General catchup

[Gary C]

Happy days

Just waiting for my Pension to hit the bank then its time to ask for 3 days per week

Which should give me time to sort out some of the projects I have waiting

Hires board to fit in a PET
IDE interface to fit in an Acorn A3010
80 column adapter to fit in an Osborne
Colour adapter to fit in a DEC Rainbow
Acorn RISC PC to set up
Museums Northstar horizon to fix

Jumble sale later in the year so need to identify machines to sell and ensure they are electrically safe and working.

This week though is mainly setting up my new Acorn RISC PC600 which landed after a cheeky offer on an Ebay sale which showed no pictures inside. As the machine wasn't showing any corrosion around the rear ports, took a gamble and a machine totally free of corrosion but with the original Varta still fitted turned up.
Fitted with the faster 710, a midi card a 10Base2 NIC, a 1gb HD, a 100MHz 486 and 41Mb quite happy

Just installing windows 95 just for fun.

 

[g4ugm]

Gary,
Is the jumble sale at the museum?
Dave

 

[daver2]

Another one starting the process of abandoning the ship!

Dave

 

[g4ugm]

Another one starting the process of abandoning the ship!

Dave

Me, not really! I just have accumulated more that I can ever play with. Does it make sense to retain 50 boxes of floppy disks, several boxes of Microsoft Technet CDs, Assorted floppy disk drives, tape drives and external SCSI boxes. A second IBM 3270 controller when I only have one real 3270 terminal. Several VT terminals when I mostly use my VLC.... oh and two Sun workstations, neither of which seem to work... which is a problem with stored stuff. You fix it, put it away, get it out and it doesn't work. Got two papertape punches like that....
.. three CD cases with probably 100 cover disks in each.... My loft is the Vintage Computer equivalent of Steptoe and Sons yard, with its of Only Fools and Horses thrown in for good measure..

... if I don't re-distribute it, it will just go to the skip when I pass or we have to move house, NO I need a jumble sale (or probably several) for the jumble, then probably a trip to the re-cycling centre....
... I know, when its gone I will be saying "where did that floppy with USB support for Win95 go, but perhaps not.....

 

[daver2]

No, Gary.

Dave

 

[Gary C]

It w

Gary,
Is the jumble sale at the museum?
Dave

It will be but its not until September.

And I will be slowly walking to the gangplank but it will be a couple of years (hopefully on three days a week) until I step of the end

 

[Gary C]

Not really discussed my new toy

An Acorn RISC PC600

described as a Strongarm machine it was on ebay with no pictures of the PCB. Know that most of these machines have been all but destroyed by battery leakage, it was a risk to make an offer but I also know that most machines thus affected, show some signs of corrosion (possibly galvanic) around the metal fittings at the rear. Seeing this one showed no external signs, I took a punt and put in a cheeky buy it now offer and to my surprise the vendor accepted and in a couple of days the machine arrived

Lid off and, no corrosion. The battery was 'just' showing some signs of leaks forming and where it touched the PCB there was a piece of paper that was a little crumbly but apart from that, nothing. It didn't have the strongarm card but it does have the more compatible 710 card, an ethernet NIC, the extra VRAM, 40Mb of RAM and a Lark Midi/sound card. It also has a 486-DX4 100 and a 1GB hard disk so not too bad.

Battery cut out and CR2032 with diode fitted, powered up and delete pressed and, nothing, but an 'out of range' error on the monitor. Humm, reseting CMOS should have made it drop to 640x480 50Hz and well within range. Changed the VGA cable for a full spec one and now a screen appears, yay.

RISCOS 3.50 was fitted, but by luck I had 3.70 ones in a box, so once inserted the CD has come to life.
Windows 95 installed via a Gotek (cant write 1.68mb DMF format disks on my USB floppy drive and both the floppy and the CD writer is missing from the workshop PC)

Now its time to load it up with software.

Elite is too fast though...

 

[Gary C]

CJE were selling some Castle SCSI cards cheap as the external connections rarely work but the internal one does. As I dont have a second slice, there isn't a place to stick another hard drive but I do have a Zuluscsi which works perfectly with it.

Need a new cable though.

Also got a couple of 128mb Simms but they wont fit the Acorns sockets, the chips foul the socket and you cant quite get them pushed in enough before you rotate them so they then dont line up on the pegs which is a shame.

 

[DougM]

Congratulations on pseudo-retirement! Full retirement was the smartest decision I never made (it found me when the company went out of business...)

For the first time in my life I have both time and money at the same time. And a list of projects 130 years long.

 

[Gary C]

RISC PC is now fully working

The mouse's IR emitters were really dim so swapped them to get the mouse working again with some Kingbright AM4457F3C emitters

Got the network working. I could have either changed the thin ethernet NIC for a 10baseT unit at daft cost or go for a media converter. Found a cheaper AT-MC15 Ethernet Media Converter and some 10base2 cable/terminators. Manged to get it setup and got the browser somewhat working but FTP is very flakey with the browser. Downloaded !FTPc and installed that. Worked perfectly and could now download big files to the machine.
I then turned it off and moved the PC about 12" and everything stopped working. Much hair pulling and head scratching when I noted the online indicator on the 10base2 side was not working. Checked the cable and dead short between core and sheath
Dismantled one of the BNC connectors and found that a few strands of the core had not been crimped into the centre pin and had moved just enough to touch the metal of the connector. Remade it and network has sprung back into life. Terminators though look newly made and have very little springyness and are easily displaced.

Nice machine but now on the shelf and its time to crack out the next project

I wonder what it will be.

As to my pension... I am still waiting for the bloody administrator to pay up ! 3 months late so far

Bloody good job I haven't reduced my hours yet.