Packard Bell Victory

Desktop

A 286 desktop playing full-screen video in the Video Player with no frames dropped or cut.

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os8088 on real hardware

Victory, in a window

The Video Player in a window, in front of the Disk window it was opened from. Still from the video by AcornsN64.

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Video: Packard Bell VictoryFrom power-on to full-screen playback. Video by AcornsN64.

Victory, power-on

The os8088 desktop in VGA on the Dell LCD, with a blue background, a menu bar reading Video Player, File and Oct 31 2026 1:11 PM, and drive icons A:, B:, C: and Wire down the right. A Video Player window titled Catch My Heart shows a dithered frame of dancers above its seek bar and transport buttons, in front of a Disk window with 33.68M highlighted in its list of file sizes. — Victory, in a window

CPU: AMD 286, 16MHz
RAM: 4MB, 100ns
video: Paradise PVGA1A, 256KB
bus: ISA, 8 wait states
disk and sound: PicoMEM V1
playback: 30fps, full screen

Manuals & resources

PVGA1A Video Graphics Array DevicePDF

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History, photos & source references

One card is the hard disk and the sound card

A PicoMEM in an ISA slot, doing two jobs.

A PicoMEM card does two jobs here: it is the hard disk, at about 500KB/s -- close to the 102MB drive the machine came with -- and it is the Sound Blaster 2.0. The video was filmed on an LCD, because the phone's camera and the CRT did not agree.

Victory, power-on

The power-on screen: the Phoenix 286 BIOS counts the memory, then the PicoMEM's own BIOS finds a 504MB disk image named OS8088. Still from the video by AcornsN64.

The Dell LCD on the Packard Bell case, filled edge to edge by a frame of the music video: a dancer in a black vinyl outfit and long black gloves against a white wall, with another dancer in a white cap at the right edge. — Still from the video by AcornsN64.

On a CRT, in the mode every screenshot here is taken in

The same machine on a different monitor.

A CRT filling the frame, showing the os8088 desktop at 640x480. A Clock reads 00:02:16, two Bounce windows each hold a black square, a Task Manager reads CPU 63% and RAM 151K of 639K, a Disk window lists five files with NOTEPAD.O88 highlighted, a Note Pad reads The most notey of pads, and a Piano keyboard is partly hidden behind them. Seven tiles fill the dock. — The os8088 desktop at 640x480 on a CRT, with eight programs open: a Clock, two Bounces, the Task Manager, Disk, Note Pad, Piano and Recorder.

A corner of a desk with a beige Packard Bell desktop case and a Key Tronic keyboard on the left, and on the right a Gateway 2000 case with a Dell CRT on top of it displaying the os8088 desktop. Two mice and a mouse pad sit between them. — The Victory is the Packard Bell case on the left. The CRT stands on a Gateway 2000 beside it.

A store-shelf 286 with its VGA soldered down

The board under the PicoMEM, and who it was sold to.

Packard Bell did not sell through computer dealers. Its 286s went out through Montgomery Ward, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Silo, Costco and CompUSA, and by its own count it shipped more IBM compatibles in the United States in 1991 than anyone but IBM (an outside estimate quoted by UPI put it only fifth among all personal computer makers, with 3.4 percent of 1990's IBM-compatible sales). A machine for that shelf had to work out of the box, and the Victory's board has the hard disk, floppy, serial, parallel, mouse and VGA ports on it before a card goes in.

Most of the silicon is Western Digital's. The Retro Web's entry for the board identifies an FE3600 chipset beside the Paradise video chip, and Paradise had been a Western Digital company since 1986. The video memory is soldered: enough for 800 x 600 in 16 colors, not VESA compatible and, in the words of the board's data sheet, "not upgradeable", though jumper W11 turns it off for anyone fitting a card. The slots are not on the motherboard at all but on a riser, and a board that has lost its riser takes no cards. The part that fails is the Dallas DS1287 clock, whose battery is sealed inside it.

The faster of the two clock speeds needed somebody else's processor: Intel's own 286 stopped at 12.5MHz, and it was AMD and Harris that took the design on to 20 and 25. The PicoMEM is FreddyV's 8-bit ISA card built around a Raspberry Pi Pico. It does not imitate a disk controller; it answers the BIOS's disk calls from image files on a microSD card. Its Sound Blaster on this first-generation card is a memory copy on an interrupt standing in for DMA, which the author rates "low" for compatibility, and his list of failing machines includes some fast 286s. This one is not among them.

CPU as sold: 80286, 12 or 16MHz
chipset: Western Digital FE3600
RAM as sold: 1MB, to 4MB on SIMMs
slots: four 16-bit, one 8-bit, on a riser
disk: IDE on the board
power supply: 145W

Sources

Packard Bell VICTORY The Retro Web. The board: its chipset, video chip, clock speeds, riser and the DS1287.
Packard Bell Victory M/Board pb.retropc.se. Slots, memory, power supply, jumpers and the soldered video memory.
PACKARD BELL VICTORY Total Hardware 99. The 12 and 16MHz versions and the connectors.
Catch Catch on a 286 16Mhz Packard Bell Victory AcornsN64 on YouTube. The owner's description of this unit.
Packard Bell Electronics seeks to go public Dave McNary, UPI, March 17, 1992. The retailers, the shipments and the market share.
ISA PicoMEM Extension board FreddyVRetro on GitHub. What the PicoMEM is, and how it does a disk and a Sound Blaster.
PVGA1A Video Graphics Array Device Western Digital, 1991 data book. The video chip's modes.
Intel 80286 Wikipedia. The AMD and Harris parts above Intel's 12.5MHz.

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