Bad Acorn Day

[rubber_jonnie]

Better to cool down and do one thing after another.

But I perfectly understand you...

Going to step away from the A5000 for a bit and focus on the Beebs FDD problems. I'm missing something for sure, but I know the Gotek is good from a drive point of view so I don't need to consider if the FDD is good or not.

[HigashiJun]

Going to step away from the A5000 for a bit and focus on the Beebs FDD problems. I'm missing something for sure, but I know the Gotek is good from a drive point of view so I don't need to consider if the FDD is good or not.

That's a good start.

[rubber_jonnie]

This is also a good start:

IMG20241201123120.jpg

This is the 8271 machine, I added ff.cfg to the USB with a specific option relating to the disk indexing and it worked right away.

I'll try the 1770 based machine later but I feel quite positive it's going to work as well.

Doesn't look good for the Cumana double drive but it could be bad disks.

Either that or there is something awry with the drive indexing.

This is all the ID the drives have on them:

IMG20241130152507.jpg

Will have to have a look and see what I can find.

[rubber_jonnie]

OK, so it's been an interesting afternoon. I was concerned that the 1770 board was faulty, so I decided to swap it over to BBC number 3, a bit of a tired looking machine, but I knew the 8271 worked in it with the Gotek.

All swapped over and the 1770 is working as it should in Beeb number 3 with the Gotek :)

IMG20241201152728.jpg

And even boots using SHIFT + BREAK :)

IMG20241201152743.jpg

So it's looking like Beeb number 2 has some other fundamental problem with the FDD circuitry.

So my thought is, since Beeb 2 has the nicer case, but doesn't work with FDD, I'll just swap over the mainboards since they are both issue 4's and I can just use the faulty one with the SPI MMC card adapter I have.

Then I can concentrate on getting the floppy set up on the other board in the nicer case.

Well, it makes sense to me :)

But for now, it's time for a coffee, a mince pie and some Usagi Electric :)

[rubber_jonnie]

OK, so mainboard swap is done and I have the Sidewise board installed as well!!!

IMG20241201180000.jpg

I just need to sort out some ROMs to burn and then RTFM to understand how to drive it :) I do need to figure out something to hold it in place too since the pins are not the tightest fit in the sockets.

Also booting just nicely from the Gotek now, I think all the Beebophiles will recognise this:

IMG20241201180846.jpg

So overall a good day. The original mainboard is now in the slightly dodgy case, but I think I'll likely have a go at retrobriting it next summer, so fingers crossed we can get it back to a more normal state.

I am going to try and do some more figuring with the Cumana as it's be a shame for it to be a complete loss.

Need to get back onto the A5000 too.

[HigashiJun]

Well done !

Hope you'll manage to sort out your A5000 issue(s).

[rubber_jonnie]

Well done !

Hope you'll manage to sort out your A5000 issue(s).

Me too!

[rubber_jonnie]

OK, so this was a surprise this morning:

IMG20241202105644.jpg

This is the Cumana drive :)

It completes fine and drops me back to BASIC, but I can't then do *. and get the directory listing, BUT it's never even tried to do this before. It also 'seems' to work for 40 tracks too. That's progress.

Of course I don't know if my disk is suitable for use with the Beeb, it may not be, but I will try the original disks I have.

[rubber_jonnie]

In fact, even more interesting, I can now run *. on the two original disks I have and it works!

IMG20241202112344.jpg

The 2nd drive isn't playing, but to have one working is a big improvement :)

[rubber_jonnie]

More good news regarding the BBC B. The Sidewise is working nicely:

IMG20241202164052.jpg

With all the currently installed ROMs showing up as expected:

IMG20241202164059.jpg

In addition, I have set up a whole bunch of disk images on the Gotek, and ran Exile, which I knew would work with Sidewise RAM to give speech, and that works great too :)

As for the A5000 I've been testing it in varying base configurations, so 1MB, 2MB, no hard drive, just the FDD. If I leave it running on the RISC O/S desktop as booted from ROM, it is randomly crashing, so I think there is an issue with the first 1MB of RAM. It's pretty reproducible too. So, board is coming out for a good inspection. Thermal camera isn't showing anything obvious.