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Brother Super Power Note PN-8500MDS

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DeltaDon

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Dutchess County, New York, USA
I have a Brother word processor/laptop shipping to me. Not much information on it online other than owner's manual etc. It is supposed to be able to read/write to 3.5" disks with IBM formats, but is running a clone Z80 CPU. Has anyone determined if it is running some form of CP/M with shell or is it a proprietary OS?
 
Got to see if it even boots first. That could be the first challenge. I have a NEC Starlet laptop with CP/M plus a complete Wordstar suite of programs in ROM. Perhaps a modified ROM swap replacing the Brother OS with some hooks to the Brother hardware could be done?
 
DeltaDon said:
I have a Brother word processor/laptop shipping to me. Not much information on it online other than owner's manual etc. It is supposed to be able to read/write to 3.5" disks with IBM formats, but is running a clone Z80 CPU. Has anyone determined if it is running some form of CP/M with shell or is it a proprietary OS?
Click to expand...
You can load CPM on it. There is a guy that put up the code on GitHub and I think he also did a video on YouTube about it.
 
Yeah, David Given who did that video up above also has an open-sourced 8080/Z80 CP/M-alike (cpmish) that includes a decent porting guide to write BIOSes for new hardware.

Listed as compatible, though they may be stale:
  • the Brother PN-8510MDS SuperPowerNote laptop (and probably others)
  • the Brother PN-8800FXB SuperPowerNote laptop (and probably others)
I have a PN-4400 that I was working on for awhile (the power supply caps ate the board and LCD polarizer, but it now runs, although the floppy drive needs a new belt.) I bought it because it came with a copy of Tetris, but the disk was difficult to read even with FluxEngine. I am slowly collecting Tetris ports for word processors it seems...
 
My Brother (BSPN) PN-8500MDS arrived a week or so ago and appeared to be NOS or an extremely mint used. No main battery, but did have a 2032 clock/backup coin cell. Included was a manual and two 3.5" floppy diskettes. No AC adapter and after checking my Radio Shack adjustable voltage Adaptplug adapters and none would provide negative center 9vdc @ 1.0 amps. My laptop sized one would only go down to 12vdc and the smaller one only outputted 400ma. I tried my 400ma, but no signs of life.

I just received a larger adjustable voltage output enercell (also adaptplug) adapter that can supply up to 2.5amps and mated it with the proper plug. The Brother quietly powered up and after adjusting the contrast on the awful non-back lite LCD had the splash screen. I tried a few commands and couldn't figure out if the keyboard was not completely working or if I just needed to read the manual. Note: some keys did allow me to move around the choices and enter into to them. But then I got lost. So time to RTM.
 
Did some more testing and the 8500MDS has a keyboard problem with many keys not working. Next step will be to disassemble the case and pull the keyboard out and see if it is a foam pad problem. If so , I hope the TexElec new foam pads fit, I know they aren't the exactly correct pads for Epson QX-16 keyboards.
 
One of the later models in this series ran GEOS, and could be made to run DOS software (although with keyboard mapping problems).
 
I have two floppy disks, one is "Brother conversion software and the other is "Bus letters, spreadsheet templates, Turnabout game and Lotus 123 file conversion". No Tetris disk. But until I get the keyboard working I'll not worry about playing games.
 
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