New project: An ACT Apricot F1 "barn find"

[stephen_usher]

I thought I'd attached them!

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[stephen_usher]

After defusing the RIFA smoke bomb in the PSU I've tested out the F2.

It passes the diagnostic disk tests other than for drive A. Disks won't boot from it, giving a CRC error yet when I read a disk it reads fine. :-/

I've not got a spare DD floppy at the moment to do the full write/read test, which is a pain.

[stephen_usher]

This turns out to be a strange one.

I found a spare DD floppy and tested it in my Win98 machine (the other DD floppy tried had bad blocks) using scandisk.

Formatted the disk in the F2's B drive and it tested fine. Booted the diagnostic floppy and drive B works fine. With drive A it tested the whole of side zero OK and then when it got to side 1 it fails to be able to write zeros to the disk on or around track 22. I've no idea what's going on there.

I've got to disassemble the machine tomorrow to glue the broken bits of the case so I can strip the drive and take a look. Even though the F2's drives are using 34 way IDC cables I have a sneaking suspicion that they're again specials as I can't see any power cables, requiring the signal cable to also power the drives!

[rubber_jonnie]

Nice pics, odd GUI though!

GEM is still around for PC in the form of OpenGEM if you want to try it.

As for the FDC cables, I know what you mean, my Amstrad Alt386 is the same, no power cable, but a custom 34 pin main cable with power on it somewhere.

[stephen_usher]

I'm not sure that OpenGEM will work under MSDOS 2.11

I'm trying to see if I can find MSDOS 3.1 for the machines. I know it exists as in the early 90s I had an Apricot Xi with MSDOS 3.11, and I have a boot floppy, but that won't boot on the F-Series.

[Acsi]

Nice project and I'm really amazed you got it working given the state it was found in.

I saw on this site that they have 3.0 for the Xi. Although it does say it is incomplete.

https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos/30

[derkom]

I'm not sure that OpenGEM will work under MSDOS 2.11

If you want, you could see what it makes of GEM for the Atari PC-1. I think your chances are quite low, as it wants (requires?) EGA graphics, and the PC-1 was running MS-DOS 3.21.

[stephen_usher]

Re: GEM.
The Atari-PC1 will be an IBM PC compatible so very different from the Apricot. No CGA or EGA graphics or anything that anything the PC world would understand.

Re: MSDOS
Unfortunately the Xi and F-Series are incompatible at the hardware/BIOS level. The Xi loads mor eof the BIOS into RAM.

[stephen_usher]

Well, I've glued up and cleaned the F2. There's only one bit of case which obviously escaped the box on the way here.

I swapped over the floppy drives so that the problematic A drive became the B drive and put everything back together.

It looks a lot better now:

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However, after powering on and booting I put a floppy into the B drive to see if it would format any better after I'd lubricated it...

Floppy went in, the screen went blank and corrupted and smoke came out of the B drive!!!! A component had gone bye-bye and shorted!

Opened the machine up again and disconnected the B drive and the machine boots. Interestingly, whereas before the BIOS was reporting 1440K drives (which they aren't) it now correctly reports 720K, so it looks like whatever component was dying made the machine think it had bigger drives. Unless, of course, what it's actually reporting is the total drive space, i.e. 2x720K for two drives.

[rubber_jonnie]

Re: GEM.
The Atari-PC1 will be an IBM PC compatible so very different from the Apricot. No CGA or EGA graphics or anything that anything the PC world would understand.

Re: MSDOS
Unfortunately the Xi and F-Series are incompatible at the hardware/BIOS level. The Xi loads mor eof the BIOS into RAM.

So a no go then....

Have you determined what the magic smoke emitter was yet?