All the while protesting its innocence, Seiko Epson has caved in to NEC’s lawsuit and announced it is ceasing production of its NEC 9800-compatible Epson PC 286 and HDD 20 hard disk interface board, and that on Thursday it will release the PC 286 Model 0 and HDD20S with different BIOS. The company claims that it had two teams working on the compatible project and at the last minute decided to switch to alternate BIOS, even though it is confident of not violating NEC’s copyrights. NEC says sternly that it will fully investigate the new model for breach of copyright. The switch prevented ROM Basic being included; the machine is therefore 12% cheaper than the 9800 at $2,600
