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Display problems on a Commodore Pet 8032

For some of us, every day is PET alive day ;-) Bring it on!

I'd be able to dig my 2001 out and it's certainly been dormant for more than 3 months. Maybe we should all run the same program and post photos of the results as proof that our machines are alive.
 
If anyone makes a port of Folding@Home, we could let our PETs crunch partial packages and shift the results inbetween us in order to get one complete package done. :-D

Dave: In the past 4-5 years, I've come across some 20 units of the 8250LP. All were rescued, but I only took care of a handful myself. Perhaps my distribution was unusually uneven, but if I didn't know better I would think at least 1/4 or even 1/3 of all IEEE drives are LP's. Not sure why so many ended up in Europe and so few in the USA. Perhaps the slight delay of the IBM PC (not here until 1983 or so) gave room both for Victor/Sirius systems as well as letting Commodore run their PET and CBM-II lines a little longer than they would have market shares for overseas. Well, this is highly speculative writing.
 
Re: Pet Alive!

Thanks guys. I think this could be fun event. I got to rush off now but I'll think more on this today. I'm starting to think now this should be less of a just a "switch it on and see what happens"-event (although that could be part of it) and more a celebration of the PET. People could supply a photograph of our "groomed" PET doing something. A chance for people to drag their PETs out for a walk.

I'm thinking the event could be over a weekend, maybe in a week or two.

Anyway, more later...

Tez
 
tezza said:
Re: Pet Alive!

Thanks guys. I think this could be fun event. I got to rush off now but I'll think more on this today. I'm starting to think now this should be less of a just a "switch it on and see what happens"-event (although that could be part of it) and more a celebration of the PET. People could supply a photograph of our "groomed" PET doing something. A chance for people to drag their PETs out for a walk.

I'm thinking the event could be over a weekend, maybe in a week or two.

Anyway, more later...

Tez
Click to expand...
Well, I guess I could put little casters on the PETs, or at least make a little platform with casters for them; a leash should be no problem and I've got lots of UPS power to run them off while we're out for our walkies...
 
carlsson said:
If anyone makes a port of Folding@Home, we could let our PETs crunch partial packages and shift the results inbetween us in order to get one complete package done. :-D

Dave: In the past 4-5 years, I've come across some 20 units of the 8250LP. All were rescued, but I only took care of a handful myself. Perhaps my distribution was unusually uneven, but if I didn't know better I would think at least 1/4 or even 1/3 of all IEEE drives are LP's. Not sure why so many ended up in Europe and so few in the USA. Perhaps the slight delay of the IBM PC (not here until 1983 or so) gave room both for Victor/Sirius systems as well as letting Commodore run their PET and CBM-II lines a little longer than they would have market shares for overseas. Well, this is highly speculative writing.
Click to expand...
I've always wondered whether the LP drives would fit into my 8032; it's one of the tall early models with cutouts and mounting pillars behind a snap-in faceplate obviously intended for a pair of integrated floppies, but the height & mounting pillars don't match a standard 5 1/4 drive.

Faceplate removed to show cutouts; note how it's taller than the 4032 beside it (same universal board inside though).
8032FDD..JPG(Click for larger pic)
 
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carlsson said:
All my PETs are in the basement and it takes a bit of effort to haul one into the apartment. But sure, I can join. Even better if we have some task to perform. Those of us who own IEEE floppy drives and one of those cbmlink compatible cables could try some disk transfers, report success and how we went ahead: PC64, C2N232, PRLINK, X-cable and so on.

By the way, did you see the Christmas card I sent to some of my friends?
godjul-final.jpg
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'd seen that card before; beautiful!
No power in the basement? No UPS to take down with you?
 
Well, an outlet in the corridor but it means I have to haul the PET out from my storage space anyway.

As a matter of fact I have a couple of loose Matsushita mechanisms pulled from 8250LP drives. Those are in highly unknown condition, and I don't feel like swapping working mechs for possibly broken ones in case it ends in destroying circuitry. I already killed one or two LP drives by swapping boards and chips between identical units, on which one unit must've had really nasty chips that I discovered too late.
 
Guys,

I've sent a PM to you all with more ideas about the Pet Alive! day. I thought maybe better to do it there, rather than hijack this thread.
 
sorry I'm late to this thread

sorry I'm late to this thread

...Actually very late!!!

I'm the 'Philip' mentioned earlier in the thread. The one who made the JPN character ROMs. MikeS, nice to see you're still using them. My own machine is still not fixed yet :(

Anyway, I thought I'd mention that one way you could have initially tested the character ROM is by systematically shorting between the outputs of the ROM and watching the characters change on screen (always fun). Eventually the outputs that were stuck would be shorted to another non stuck output and the lines would have disappeared being replaced with something else. I've done this simple test many times in the past and it's helped me numerous times to find, and fix similar issues on various hardware.

Phil
 
Nama said:
...Actually very late!!!

I'm the 'Philip' mentioned earlier in the thread. The one who made the JPN character ROMs. MikeS, nice to see you're still using them. My own machine is still not fixed yet :(

Anyway, I thought I'd mention that one way you could have initially tested the character ROM is by systematically shorting between the outputs of the ROM and watching the characters change on screen (always fun). Eventually the outputs that were stuck would be shorted to another non stuck output and the lines would have disappeared being replaced with something else. I've done this simple test many times in the past and it's helped me numerous times to find, and fix similar issues on various hardware.

Phil
Click to expand...
Well, hello there Philip; fancy meeting you here! Guess you have to be careful what you say here; ya never know who's reading...

That's a good tip, but I usually use a low-value (~56 Ohms) resistor when connecting outputs together just in case, and especially when grounding them or connecting to Vcc.

Haven't gotten around to trying to use Japanese, graphics and 'normal' upper and lower case symbols on the same screen yet; looks easy on an 80/4032 but I'm probably overlooking something crucial; a bit more challenging on a non-controller PET though by the looks of it.

Sorry to hear you don't have your beloved PET back yet; I gather Ethan's been very busy since at work he has to fill in for someone, and your PETs turned out to have some other more subtle problems than just PS and ROM trouble as was originally thought. But I'm sure you'll see them again soon; he hasn't sold them or run off to Mexico with them AFAIK...
 
Yeah, Ethan has been very helpful. It's unfortunate that he's been tied up so much with other more important things (i.e. making a living). However I'm hoping to get the boards back sooner rather than later. The chassis has been sitting on my desk for the last 6 months looking quite lonely indeed.

The last email I got from Ethan says that he now has both boards powering up on screen, One still has a loading/saving issue (although now partially fixed), and the other has vertical lines running down the length of the screen (not to dissimilar to the original issue on this thread, but by the sounds of it they are not character based errors). This is what Ethan had to say about this latter board:

"it has stuck bus bits - D1-D6
tied together. It seems likely that it's something with 8-bits
through it, not merely 4, so it's more likely to be a PIA, CIA, or a
ROM rather than a 244 buffer or the SRAM. I did test the SRAM in my
own board - looks like I've found a few that have bad bits. This is
not at all uncommon with Static PETs."

...as for the board with the load/save issue, Ethan has this to say about it:

"As for the tape/disk issue, it looks like a bad 6522. I swapped out a
65C22 for your 6522. Loading from the disk doesn't lock up anymore -
it gets "DEVICE NOT FOUND". The tape drive responds to "PLAY" and
does allow me to hit RUN/STOP to break back immediate mode. The tape
doesn't spin, from either port. That could be on of several parts,
but the controls are on different I/O ports, so it's probably not
that, especially since one is controlled by the VIA I replaced."

So indeed, some really good progress made by Ethan. I just hope he can figure it all out.

Phil
 
Oh...for the PET alive event I will post some pictures showing this unusual Japanese PET 2001 with Japanese chicklet keyboard. I've never seen or heard mention of a Japanese PET 2001 before. So it was just by luck I happened upon this one on Japan yahoo auction.
 
Nama said:
Oh...for the PET alive event I will post some pictures showing this unusual Japanese PET 2001 with Japanese chicklet keyboard. I've never seen or heard mention of a Japanese PET 2001 before. So it was just by luck I happened upon this one on Japan yahoo auction.
Click to expand...
Well, then I guess I'll have to dig out my Japanese 4032 to keep yours company; they must be lonely...

As to your PETs, unless they're intermittent those problems don't sound too difficult to find/solve (easy for me to say ;-) ), so it shouldn't be much longer...
 
Yes, please do. I still have the pics of your Japanese keyboard you sent me for reference when I was making the Japanese ROMs.
 
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