Recent content by dutchacorn

If you make a cable for the Serial port (as opposed to the RS232 port) you can use the MH20 disk drive emulator, see here for more details.

More on the display disassembly (step by step disassembly instructions) is in chapter 4 of the technical manual. That states that the front panel is “not reusable”.

Yes, I did. It requires removal of the front "PX-8" label which is glued to the display part and very hard to remove without bending.

All capacitors now replaced. The caps in the Epson were in bad shape, many of them had leaked. It took a bit of effort to remove most of them, the solder was affected by the leaking caps (and/or battery) and would not flow. The caps replacement has not improved the functioning, the Epson has...

Both printers were not working. As Geoff suggested, they were both simply stuck following a long time of idleness, a few squirts of silicone spray got them back to life. Steps: Loosen the 2 small screws on the front side of the printer assembly. This frees the clips on the front side of the...

Update: the Mitutoyo keyboard issue is fixed after reflowing the joints for the keyboard connectors on the MOSU board. They were very sparsely soldered and looked a bit gray. All keys have worked since.

For the keyboard; it's actually the Z X [shift] [ ] \ [cursor] keys that don't work. And if I do press them repeatedly the computer hangs up. The printer does not show any signs of life other than when I switch it on and try an LPRINT command the computer starts to beep repeatedly. CHANGE...

Found two more faults with the Mitutoyo MOSU: The keyboard does not function fully: Z, X, shift keys, function keys, - to \ keys don't work The printer does not work The keyboard issue is not caused by the keyboard itself. The keyboard works fine on another MOSU board and a known-good keyboard...

Both keyboards now work fine with a known-good MOSU board. So the Epson video issues seem to originate from the Epson MOSU board. I've had another HX-20 where I had to turn the contrast up fully to see anything. That was fixed by replacing the caps. If the caps don't fix it I'll dive into the...

Looking at the 2 FPC cables that connect the MOSU board to the keyboard, I noticed they were stained /corroded. Cleaning these made them both fully functional again. So the battery leaks on the cables between the keyboard and the LCD board does not seem to have led to broken tracks. For the...

Recently I got 2 HX-20s off eBay. My curiosity was triggered by the "Mitutoyo DP-20" labeling on one of them. Neither of them work, this thread is to document their repairs. It can take a while because time is scarce but it may help others track down faults. It will probably help me document...

In terms of floppy disk solutions I have seen 3 variants: S100 extension fitted with a disk controller card (either soft sectored or hard sectored). I believe that initially this was the only way to connect a floppy drive to a Sorcerer. I remember reading that there were some reliability issues...

About the add-on drive; the one I owned did not have it's own power supply. It had a separate power plug coming from the main drive, powering the add-on drive (DP6401). It came with the FDS Operators Manual that was linked to a few posts up (the version from bitsavers was scanned by me). The...

Of course, you'd need a working CP/M disk to format a blank disk to the 100 TPI format. So it's a bit of a bootstrap situation. If you have a set of disks, chances are that there is more than one copy of a CP/M system disk. The cool thing about having a dual drive setup like this is that it is...

Thanks for the suggestions, Geoff. If the issue would be the LCD I would expect the machine to do a startup beep? Or at least respond to the on/off switch. It seems not to get trough the start-up process and hang somewhere before a beep or screen output is generated. Here's what I mean with the...