General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Well, I got the Apricot F Series Portable.

The two hour trip to/from Leigh Delamere services took 4 in the end due to the M4 being closed around Swindon. Looks like a major crash on the Westbound carriageway.

Anyway, I've just got back and had a quick look.

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This is portable computing 1985 style!

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Everything except the floppy disks and the power cord is there, including the "mouse" and light pipes!

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An interesting steel protective clip for the trackball!

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Even the floppy protection insert is there.

Unfortunately...

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Error 23 is peripheral chip test failure. Given that the speaker is sounding constantly I'm wondering if there's a bad connection between the main circuit board and the peripheral board, which is quite possible. I need to look at the PSU as well as I know there should be at least one RIFA smoke generator in there.

One bonus, it's a later 512K model and unusually not dark grey coloured plastic.

[stephen_usher]

Looks like this may be another repair thread.

Actually no RIFAs in the PSU and all the voltages are good and stable.

The I/O board isn't being initialised and there are some suspiciously floating voltages on some chip pins.

[rubber_jonnie]

Wow, that's a seriously funky machine!!

I can sympathise with the journey problems, I had a 1 hour trip to collect a Mega ST take 3 due to an accident on the M25. At least you got there and back again in the end.

[stephen_usher]

IC74, a 74LS74, which controls the I/O read/write enable for the 6845 is looking suspicious. The inputs (clock and data) are doing stuff but there's no output.

Unfortunately, as with most of the chips, the 74LS74 is not socketed. I don't know if I have one in stock I can piggy-back.

[stephen_usher]

Found a 74LS74, piggy-backed and... happy computer.

That was quick. :-)

P.S. I was suprised how quickly I found this fault as i'd never looked at the F Portable schematics before and they're a bit more complex than the F1/F2/F10.

[rubber_jonnie]

Found a 74LS74, piggy-backed and... happy computer.

That was quick. :-)

P.S. I was suprised how quickly I found this fault as i'd never looked at the F Portable schematics before and they're a bit more complex than the F1/F2/F10.

Nice quick find 😁

[stephen_usher]

OK, now it can't read floppies. (Error 8, sector not found)

Everything else seems to be working fine though.

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[stephen_usher]

Looks like it was probably the dodgy Argos 'Select' branded floppy which was at fault. They were unreliable from new. Other (non) Apricot disks are rightly seen as that and give Error 99.

Anyway, I couldn't sleep due to thinking about this so I got up at about 3:30 and thought I'd use dd on my Linux server to write a floppy image...

Had to reboot the machine as an update had fubared the console...

Grub2 fails! It seems that a recent update of Grub2 broke booting from XFS partitions and guess what my root partition is formatted as...

3 hours later I manage to boot using the installation DVD's Grub via a USB drive, and I'm still no nearer writing that floppy image. Blurgh!

Bug report to the distro done this morning with a link to the bug on the Redhat bug reporting system showing the problem.

[stephen_usher]

OK, written known good images to known good floppies using a known good drive.

The Field Test floppy image, which is definitely FP compatible, gives Error 08 (sector/track not found).
My clean boot image, which probably couldn't boot on the FP, gives the correct Error 99 (invalid disk type).

I'm wondering if the drive is out of alignment.

[Icky]

Apricots were definitely ahead of their time. That’s one really neat setup. Apricot the UK Apple. :)