Monitor of EC65 needed / OS65D v3.2 disks malfunction

[tanteju]

ttlworks wrote:

Many years ago, I had a defective backplane which had prevented a computer from working for good.
But I wasn't aware from the start, that the problem had been caused by the backplane.

Does your backplane look like this ?

backplane.png

If yes, plug the PCBs into a new backplane, and see what happens.

;---

Nice green solder resist on the backplane PCB, that yes, but no copper inside the holes.

When soldering the connectors into the backplane, _then_ mounting the connectors with screws to the PCB,
this causes mechanical stress to the pads where the connector pins are soldered.

Could happen, that some of the PCB traces "go lose" from the pads after a while...
...when an old school floppy drive decides to send vibrations through the whole computer, for instance.

Would be good to know for sure that the malfunction isn't caused by "a simple mechanical problem" before digging deeper into the hardware.

It looks exactly like my backplane. Interesting. I tried with a different backplane, but it did not start at all. Maybe a PSU issue on that one. Will give it another try. Thanks.

[paul928]

Hello Tanteju…

I have a working EC65 system at home.. With CPUcard, new VDU card built, RAM card and floppy card. On my Junior DOS system I'm able to boot OS65D. Not using the floppy drives anymore but a HxC floppy Emulator (but writing actions does not work). Next step is to modify the OS65D disc for EC65.


Regards,

[tanteju]

paul928 wrote:

Hello Tanteju…

I have a working EC65 system at home.. With CPUcard, new VDU card built, RAM card and floppy card. On my Junior DOS system I'm able to boot OS65D. Not using the floppy drives anymore but a HxC floppy Emulator (but writing actions does not work). Next step is to modify the OS65D disc for EC65.

Hi,

That sounds great. I did not spent any time on it this winter so far, but I have all the pieces on my desk to fix the backplane issue. I can boot OS65D from HxC, but for that I manually patched the original one according to what infos I have available. Did just not work reliably with BASIC and ASM and the Forth is completely lost I think. I had the impression, that the HW issues have a key role in the issues and hence I wanted to fix that before looking further into the OS.

Let's join forces I would say. Probably in March or April I will start setting it up again and can verify, if my patched image is really working.

[paul928]

Hello Tanteju…

Any updates regarding the EC65 computer ?

I used the PCB's of the EC65 for a DOS65 system which is working great... Three of the four PCB's are used for this DOS65 system. The fourth card is a new floppy card based on a 1793 disc drive controller.. On this DOS65 I have a C-compiler up and running.. For the floppy drive I use the HxC Floppy emulator. And in this setup I'm able to save my work on these emulated disks. That was with OS65D running on the EC65 not possible (only read functionality)…

Regards

[tanteju]

paul928 wrote:

Any updates regarding the EC65 computer ?

I used the PCB's of the EC65 for a DOS65 system which is working great... Three of the four PCB's are used for this DOS65 system. The fourth card is a new floppy card based on a 1793 disc drive controller.. On this DOS65 I have a C-compiler up and running.. For the floppy drive I use the HxC Floppy emulator. And in this setup I'm able to save my work on these emulated disks. That was with OS65D running on the EC65 not possible (only read functionality)…

Hi,

Haven't really done much, due to actual situation. But I had OS65D writing on HxC. It was the firmware on the emulator. Then it worked.