New project, Altos ACS8000-6

[hideehoo]

Took a chance on a local auction site



Ended up with an ACS8000-6 and Winchester drive unit with a Shugart 400B hard drive. Other than disintegrating foam and the usual dust build up, looks to be in pretty good shape.





Going to leave the hard drive alone for now and work on getting the board to boot on the bench with a FlashFloppy. Then back into the case with the real floppy drives.

 

[LiqMatrix]

Thing of beauty. Look forward to seeing this restored.

 

[hideehoo]

Success (so far).



Crimped up a custom power cable and connected it up to an Mean Well RT-65B PSU I normally use with my Ferguson Big Board. Here's the pinout for future reference, pin 1 is at the bottom of the board closed to the memory banks.

Pin 1 GND
Pin 2 GND
Pin 3 -12V
Pin 4 +5V
Pin 5 +5V
Pin 6 +12v

This is the multi user ACS8200 board so terminal 1 is the JY connectors on the right side of the board. This is the wiring to a male DB9 assuming a null modem cable to your terminal (what was on the bench). If using a straight through cable just reverse pins 2 and 3.

Pin 2 TX DB9 - 2
Pin 3 RX DB9 - 3
Pin 7 GND DB9 - 5

Now to make some floppy images. This is the DMA version of the board, so I don't see a lot of options out there for images on the various sites.

 

[hideehoo]

Hmm, no dice getting a (virtual) disk to boot.

Tried both these Teledisk images from http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/Altos...k_images/DMA_Version_-_double_density_format/. Converted to IMG format with the HXC Floppy Emulator tool which gave me a 467,456 byte image (good). Then configured this in IMG.CFG for FlashFloppy to account for the first two tracks being single density FM, and the remaining double density MFM.

[::467456]
cyls = 77
heads = 1
bps = 128
rpm = 360
tracks = 0-1
secs = 26
mode = fm
rate = 250
tracks = 2-76
secs = 48
mode = mfm
rate = 250

On power up/reset the Altos reads track 0, advances to track 1, but then freezes. I tried some of the single density (non DMA) images out there and most of them don't even move past track 0, so it does appear to be doing something here. For single density I'm using the same IMG.CFG that works for the Ferguson.

[::256256]
cyls = 77
heads = 1
secs = 26
bps = 128
mode = fm
rpm = 360
rate = 250