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QX-10 floppy drive issues

retrogear

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Jan 29, 2014
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I owned an Epson QX-10 from late 1980's for about 10 years before I binned it. Ever since, I've regretted tossing it. I did hang onto the disks and manuals, though.
I just received an ebay purchase of a QX-10 cpu, display and keyboard. My cp/m disk booted right up !!! The battery looks ok but I haven't measured it's voltage yet.
But drive A requires removing the disk with my fingernails (doesn't spring out) and drive B the load/eject is ok but accessing a floppy just flutters the LED with an error.
Hopefully drive B could be just head cleaning ? I'll be diving in more this weekend.

Larry G
 
There's a little slide lever with a coil spring that ejects the floppy. I managed to clean it with some alcohol and apply some light grease and it ejects now smoothly. That was on Drive A
but unfortunately Drive B doesn't turn on the spindle motor. By comparing voltages with the good drive A it really seems it needs a motor which includes a drive circuit of it's own.
For now I can experiment with only one drive but I'll keep my eye out for an Epson SD-321 drive either working or for parts. If anyone reads this and happens to have one message me in here.

Larry G
 
Larry,

Don't have any spare drives. But if you need to replace the battery Lowe's online sells a replacement for a few dollars. Cheaper than the auction site price for the same Excell PLC-39-2 battery that I put into my QX-16.
 
Thanks, I saw that note in another post and it looks like it still might be available. The battery in this looked in pretty good shape like it might have
been replaced at some point. While I was running it with the cover off it had charged to almost 2 volts so it might be ok. At some point I'll need to take
it apart again and so I'll measure the voltage to see if it's come up more as I use it. I can't remember if there were any parameters that need to be set
after a dead battery or if it's just date/time. It didn't like 22 as a year of course so I just used 92. I can live in the past ...
 
As far as i know the battery only keeps the date time information on the QX-10, other setup information is written to the book floppy when changed.

In regards to the floppy I actually have one of my QX-10 systems that i am currently using a gotek/FlashFloppy emulator as one of the drives. I find this convenient since I can easily transfer files to the system and it allows me to easily image actually floppies from a a disk image or vice versa.
 
As far as i know the battery only keeps the date time information on the QX-10, other setup information is written to the book floppy when changed.

In regards to the floppy I actually have one of my QX-10 systems that i am currently using a gotek/FlashFloppy emulator as one of the drives. I find this convenient since I can easily transfer files to the system and it allows me to easily image actually floppies from a a disk image or vice versa.
Ah I was wondering if a gotek would work. That is good to know.
 
How is that accomplished ? What I'm finding so far online is for 1.44MB and 720K. How does one do 320k/360K ? Or does the gotek figure it out from the image ?
 
So the original gotek firmware has a fixed format either 1.44MB or 720K, which is why they are advertised as such. What you want is to install the FlashFloppy firmware which allows a wide range of formats and host systems.

I would look through the models on the FlashFloppy wiki which goes though the various different hardware models supported by FlashFloppy. You might also check out the Firmware programming page for information about what is needed to program the firmware onto a Gotek drive. You can also find plenty of ebay sellers that will sell a pre-flashed Gotek drive that should work as well if you'd prefer not to bother with flashing the drive yourself.

For the QX-10 I've attached a version of the img configuration file i use for QX-10 disk images with flash floppy. you can just rename it to img.cfg in the root of a usb drive and it will tell the firmware the track/sector layout used by QX-10 disks.
 

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Well I'll be damned. I was booting software on A: and of course it was complaining that B: was empty so I shoved a disk in there to see if it could get past that point and I heard noises like drive access
then the software continued. So I went ahead and picked from a menu and by God it was reading drive B: !!! I have since done a format and verify on that drive. It is a little off with respect to A: as far as alignment
but as long as a B: disk stays in B: it's fine !!! I remember now I rocked the speed pot on the motor PCB but put it back so I might have to do a speed adjustment of B:. There is a 60Hz strobe on the spindle to check it.
I uploaded a youtube of it in action.

Fun Stuff !!!

Larry G
 
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brijohn - thanks for the config file for the gotek. Funny, your post didn't show up for a couple hours after I made my last update. Maybe since you're new it's getting scanned first ?
I may still get a gotek just to try it out if not on the QX-10 then on other dinosaurs I have around here.

Larry G
 
Well I'll be damned. I was booting software on A: and of course it was complaining that B: was empty so I shoved a disk in there to see if it could get past that point and I heard noises like drive access
then the software continued. So I went ahead and picked from a menu and by God it was reading drive B: !!! I have since done a format and verify on that drive. It is a little off with respect to A: as far as alignment
but as long as a B: disk stays in B: it's fine !!! I remember now I rocked the speed pot on the motor PCB but put it back so I might have to do a speed adjustment of B:. There is a 60Hz strobe on the spindle to check it.
I uploaded a youtube of it in action.

Fun Stuff !!!

Larry G
Nice that you got the B drive working. What software do you have for the QX-10? There is fairly little archived software for this system, besides the standard C/M and Valdocs I own 3 games that were written for the QX-10. The early learners toolkit was a new one i hadn't seen before so I'm curious if you have any other unique pieces of software for the QX-10 I've not heard of.

PS.
Yes my posts are currently being moderated since I'm still fairly new, so it does take a while before they show up.
 
I imaged everything I had maybe 10 years ago and gave it to F.J.Kraan. It's on his site here
If you look toward the bottom, there is an IMD set from Larry Greene.
All the software I have is linked on that web page. Mainly Don Maslin, Dave Dunfield, Mr Kraan and myself.
Toward the bottom, the LOGO Package (TeleDisk) has the eltk left drive and right drive td0 images that work correctly.
Teledisk v2.23 seems to work the best. Oh if you're using a Gotek then not sure what images are supported by Gotek.
There is a td02imd conversion utility in there somewhere otherwise there's Simon Owen's SamDisk I use for conversion as well.

Larry G
 
Oh nice, yeah I knew about that page but apparently failed to notice there was an archive of disk images from you.

With the gotek it just uses raw img files which i am able to get using td02imd and then using imdu to dump a raw binary. The config file I posted is what tells gotek how to interpret the track and sector layout of the raw file.
 
The drive B acted up again. I suspected drive speed. I removed the drives again. The drives have a 50/60 Hz speed strobe on the bottom of the spindle flywheel. I couldn't get a read on either with an incandescent filament bulb.
I managed to scavenge a flourescent light fixture yesterday and got a good read. The A drive holds steady but the B drive is fluctuating all over the place. I removed the motor and noticed several caps that look like the notorious
tantalum type. There is a good schematic of the spindle motor control circuit in the TF-20 manual toward the end. I would suspect C30,C31 and C36 as they are part of what controls the current thru the motor. The board is very compact
so not sure if I can replace those successfully. I wonder if a standard 360K PC type 5.25" drive would work ? Obviously won't fit physically since this drive is thinner than typical half height. If I were to buy a Gotek, Which model should I get ?
 
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For the gotek I would currently say you should get one featuring the Artery ATF32F435 MCU, I actually only have ones based around the STM32 chipset but i haven't bought a new gotek since before 2021 when the started using artery MCUs. I would also recommend gettting one of thew newer boards that come with the oled and rotary encoder already installed. On my older boards I had to do those mods myself but some of the newer gotek's come with an oled screen and rotary encoder. While the encoder is nice to have you definately would like an oled screen over the original 7 segment display.
 
I just ordered a gotek with the specs you recommended. I did get an IBM YD-580 5.25" drive to work with the QX-10. I had to ground pin 34 which is unused by the IBM drive but the Epson expects a ready low to come out of the drive.
The setup looks like hell but I'll use it for now until I get the gotek. I did get the spindle motor out of the bad Epson drive and pulled one of the caps which checked ok out of circuit. Not sure if I'm going to pursue trying to fix it.
 
@brijohn (or others) I am experimenting with the gotek on B: with a real drive on A:. with your config file. It seems the ::45504 definition works good with both cpm 2.2 and tpm 2. I get errors trying to format
the ::331776 or ::327680. The TPM3 def ::408576 works good. The biggest problem now (other than my display seems upside down?) is I get random read errors on A: while the gotek is on B: but never with a real drive B:
I'm wondering about termination. The real B: has the termination chip which places it at the end of the floppy cable but not with the gotek. I wonder if I need to move the termination resistor to A:
while using the gotek on B: ?
 
@brijohn (or others) I am experimenting with the gotek on B: with a real drive on A:. with your config file. It seems the ::45504 definition works good with both cpm 2.2 and tpm 2. I get errors trying to format
the ::331776 or ::327680. The TPM3 def ::408576 works good. The biggest problem now (other than my display seems upside down?) is I get random read errors on A: while the gotek is on B: but never with a real drive B:
I'm wondering about termination. The real B: has the termination chip which places it at the end of the floppy cable but not with the gotek. I wonder if I need to move the termination resistor to A:
while using the gotek on B: ?
So the ::331776 or ::327680 variants are meant to work with the the 64k multifont disk version of CP/M (CPM22M1.TD0). That version of CP/M used 16x256 byte sectors for the entire disk. Trying to format it outside of that version is likely not going to work.

The newer versions of CP/M and TPM use disks with 10x512 byte sectors (except for the system tracks which need to be 16x256) and that is what the second two entries are for. The difference between them is that the second one only has the first track of the first side as 16x256, since i've seen some disks that only format that track differently instead of all 4 of the system tracks.

For your upside down display try adding this to the file called FF.CFG on the root of your USB Drive: display-type = oled-128x64-rotate

My current FF.CFG my qx-10 looks like:
interface = shugart host = unspecified pin02 = nc pin34 = rdy autoselect-file-secs = 5 autoselect-folder-secs = 5 twobutton-action = eject display-type = oled-128x64-rotate

I've not tried using it as the B: drive currently so I'm interested in if you manage to figure it out. I'm assuming you have moved the the gotek's jumpers to be set for DS1 when you try and use it as the B drive? I think it ships with DS0 selected.

Also on the topic gotek/FlashFloppy I recently found a project called OpenFlops witch is an open source board designed to be compatible with FlashFloppy.
 
I had set it for DS1 when I got it. I did not realize that the disk parameters go in IMG.CFG separate from the FF.CFG settings so now it seems more stable.
It sucks I didn't get a multifont card with mine. I did get a Comrex CR-103 modem which I see Valdocs+ comm module has a driver for it. I still have a
land line but I doubt there would be a bbs to dial into anymore.
 
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