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The story behind my Tulip System I - and its lack of a PSU

Chuck(G) said:
I've been on fora where multiple languages were used. If anyone really wanted to know, there's always Google language tools (which I prefer to Babelfish). It didn't seem to beother anyone. Who speaks Dutch anyway? The inhabitants of the Netherlands, of course and the Flemings (I don't count Afrikaans). Maybe Aruba, but most speak Spanish and English there also. Who else?

Hell, maybe I'll start a vintage computer forum where posts are limited to Ciceronian Latin or Skiermûntseagersk. :)
Click to expand...

Hvorfor ikke norsk også? :rolleyes:

Maybe we should get back on-topic. One way of finding out about the two last lines is to see of they are equiped with polarized filtering capacitors. One leg of the capacitors usually connects to ground, and the other is connected to the power-lines. if those capacitors are polarized, then you can identify if a power-line is greater or less than ground (0V), based on what of the capacitor's poles are connected to ground.

If - is connected to ground and + is connected to the power-line, then the line is more than 0V.
If + is connected to ground and - is connected to the power-line, then the line is less than 0V.
If the capacitor is un-polarized, then you can't tell.
 
Better yet, how about a photo of the board with all ICs shown so that one can read their part numbers? I can then offer simple continuity checks to the power connector and tell you exactly what's what.
 
I've made a list with all the ICs on the board if that helps. I'll take some photos too.
 
Victory !

victory.jpg
 
Just as I thought. Now you have to find out what-is-what of the two last connectors. One of them is 12v, one of them is -12v, and if you get them wrong, something is likely to toast.
 
if it has 1488 or 1489 line drivers/recievers on the serial port, that's a dead giveaway, you should be able to trace the power connections from them. Also check the polarity of smoothing capacitors on the main board.
 
Damn, its been two years without an update but I finally came through ! Well... sort of.
Apparently, powering the machine was the easiest part. Directing the video-out to a S-video cable to plug it into my LCD was way beyond my capabilities. Luckily I had help :)
I'll post pictures soon, although its not much because my dual floppy drive turns out to be faulty :(

Anyway, I'm currently being given two options by what I guess its the Tulip's boot loader / "BIOS" equivalent (well, more than two actually but the rest allow you to punch machine-code into RAM and that's way beyond me) :
1.EPROM boot
2.Network boot

I tried booting from the internal memory and got a "Unable to find MSDOS.SYS" message (I'm paraphrasing) which probably means that the boot sector is okay and presumably IO.SYS was successfully loaded (at least I think this is the order : IO.SYS -> MSDOS.SYS -> COMMAND.COM ).

I also tried network boot at least to see if its functional (one machine had the network connector missing and the other had it in place but it wasn't soldered for some reason).
What I got here was a cryptic "Invalid Master" message. It probably needs me to input the server address as parameter but I don't even know what type of address is he expecting (some older version of IP, IPX ... I'm completely clueless ! )

And that's about it. I presume the contents of the EPROM suffered from bitrot because otherwise I would get a "Invalid system disk" error. I could try making the Tulip boot MS-DOS from another computer but I have no idea what he's trying to tell me with Invalid Master. A even more outlandish idea would be to improvise a SASI adaptor and boot MS-DOS from a hard drive !
Or I could try to read the contents of the EPROM and maybe... maybe attempt to reprogram it although that's asking for trouble.

Add to that, I'm leaving on the 12th to begin my university studies in the UK which means I have to come up with a quick solution.

I hope I might get a new toy to keep me company there although my Tulip will always come first in my heart, haha !
 
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