Kurt, The system disk must be in the drive at the time when you reset the NEC.
Sequence is this: 1. Insert the system disk into the drive 2. Make sure the PC-8231A is connected to the SIO1 port (RJ-45 jack) on the back of the NEC 3. Power on the PC-8231A 4. On the NEC, either Either powering off and on, or hit the reset button, or perform a full cold start 5. The drive light comes on and "DISK Basic 2.0" gets loaded in a couple of seconds. Perform these steps without the system disk in the drive and instead the drive light just comes on and the NEC hangs and has to be reset, so it is definitely reading the code from disk. So there must be system BIOS code on both the 8201 and 8300 system ROMs that does some type of initialization sequence with the SIO1 port and spits out some command sequence and starts reading bytes after you do a system a reset. I've never traced this code out in the NEC system ROM disassembly, but now I'm curious.. Gary On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 1:05 PM, Kurt McCullum <kurt.mccul...@att.net> wrote: > Gary, > > Does the NEC load software from the drive on reset, or does it need a > system disk? I'm curious as to how those additional basic features are > loaded. > > Kurt > > > On Wednesday, July 12, 2017 12:49 PM, Gary Weber <m100l...@gweber.org> > wrote: > > > 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): > > > > > > >
