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Searching for NEC PC-8001A software & hardware

Yep, most probably "B" for being the next letter :-D. It's a 220V machine, not 240V as usual for the British market. Maybe a generic European version?. A rare machine anyway, I haven't been able to find any info related to this model.

I have two working PC-8031 units and one of them I consider it as spare; but I suppose the shipping would be killing...:-(
 
jltursan said:
In the last years I was able to repair some expansion disk units for the 8001 and find a lot of software, nice machine all in all :)
Click to expand...

Well done with the repairs, can you give some details on what you did please?

Also I am delighted you found some 8001 software, are you able to make copies please? I can pay costs & postage to the UK,

Regards,
John
 
One of the units was good from the beggining and it was extremely useful to help diagnose the faulty one. It was extremely corroded; so I started with a good cleaning and socketizing A LOT of ICs, next I started swapping the big ICs and found that the ROM was busted so I burned a copy of the good one. Also a tantalum capacitor was shorted and promptly replaced. The last failure was harder to find but I was extremely lucky as it was a 74LS357 (can't remember for sure right now) already socketed in my first effort. Once replaced the interface worked fine.

As I've replaced the first drive with a 3.5" one it's easy to transfer software from the PC to it and create software, by means of the second 5.25" drive, in this format.
Yep, it's easy to transfer; but in fact the software I've found it's for the 8801, not the 8001 :p. I haven't tested these units with the PC-8001 machines, only with the bare PC-8801.

As I have some disk software for the PC-8001, I'll try to transfer it to the real machine :)
 
Thanks for the details, interesting to see what you managed to find :)

Regards,
John
 
So, here it is:

1) Of course the PC-8031 units work great with the PC-8001mkII. I can't try with the original PC-8001 as I don't have the PC-8033 interface, I'm not sure about this point tho...
2) The software transferred to DSDD floppies work great. I've used Samdisk and a WinXP machine with 1.2MB drive, just a matter of use double step. With good quality floppies usually works at the first attempt.
3) You can find some nice PC-8001 software freely available here: http://w01.tp1.jp/~a571632211/gamesoft/index.html or http://www.theoldcomputer.com/roms/index.php?folder=NEC/PC-8001

A pity there're no other software out there...or at least I haven't been able to find it
 
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Thanks! I'm just browsing some further Japanese sites (thanks to Google translate):

https://translate.google.co.uk/tran...ww.geocities.jp/upd780c1/pc-8001/&prev=search

CMT8001 appears to be a tool to manage cassette tape images, and PCM8001 a tool to convert such images back to audio (presumably to feed from a PC to a PC-8001 tape input socket). A search for PC8001 MP3 throws up many hits but they all seem to be dodgy sites.

A few nice YouTube videos too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTg1qzvpGLg

Regards,
John
 
Nice!; but as usual it's extremely hard to find the download bits (if there're any...:p)

theoldcomputer.com ROMs are not downloadable if you're not a member; so no luck with them neither.
 
jltursan said:
Nice!; but as usual it's extremely hard to find the download bits .
Click to expand...


I've attached a ROM and FON files from http://cd.textfiles.com/230/EMULATOR/NEC/PC8001/, plus Google translations of the J80 help files. However, I don't know how to load the ROMs into J80, starting it up just gives a continuous beep.

Has anyone here managed to run the J80 emulator, screen shots look great.

Regards,
John
 

Attachments

  • J80 files.zip
    82.7 KB · Views: 3
Hi everyone,

Sorry to barge in on this thread like this. I own a PC 8001B which works fine but which I have no documentation for (other than a pdf of a sales brochure which loosely describes capabilities and the BASIC commands). Does anyone have user manuals, programming manuals (both BASIC and machine language) or other useful documentation (in English)? I am willing to pay postage and compensate for any work like scanning etc.

Best regards,
Philipp
 
Hi,

Good news !!!! Just come across this page:

https://archive.org/details/Neo_Kobe_NEC_PC-8001_2016-02-25

which was uploaded back in February. It contains a 43MB ZIP archive of loads of PC-8001 disks, including Basic, CP/M and many games. I have yet to try these out, but thank you Neo Kobe team!

I just need to connect up my disk drive (need some leads for starters, and have never powered up the drives!)

Regards,
John
 
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That's what I call a hell of a find, thanks!. I already know of NeoKobe packs but never know of this one, so 8001 specific. It has a ton of nice software!
 
Thanks. Any idea what the format of the disks is to write the image file to a physical disk? The size is 348,576 bytes which doesn't divide by 256.

Regards,
John
 
seems expensive

but someone with deep pockets may buy it.
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Extremely expensive IMHO. Get it from Yahoo Auctions and you'll save some hundreds. The PC-8001s are usually cheap machines specially if they're dirty and come loose.

Any idea what the format of the disks is to write the image file to a physical disk? The size is 348,576 bytes which doesn't divide by 256.
Click to expand...

They're not raw images, D88 archives have headers that increase the final size. Use Samdisk to write them back to floppy, I've used it with more or less success with 1.2MB drives and DSDD floppies.
 
If anyone is looking for a NEC PC8001, I am selling the Japanese version. I'm based in the USA. My eBay link is posted in the sellers/auction forum here.

Cheers
 
Apologies for re-openning an old thread, I've just started looking at the .D88 disk image files. These all seem to be for DSDD drives. I've read here:

https://archive.is/Hp9CS

that the PC-8031 is a single sided drive (which I earlier knew as it has FD-50A single sided floppy drives), and the PC-8031-2W is double sided. So what specific PC-8031 drives to people have please? Hopefully someone can comment on compatibility of any of the many .D88 images with the PC-8031.

Regards,
John
 
1980s_john said:
Apologies for re-openning an old thread, I've just started looking at the .D88 disk image files. These all seem to be for DSDD drives. I've read here:

https://archive.is/Hp9CS

that the PC-8031 is a single sided drive (which I earlier knew as it has FD-50A single sided floppy drives), and the PC-8031-2W is double sided. So what specific PC-8031 drives to people have please? Hopefully someone can comment on compatibility of any of the many .D88 images with the PC-8031.

Regards,
John
Click to expand...

I can't remember exactly; but I can check the exact models of expansions and drives I have, if I'm not wrong both were PC-8031 units, one of them have a 3.5" drive and I don't remember having problems when writing D88 images to both drives. I'll check also my D88 image library to look for the different possible sizes...

Edit: Mmm, checking the thread I must reckon that I've never tested the units with the PC-8001, all my use has been with the 8801 and so, the D88 images are for these machines, not PC-8001. Anyway I suppose it doesn't matter, a D88 image is always the same, mostly a raw dump of a disk...
 
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jltursan said:
I can't remember exactly; but I can check the exact models of expansions and drives I have, if I'm not wrong both were PC-8031 units, one of them have a 3.5" drive and I don't remember having problems when writing D88 images to both drives. I'll check also my D88 image library to look for the different possible sizes...

Edit: Mmm, checking the thread I must reckon that I've never tested the units with the PC-8001, all my use has been with the 8801 and so, the D88 images are for these machines, not PC-8001. Anyway I suppose it doesn't matter, a D88 image is always the same, mostly a raw dump of a disk...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the quick reply. My hope is that as a lot of D88 zip files are so small that most of the 384KB when expanded is empty, and all the data is only on one side of the floppy. Still worth checking who has one of the double sided PC-8031-2W drives, and which machines these are supported on.


Regarding cassette tape images, I wrote earlier:

1980s_john said:
Thanks! I'm just browsing some further Japanese sites (thanks to Google translate):

https://translate.google.co.uk/tran...ww.geocities.jp/upd780c1/pc-8001/&prev=search

CMT8001 appears to be a tool to manage cassette tape images, and PCM8001 a tool to convert such images back to audio (presumably to feed from a PC to a PC-8001 tape input socket). A search for PC8001 MP3 throws up many hits but they all seem to be dodgy sites.
Click to expand...

Well the Neo Kobe archive:
https://archive.org/details/Neo_Kobe_NEC_PC-8001_2016-02-25

also has a few (well 5 I think) CMT files, I've converted a couple to .WAV using the PCM8001 tool so I hope to feed into my PC-8001 cassette port soon.

On the J80 emulator front, I wrote earlier:

1980s_john said:
I've attached a ROM and FON files from http://cd.textfiles.com/230/EMULATOR/NEC/PC8001/, plus Google translations of the J80 help files. However, I don't know how to load the ROMs into J80, starting it up just gives a continuous beep.
Click to expand...

I found ROM and character font (FON) files for the PC-8001 in the Neo Kobe archive as well, and managed to load these into J80 (version J80.6.117) and it starts at last! Key is to edit the j80.cfg file with the right file names for the ROMs and FON, and create the directory \system to hold them. Also with this j80.cfg some file directories have to be moved up a level in the directory hierarchy. The emulator is started (in Windows 10) by double clicking _j80.bat. This gives a load of helpful error messages saying file not loaded, so need to work out why and adjust config as needed. Next up is to find or dump the PC-8031 ROM as this is needed for disk emulation I think. I haven't tried loading CMT or D88 images into the emulator so more to do.

Final plea is please can someone help with the loan / sale of the NEC N80 Basic manual (in English)? I could help scan it in.

Regards,
John
 
Some progress! Firstly I've dumped my PC-8031 ROM, it is a 2316 and luckily is compatible with a 2716 EPROM. I copied the .BIN file to the J80 emulator system directory and edited the j80.cfg file to include it:

DISK ../system/PC8031.rom

Now when I RESET the emulator I get the 'Disk' commands in the top menu and could load in a .d88 file. I assume when the PC-8001 is reset it tries to read the disk in drive 1. However on the emulator so far I have only found file 'Galaxian (Geimu Kyoujin) [Alt 1].d88' which runs. On others I get either PASSWORD, or the message:

Dash 80 loading - Dash 80 can't run under these conditions

Any idea what this means?

BTW the original j80.cfg file had an entry for the PC8031-2.rom which I assume is for double sided disks, so may be needed for the larger .d88 files.

I have also loaded in a .CMT file 'Invader 2 {mon L GD000}.cmt'. In the emulator set the Tape player to the .CMT file then reset the PC-8001. In Basic type 'mon <enter>' and you get the '*' prompt. Typing L <enter> loads the cassette image, then GD000 <enter> runs from D000 in RAM.

Thanks again to the Neo Kobe people for the archive! Running the emulator up will certainly help get my real PC-8001 efforts.

Regards,
John
 

Attachments

  • pc8031.zip
    2.7 KB · Views: 7
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