One correction.
Step One. Tell wife you will be using the dining room table for the next 7
months to display your new vintage computer system! "Isn't it amazing and
beautiful, honey?"
I tell my wife where all my toys are and that they are worth money if I go.
She says, "that junk is in the dumpster the day after your funeral!"
LOL!
On Wed Jul 12 2017 17:05:08 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time), Gary Weber
<m100l...@gweber.org> wrote:
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 drive2. Make sure the
PC-8231A is connected to the SIO1 port (RJ-45 jack) on the back of the NEC3.
Power on the PC-8231A4. 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/ 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):
