Even better news. I got the PC-8231A drive to format a new disk. Had to buy a pack of 10 new DSDD floppies. So now this thing is fully functional and I feel even better about the auction which included now both a working CRT adapter and a drive. The drive fully supports the reserved DSKI$ / DSKO$ keywords in BASIC as well, not that there would be any software out there that uses that these days though...
So now I have to ask myself, is it worth using? Probably not. Hardware this old that has moving parts will inevitably fail at some point and the last thing I need is to be heavily invested in it. :) Well, maybe if I could get a flavor of CP/M working with it... *snicker* On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Chris Fezzler <fezz...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > > Thanks for the update! > > If anyone can restore that drive it will be you! > > > ------------------------------ > On Mon Jul 03 2017 01:04:58 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time), Gary Weber < > m100l...@gweber.org> wrote: > > > To Chris, > > Good news and bad news. > > The good news: The CRT adapter works great. > > The bad news: The NEC disk drive that shipped as part of this auction > lacks the system disk, and therefore there is nothing to boot. Within my > archives I have a PC-8231A system disk *somewhere*, and hopefully I can > locate it. Unfortunately part of the case for this drive is broken as > well, so I'm hoping the drive itself would even still function given the > abuse. As this was an "as is" auction I of course accept all of this > risk. Happy to have a working CRT adapter again regardless.. > > Gary > > > On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 11:17 AM, Mike Stein <mhs.st...@gmail.com> wrote: > > *> ...it would likely be slow and limited to text only. The system bus or > parallel port would be MUCH faster for this...* > > Well, there are SPI BT/BLE modules so speed to the ModelT side shouldn't > be too bad, either using the bus or the parallel port... > > Alternatively, there are modules like this (VGA colour display *and* > FAT-compatible SD card storage): > > https://www.4dsystems.com.au/ product/uVGA_III/ > <https://www.4dsystems.com.au/product/uVGA_III/> > > Of course before long you'd have lots of stuff hanging off the ModelT > again... > > FWIW, here's what an M100 in 80x24 mode looks like (can't find a picture > of 8x40 on a big screen TV at the moment): > > > >
