told was also a 360KB drive but was belt driven and had a round LED) as well as a 30MB MFM hard drive mounted in the lower bay.
Completing the front face of the PC is a large block of a power button and a power LED light.
A PC style keyboard connector is located on the right side of the machine.
The rear of the Super-16 is pretty sparse mirroring the front. We do get a nice power pass though for a monitor which is always nice but as far as built in ports go all we get is a RS-232C serial port as well as a printer port. To the right are six slots for expansion cards.
The top of the case comes off after unscrewing two screws on each side as well as one screw on the rear of the case.
Here we have the motherboard with the expansion cards removed.
1 ) CPU – The CPU is a P8088-2 running at 8MHz though I’ve seen variations of this PC that used an 8088-1 at 10MHz. This is pretty fast for an 8088 CPU and allows some more versatility when playing some later CGA titles or titles that may chug just a bit at 4.77MHz. The problem with the Super-16 Turbo is that there does not seem to be a turbo button to switch CPU speeds between 4.77MHz and 8MHz nor can I find a keyboard command to switch between speeds. There is a DIP switch setting though on the large blue switch located on the motherboard to choose between speeds but unless your playing with the case off this is extremely inconvenient. I’ve been told by a user of this machine that originally the machine came with a TURBO.EXE program and hitting Ctrl+Alt+Enter on the keyboard would toggle speeds.
If there is a way to switch speeds with the cover on and I’m just not seeing it that makes the Super-16 Turbo a pretty nice XT PC as far as versatility goes with those old CGA games but if the only way to change speeds is the internal switch then that really handicaps the Super-16 as you have to choose between being more compatible with very early games or not.
Another big downside with this PC and a hallmark of cheapness is that the CPU is soldered onto the board. That means without removing the motherboard and desoldering the old CPU you can not swap the CPU for a faster 8088-1 or NEC V20 or easily change CPU’s in case yours fails.
Next to the CPU is an empty socket so you can add an 8087 math co-processor if desired though these rarely add much benefit on an XT class PC outside of a few select games and CAD software.
2 ) RAM – The Super-16 Turbo comes stock with 640KB soldered onto the motherboard. This is nice but by the time this machine came out this was standard. You can, of course, add more memory via an 8-bit ISA expansion card though even with an 8MHz 8088 your really not going to be playing any games that really require that much memory or at least not playing any that run all that ideally.
The motherboard itself is fairly compact for an XT board and has six expansion slots which should be enough for most XT class user’s needs. The floppy controller is built into the motherboard freeing up a potential expansion slot and there is a real cone speaker although its located sort of awkwardly in the center of the case further to the rear.
I do like that the CMOS battery on this board is a coin battery rather than a barrel one which not only makes it a little easier to replace but has less chance of leaking on your board and destroying components over time.
The large blue switch to the right of the battery sets things like your CPU speed, whether you have a math co-processor installed and video mode. You can find a layout of the motherboard as well as the switch settings Here.
Let’s take a quick look at the two expansions cards that came with my Super-16 Turbo PC
The first card was an 8-bit MFM hard disk controller from WDC which was attached to my PC’s 30MB ST-238R hard drive. On boot, the hard drive did in fact spin up but the machine would not boot from the HDD. If I booted from a floppy disk into DOS I was able to access the hard drive so maybe this drive was just used to store data and not set up as a bootable drive on my machine.
The second card installed was the video card.
The video card is a 64KB ATI Graphics Solution Plus 8-bit CGA card. This is an earlier card but like most of ATI’s video cards is supports Plantronics and Hercules graphics modes along with standard CGA modes. There is no color composite jack on this card though I see some headers on the top of the card near the video output which may allow one to connect a dongle.
The Hyundai Super-16 Turbo seemed to of been released in the latter half of the 1980s as a sort of budget machine competing against more capable but also more expansive 286 and even 386 PCs. Reading a few Computer magazine articles of the time that mention the Super-16 seems to paint it as a no thrills but reliable PC and thats mostly the impression I get. Corners were obviously cut on this machine and it does have a sort of boring utilitarian feel about it but it also does seem to be pretty reliable overall.
There isn’t a whole lot of bells and whistles built into this PC. The CPU is soldered to the board and the fact that you seemingly cannot switch CPU speeds without opening the case is a real pain but at the time if you just wanted a basic and cheap PC for the home that just worked I guess this would have been a nice compact choice. As a retro gaming PC though, if you find one cheap and don’t have a PC of this era go ahead and pick it up but otherwise there are more versatile PC’s of this era out there.
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