Recent content by GearTechWolf

Hmm, will need to de-sandwich them for a better chance at identification. I see one large chip per board, knowing what those are will go a long way to knowing what its function is!

One label looks like E311-23UT3 (not sure on those first two characters though). Other looks like ?9 -24743 (can't make out first character). Dunno if either label is relevant!

A profession with no lack of work! XD

Oh! Those don't go nowhere, they go to a plated through-hole called a via! It's a way of jumping the trace between different layers or sides of the board. If you scrape away the solder-mask at those round points/dots you may be able to solder to them. They look to be in decent shape. Happy to help!

Looks like a good start, yeah! Looking at the underside of the board, are there any other traces on the other side that connect at that through-hole where it changes layers? There are a few ways you can route the wires that replace the traces. You can follow the same path and use dabs of glue...

Looks like you have a bunch of traces that have been entirely removed by the battery leakage! Fortunately, it seems the paths they used to take are still evident on the surface of the board. Following those to their next viable solder-point (at a component or where the trace is large enough to...

They really don't hold up all that well, do they? If they weren't made to run off of USB power they could be made more sturdy. Sure, they'd be heavier and require a separate power-supply, but I'd be fine with that! I don't care about the portability, I just want to connect a floppy to a modern...

Tested all of the ISA video-cards and floppy-controllers/multi-IO cards I had immediately on-hand, then later tested all the 3-1/2 floppy drives I could find. Most of them worked! Only a couple VGA cards and a several floppy-drives refused to work fully, or at all. Was going to use ImageDisk to...

Are those red and white ones chiclet style?

The saga continues! While the USB-floppy technically still works in of itself, it cannot read disks made by other drives and vice-versa. So it's clearly out of alignment from running the cleaning-disk through it. Time to see what USB-floppy stuff the local computer place has...

The sticker on the ROM says 8500 V1.1, maybe a clue? Interesting bodge-wires on U20.

Yeah, that'd be handy, thank you! Fortunately, I jumped to conclusions. USB-floppy still works, I just had to format the floppy to access it and now have permission to put files on it. Not sure why linux is so damned touchy about permissions on floppies it hasn't made/formatted. They're still...

Welp, I was going to try the ImageDisk program on these defective drives this morning but ran into a frustrating issue. Well, issues, plural. First, for some reason I have yet to understand, linux is telling me I don't have permission to write to the BLANK floppy in my USB floppy-drive. Second...

Huh, weird, the description for the supposed 8008 board is almost identical. Surely they couldn't all be from the same system?

Why's that? I notice the 8008 chip looks kinda funky, like a knock-off, and the whole thing is very much a messy home-built look.