General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Tidies up the directories and moved the Pico source into the KiCAD directory and now published the whole lot on GitHub: https://github.com/stephen-usher/Aprico ... -Interface

[rubber_jonnie]

Bother! The cold I thought I had was actually COVID-19. I only found out when I took a test to prepare to go back to work tomorrow.

Oh no!!

I hope you recover quickly, my wife had it last year and it was pretty awful. Get well soon.

[stephen_usher]

Bother! The cold I thought I had was actually COVID-19. I only found out when I took a test to prepare to go back to work tomorrow.

Oh no!!

I hope you recover quickly, my wife had it last year and it was pretty awful. Get well soon.

Thanks. It's just like a cold for me thankfully.

[stephen_usher]

I'm at last getting back to some electronics.

I've been building the two variants of my HD board, one (standalone) for my Portable and the other a daughter board, which will be paired with a RAM board and donated to The Centre for the History of Computing in Cambridge so they can hopefully get their F1 in a state where it can be demonstrated as a working system.

I've done the main assembly. This afternoon will be adding the bodges and the SD card boards.

I need to order some Chipquik solder flux before I attempt the RAM board and its surface mount SRAM chip.

[stephen_usher]

Still COVID-19 positive today, even more so than I was on Friday, so still off work.

It's allowed me to make up the RAM and HD boards for Cambridge, except for the RAM chip as I want better flux for the surface mount!

Tests fine, i.e. it sees the HD interface and can boot for the microSD card.

The Chipquik flux should arrive at work tomorrow, along with some more stuff, so I should have it all done and dusted and ready to take over there at some point.

[stephen_usher]

The Museum of the History of Computing RAM and HD cards are now fully complete and tested.

IMG_2941.jpeg

The new Chipquik flux made the soldering of the surface mount SRAM a lot easier, though I'm still not a fan. Anyway, that's done and working.

[rubber_jonnie]

The Museum of the History of Computing RAM and HD cards are now fully complete and tested.


IMG_2941.jpeg


The new Chipquik flux made the soldering of the surface mount SRAM a lot easier, though I'm still not a fan. Anyway, that's done and working.

Very neat, nice job.

[stephen_usher]

After the COVID exhaustion (and sleeping most of the day) I finally took a look at trying to get a working 20MB HD image, this time using the F2.

So, I wrote a couple of floppies from images using the F1, the HD field formatter and the F10 HD recovery disk. I then swapped over the F2 an put a 20MB image as the only HD drive and booted from the field formatter floppy. The formatting went without a hitch, though I did notice that strangely sometime it went quickly and sometimes it slowed down to about half the speed, but the LED on the Pico showing microSD card access was on continuously. Strange.

After the low-level format finished I rebooted into the F10 recovery floppy and used the FORMAT.EXE command to create the FAT format on the drive. Initially I used 'FORMAT A:APRICOT /C /SB: /M1', the last option tells the program that it's formatting a HD. However, it told me it was about to format a 10MB drive so I killed the program. As an experiment I left off the '/M1' flag, expecting an error, but instead it said that it was about to format a 20MB HD!

So, success!

[rubber_jonnie]

After the COVID exhaustion (and sleeping most of the day) I finally took a look at trying to get a working 20MB HD image, this time using the F2.

So, I wrote a couple of floppies from images using the F1, the HD field formatter and the F10 HD recovery disk. I then swapped over the F2 an put a 20MB image as the only HD drive and booted from the field formatter floppy. The formatting went without a hitch, though I did notice that strangely sometime it went quickly and sometimes it slowed down to about half the speed, but the LED on the Pico showing microSD card access was on continuously. Strange.

After the low-level format finished I rebooted into the F10 recovery floppy and used the FORMAT.EXE command to create the FAT format on the drive. Initially I used 'FORMAT A:APRICOT /C /SB: /M1', the last option tells the program that it's formatting a HD. However, it told me it was about to format a 10MB drive so I killed the program. As an experiment I left off the '/M1' flag, expecting an error, but instead it said that it was about to format a 20MB HD!

So, success!

Woo Hoo!!!

:girldance:

[stephen_usher]

Psion Easel on a Sinclair QL?....

IMG_2947.jpeg

No, GEMEASEL running under GEM on the Apricot F2. Only the font gives it away really.

So far this is the only PC software which fully works and has colour. It's a pity that there aren't any other PC GEM applications I can find. Even the other applications in the Psion PC-Four suite only have MSDOS versions and so struggle to display on the Apricot, even with the "PC compatibility" system installed.