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Powered up my Sirus after replacing blown PSU Caps. So here is the latest.

inotarobot

inotarobot

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 7, 2014
Messages
1,209
Location
Melbourne, Australia
Bit of History.

Many here will recall I bought my Sirius 1 about 8 months or more, from a young man, whom is learning IT at school. He had bought it from a Flea market, but failed to get the SIRIUS 1 keyboard.

Recently I bought a second Sirius 1 with keyboard from a Gentleman in Adelaide, whom shipped me, via Australia Post, the Keyboard.
I have a separate thread here on how the parcel arrived.

Anyways not long after the keyboard arrived, I decided to open my Sirius 1 up.

Found the 0.33uF cap in the power supply had failed. Also the two 0.1uF caps in same mains AC input area were bulging.

Further investigation revealed they were in fact only rated for 250vac and the Mains here is 254vac.

So I sourced some nice higher rated ones, fitted them. Reflowed about 6 dry solder joints and then after connecting supply to my variable PSU load, powered it up on bench. All voltages were in close to correct.

I found that issues with the 8087 heat sink, that I started a new thread here. As yet I have not refitted heatsink.

Finally today I decided to reassemble the machine and give it a short run, to see what it does.

BTW my machine has 1 floppy drive and one hard drive.

I had tried to power it up not long after I got it, and got a few symbols on the lower part of screen.

One indicated to put a floppy in. However I had no floppies with it, so that was a no go.

I initially assumed since it did not boot from the hard drive that just maybe the drive had been 'wiped' by original owner.

Fast forward to today 30th June 2017

I put power to the machine

Got the screen showing 128k on the bottom and a symbol of floppy with an up arrow alongside it.

So I got out the floppies I bought at same time as Keyboard

Tried a few of the system Disks. NO boot

So off to have some dinner and sleep
 
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If the disc drive isn't actually doing anything when you put a disk in (other than sitting there with a red light on), I'd consider swapping the 6522s on the disk controller... If it's reporting an error, inclined to think bad disks...
 
drdanj said:
If the disc drive isn't actually doing anything when you put a disk in (other than sitting there with a red light on), I'd consider swapping the 6522s on the disk controller... If it's reporting an error, inclined to think bad disks...
Click to expand...

Hi thanks for the answer. Disk drive is seeking and trying to load, but I suspect the floppy disks may not be "systemed" correctly.
 
images of attempted floppy boot of Sirus 1

images of attempted floppy boot of Sirus 1

the following is the screen shot of bottom right of screen before I insert a disk. It is the only text on the screen

BEw5joh.jpg


drive then make noise and appears to read disk then the following appears on screen

T9usixq.jpg


At first I thought machine requires 2 or more floppies to boot from ( which is unusual) but I am told this is not the case.

So the likely cause is the floppies are not properly formatted and systemed or they are corrupt due to age, or the drive/drive controller as issues.
 
That error's "No Header" - controller's probably OK, I don't think you'd get that far if it wasn't. I guess the first step is sourcing some known-good boot disks. You've got the Universal ROM in there, so you can use DOS 1.25, 2.11 or 3. Let me know if you're stuck for one and I can probably help.

d.
 
drdanj said:
That error's "No Header" - controller's probably OK, I don't think you'd get that far if it wasn't. I guess the first step is sourcing some known-good boot disks. You've got the Universal ROM in there, so you can use DOS 1.25, 2.11 or 3. Let me know if you're stuck for one and I can probably help.

d.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I will fire it up again tomorrow. I have normal DOS Original system floppies , so I will try one of them.

When you say I have the Universal ROM, I assume you are NOT referring to the ROM's produced by a third party, being 'ISSUE' from Holland ?
I gather the ISSUE ROM's were the latest available ROMS and if machine had errors, they showed on screen or to a connected Epsom Printer.
 
Just saw the following information about the hard drives in this machine. Would be interesting to try and find out what model HD was used in those European manchines. and try and track down the OEM specs on them.

Could out of temperature range, be a reason my Sirius 1 is not booting its HD ?

....hard disks had a major temperature problem: If too cold or warm after boot it couldn't find Track 0 for the boot process. etc...
Click to expand...

Above snippet, was posted on June 14, 2014 on http://oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html by Norbert Hesse. Germany Post number 17
Click to expand...
 
HD: My HD one has a Tandon TM502 in it. It sounds like a jet taking off. If it's not booting from HD I'd be tempted to think that the drive is 35 years old and has given up the ghost. I'm looking at getting mine to work with a SCSI2SD - I'll start another thread once I get that working. It's potentially a really good solution for people who've got an HDD machine with DMA card. Mine requires a tap of the reset button to get it to boot from the HD.

The Universal ROMs were the last ones produced by Victor, not the later issue roms (I don't know of an existing image for those unfortunately) - the only real benefit of the issue ROMs AFAIK is, as you say, if your monitor's gone on the blink you'd manage to get some output down the printer port. Otherwise the universal boot ROMs are fine.

Very happy to answer Qs about these to the best of my ability. They're lovely machines once you get them going.

d.
 
drdanj said:
HD: My HD one has a Tandon TM502 in it. It sounds like a jet taking off. If it's not booting from HD I'd be tempted to think that the drive is 35 years old and has given up the ghost. I'm looking at getting mine to work with a SCSI2SD - I'll start another thread once I get that working. It's potentially a really good solution for people who've got an HDD machine with DMA card. Mine requires a tap of the reset button to get it to boot from the HD.

The Universal ROMs were the last ones produced by Victor, not the later issue roms (I don't know of an existing image for those unfortunately) - the only real benefit of the issue ROMs AFAIK is, as you say, if your monitor's gone on the blink you'd manage to get some output down the printer port. Otherwise the universal boot ROMs are fine.

Very happy to answer Qs about these to the best of my ability. They're lovely machines once you get them going.

d.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that info. Is really helpful.

One important point to note is Bill Appleton whom runs the SiriusUserGroup in the UK., taken quite sick. I got an email from his wife Wendy

Hello

My husband has asked me to check his emails and see there is one from you.

He has unfortunately had a medical issue that will prevent him from doing anything for a while. It is not known how long.

I see from your email that you were expecting something to do with his hobby. Unfortunately this will not happen for a while.
He will contact you in the future to see if you need this assistance. I do not understand any of this old computer hobby.

Sincerely

Wendy Appleton
Click to expand...

I sent back to his Wife giving well wishes for his speedy recovery.

The website Bill Appleton runs, http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/ , has a large amount of info on the machines, but sadly no 'image' of the ISSUE roms.

Bill told me a few weeks back he felt he had a couple of sets in storage, and would go look. Unfortunately he has taken sick, before doing this task.

I am taking a copy of as much as I can off that great site. Suggest you and other also download what you need.

Maybe Bitsavers could add what software and docs are there to their repository ?
 
Put power to machine.

Still not reading the floppy.

Powered on and off a few times. Still no joy with Floppy.

Damn if the hard drive suddenly seems to have kicked into life !!!
I now got the time and date screen . sorry for the out of focus

xXAPL2i.jpg


Tried a few times with no joy entering the date. I have realized the machine is NOT reconizing the shift key, so I cannot get the colon:
 
It finally booted from hard drive

It finally booted from hard drive

Well I decided since I had the date reasonably correct, I would just accept the time as 00:00 and hit return.

Now machine come up with the following screens.

ZhvdFCO.jpg


wxUm1SI.jpg


2ihhSRT.jpg


hLVY8GG.jpg
 
Wow! Excellent! :D You've got some comms software so you should be able to get things onto and off it - the line drivers on one of mine had gone pop so if it doesn't work that's the first thing I'd check. You can also try formatting a disc which should reveal whether the floppy drive is working (sorry, that's probably teaching you to suck eggs!). The floppy will be drive B.

Once you can get files onto it you can download the floppy OS images from the issue archive on here: http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/ and use "sys" to write them to a floppy. The HD DOS version doesn't work if booting from floppy as far as I know.
 
drdanj said:
Wow! Excellent! :D You've got some comms software so you should be able to get things onto and off it - the line drivers on one of mine had gone pop so if it doesn't work that's the first thing I'd check. You can also try formatting a disc which should reveal whether the floppy drive is working (sorry, that's probably teaching you to suck eggs!). The floppy will be drive B.

Once you can get files onto it you can download the floppy OS images from the issue archive on here: http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/ and use "sys" to write them to a floppy. The HD DOS version doesn't work if booting from floppy as far as I know.
Click to expand...

Yes the variety of software on the machine looks promising.

However current BIG issue is I cannot get the Keyboard to work in Shifted mode. No CAPS nor any character that require the shift key.

So next step is to check the keyboard more carefully
 
inotarobot said:
However current BIG issue is I cannot get the Keyboard to work in Shifted mode. No CAPS nor any character that require the shift key.
Click to expand...
You know you can generate any key character you want with the Alt + three keys on the Numerical Keypad. That includes all CAPs.
 
The keyboard is a keytronic - the capacitative mylar pads will have started to go :( I had to rebuild mine completely with space blanket and podiatry foam... It was a huge pain in the bum...

d.
 
drdanj said:
The keyboard is a keytronic - the capacitative mylar pads will have started to go :( I had to rebuild mine completely with space blanket and podiatry foam... It was a huge pain in the bum...

d.
Click to expand...

space blanket ? I understand the podiatry foam but not what you mean by space blanket ?

Edit to post:- I googled Space Blanket and see its often called a Mylar Blanket. So I assume you are referring to this 'functionality' of the material, especially as its easy to buy from many outlets for only a few $.

BTW I sent you a PM
 
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Yes, aluminised mylar basically. I've actually used anti-static bags in the past! I'm guessing shiny plasticky wrapping paper would also work. Conductive side towards the foam and non conductive side down towards the PCB. There are little hard plastic discs in the keys which you need to scrape the old decaying foam off and you need to save to stick the new foam back on to. I build a sandwich of mylar/foam (5mm)/double sided tape, then take to it with an 11mm leather punch and hammer, that results in discs of the right size ready to be stuck onto the plastic then reinserted into the keys.

Got your PM! :)

(only just saw your post about Bill. That's really sad. :( Not sure about bitsavers just yet, I got the sense that there was slight reluctance to have things shared across sites without permission, but I think mirroring would be a good idea?)
 
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