Month: July 2014

This is My Pet Monster, I found him abandoned on the street — left out in the rain, sometime in 2001. He was pretty scratched up and started to rust.. which after a little scrubbing (and some beer for me) he ended up getting a paint job. There are a lot of Pet Enthusiasts out there who will cry when they see the paint job. But after a little cleaning, prodding and solder (recently) he turned on!

Now, looking at the tag on the left it says 2001-8. I live in Canada, this machine was found in Toronto. I also know after pulling out the motherboard — a sticker says : Ryerson Polytechnical College (which is now Ryerson University). But the exterior is not a PET 2001 Series, it has no tape drive and has the graphical keyboard. But all pictures I’ve seen of other pets that are the 2001 series after the Chicklet Keyboard have a different motherboard.

PET Logic Assy : 320132

Is it weird or …1023 bytes free, seem strange?

— After some chats with Mike Stein (TPUG Email List), I’ve swapped around 2114 ram chips, to find the bad one(s). I basically got it down to two chips, then he suggested switching around the video ram, one at a time. If you get garbage on the screen, then the chip is bad. In the end both chips are bad. So I get ~6k of ram working :).

— Arg as I was writing this, the PET just shut down. And its not coming back. Noo….

Well This is boot up…

CH(A) (TOP) is Pin 1 off of the 2114 SRAM in the first bank.
CH(B) (BOTTOM) is 6502 pin 1

Then goes this post boot.

Well, it’s got a pulse.. hah.

I think it’s actually the display system itself. The monitor is not powering up or showing the signs when it’s powered off.. The Fading white dot..

I really wish this was a ROM problem, messing with CRT’s is deadly if you don’t discharge them properly. I knew a guy at a workshop who died form one of the massive TV’s that were built into furniture. So.. Hmm..

It looks like the tube doesn’t power up at all. With an induction amplifier, aiming it at ANY CRT will be noisy as hell. My 1084 monitor generates a lot of noise, and a PET monitor should be loud… not a peep. I do not want to open the back of the screen.. eek.

Well, as long as I stay away from the end of the Tube, for now I should be ok 🙂

As you can see below, everything looks ok.. nothing obvious..

This last pic is with the light off, to see that the tube is actually got something going on.. The tube is lit when the power is on, just not enough to show something.

I was thinking about making a modem file, or hack part of Darkstar BBS to work as Telnet BBS. When I started working with this device, I noticed Leif Bloomquist was working on a network game for the C64. I began thinking of trying to test out burning some ROM’s for this device. I pulled out my trusty EEPROM burner and found out — my laptop doesn’t have a parallel port! Shhessh. I tried various LPT-USB adapters and nothing works. Hmm, maybe I’ll bother someone with a more modern EEPROM burner.

But the idea of a network game seems pretty awesome, I’ve noticed Vice has a networking config… hmm.

Anyways, maybe a mini-mmo type dungeon crawl game might be fun.

Zoom Floppy is a USB to Anything Commodore adapter. I can remember having a X1541, a 386 some a really old ISA LPT port adapter and hours of fiddling, copying and pain with Star Commander. After the setup got hooked up, I ended up slapping an NE2000 and a DOS based TCPIP Stack to transfer files off the disks. The Hacked up 1451 cable always had its issues too.

Move ahead to 2010+ and you have a Zoom Floppy. It was 5 minutes of setup and disk transfers were happening. It’s a great piece of equipment. One of the great other benefits is for the rest of us that have IEEE Devices. I have a SFD1001, CBM8050 and an MSD SD-2. It was pretty impressive to hookup these drives just as easily as an IEC 1541.

Backing up these IEEE devices is awesome, but accessing them without a BUS card on a PC is amazing.

I noticed some weirdness with the dual drive units, I could read off of Drive 0 but not off of 1. I am sure I just need to either update my software or I’m doing something wrong. But flipping disks between drives is not an issue.

MMC Replay gets a powerup 🙂 I ordered a batch of equipment, from www.icomp.de: 2 RRNET3’s and a Chameleon docking station. My Chameleon, for some reason died! And after a few days of back and forth emails with Jens, it got shipped back to its maker. The other RRNET3 got installed in my MMC Replay (on the left). I’ve almost lost a few fingers in the process of cutting through the plastic to make the LED’s and NIC port accessible. I’ve had access to proper tools to make plastic molds and cart cases, but the hack method definitely is a little more pleasurable.

When I got this cart, I had one of those Back to the Future moments — where I wished I could send this guy back to myself circa ’84. Just be able to load everything you have on an SD card is awesome. I like doing dev work with it, but the SD card I was using was starting to warp a bit from continuous inserting. So, move over SD Card and use NIC/TCPIP.

It’s not an obvious process, but I’ve done a lot of networking and related hardware in the past. There is only so much resources that this device can have on board and then rest has to be played out by software. I ended up using the last slot on my MMCRR  and flashing the BIN for “The Final Replay V0.8”. Just loading the BIOS isn’t enough, you need to modify the BIN using a setup to give it an IP and the server IP. Works! As you can see below: