Practically Classics Forum

Occasional distraction time again...

Some of you may recall that a good few months back among a whole load of computers I was gifted by a near lifelong friend included as a star attraction a very tidy Apple II Plus. Which while sound, had some major stability issues. Up till a few days ago I had been struggling a little to figure out how to approach it. My hunch was that we had some duff memory, but I didn't really know how to confirm that. Until a couple of days back when I stumbled across a video on YouTube by Adrian's Digital Basement where he mentioned a diagnostic utility called Cillin II. He was mainly using it for disk mechanical diagnostics in the video, but mentioned in passing the other features it packed in - including a memory test feature. Cue a frantic scramble on my part to find a disk image - which thankfully was readily available. Which I could use easily thanks to the Floppy Emu. Finally I was set up for some actual diagnostics to try to get this old crate working properly again probably for the first time since the 90s.



Hey look, we have memory errors!



These were all clustered between addresses $8212 and $BDDE. Which is quite helpful as that narrows it down to a handful of chips on the board, on the upper row of the group in the white rectangle below.



Cue a bit of old fashioned deductive reasoning and experimentation.

Hey would you look at that...



A clean memory test - after running for about 30 minutes. Which is a good 15 minutes longer than I've had it running even a BASIC prompt without falling over to date.

Additional good news...



That's another clean memory test for the 16K of memory on the language card - which I'd previously not been able to even get the machine to boot with installed.

The culprits?



Two dead memory chips with a stuck bit. One from the motherboard, one on the language card.

This was quite exciting news as it meant I could actually start doing some proper testing of the hardware as it was for the first time running in a stable fashion - and had the software to do it.

Disk drives are an obvious target, I have six of them. Four Apple Disk IIs, one Super IV and one Cumana (as usually seen attached to BBC Micros).

The Cillin diagnostic suite actually has some pretty advanced disk testing facilities. Step one is to format a disk for use...



Which went without incident.

Probably the most useful test I think is one which is labelled as the random read/write test. This randomly seeks and reads/writes to every sector on the disk - a good workout for the mechanism which may have been dormant for a couple of decades, and a good way to weed out any mechanical issues.



I'll take that! Each "P" in that image indicates a "pass" result for a successfully written and read back sector on the disk. I hadn't even so much as cleaned or looked at that drive or the disk I used there, so I'm well happy with that. Something I hadn't realised until just now is that aside from the initial head bang when it homes itself is how quiet these drives are. The head seek is nearly silent, the spindle motor is more noticeable than the head positioning motor.

The other five will need to be tested over the coming days.

At least I do actually have a functioning system I can do testing and experimentation with now.



Having an easy way to test memory allowed me to ascertain that I do have a full board worth of functioning memory for my "parts" machine too after scavenging a couple of 4116 chips off a spare language card. A dead memory chip on there (Mostek chip, no surprises there then) right at the bottom of the stack would definitely explain why it wouldn't boot when I last tested it. So this thing may well also live to fight another day yet.



This machine is a compete Bitsa, assembled entirely from scrap and found parts back when these machines were worthless, but it would be really nice to actually get it up and running too. Aside from seeing if it will now boot I'll not likely be doing much investigation on that in the near future though, the main system will be the main target for now.

Quite looking forward to seeing what this machine can do now.

Uuuhh...



That's sub optimal.

That's the gear linkage on the Renault, which has lost interest in remaining attached to the gearbox.

Seems she's been looking out for me though, because I was parked here when it happened.



I need a new bush - well a full set of them, which was already in my mind anyway as she suffers from the usual slightly baggy shift that's common to 80s Renaults. So I'd like to replace all the bushes anyway. For now until I can source them I've done the right thing and bodged it with cable ties. The bungee cord in the photo was my fix to keep it out the way while I drove onto the driveway.

If that had happened while on the move that could have been really nasty.

Back in the world of yesterday's computing, I left the Apple II running the memory test for
a couple of hours while I was doing something else today and it remained rock steady. So it looks like we have licked the stability issue. So here was this evening's entertainment.



Which combined with a diagnostic utility which can thoroughly test these drives would let me find out what works and what doesn't.



Yes, that monitor does have a very tired CRT, though it's not quite as dim as the camera makes it look.

I wound up with out the box a pair of working Apple drives plus the Cumana one second from the top. The other Apple ones don't seem to know what they're doing, just head banging a bunch before eventually erroring out, so I don't think are reading anything (meaning it never finds track zero). So step one there will be to check the heads are actually free to move plus are clean. The Super 5 unfortunately seems to have deeper issues as it locks up the controller card when hooked up. Shame as that's one I'd be curious to see how that one worked given how relatively rare third party drives for the Apple II were.

You can definitely tell the difference in the mechanism between the Apple and Cumana drives when in use, the Apple ones use that odd spiral plastic runner system so head seeking is near silent (most similar sound I can think of is a Zip drive seeking), whereas the Cumana drive uses a conventional leadscrew arrangement to move the head, and therefore makes the usual gronking noises you'd expect.

Taking bets on how many more of the drives I can revive when I have time to dig into them.

Zelandeth wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 12:27 am Uuuhh...

That's the gear linkage on the Renault, which has lost interest in remaining attached to the gearbox.

I had an Avenger 1500 in the early 80s .. really beat-up, nothing to write home about but it ran OK and winter was coming so I didn't fancy riding my bike to work for a few months (and was very cheap as I'd just bought a house and the interest rates were climbing fast!).

One day, just poodling along, there was a loud clunk and the gear lever fell forward. I managed to change gear but the lever travel was just surreal! Got the car home once on axle stands it became obvious that the gearbox tail had snapped .. literally sheared away from the front mounted part

Couple of quick phone calls and found a breaker willing to sell me just the tail piece rather than a whole 'box as long as I replaced it with my broken one. Seemed reasonable. So frantic spannering for a few nights and the box was out ... and it was then I could see why. It had obviously broken before ... it had been stuck together with silicon sealant or something. (So I cleaned that off before taking the bits to the breaker and picking up my replacement tailpiece!).

As I was leaving the breaker was .. you guessed it .. trying to stick the two parts together with silicon sealant!

gazza82 wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 1:02 pm

Zelandeth wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 12:27 am Uuuhh...

That's the gear linkage on the Renault, which has lost interest in remaining attached to the gearbox.

I had an Avenger 1500 in the early 80s .. really beat-up, nothing to write home about but it ran OK and winter was coming so I didn't fancy riding my bike to work for a few months (and was very cheap as I'd just bought a house and the interest rates were climbing fast!).

One day, just poodling along, there was a loud clunk and the gear lever fell forward. I managed to change gear but the lever travel was just surreal! Got the car home once on axle stands it became obvious that the gearbox tail had snapped .. literally sheared away from the front mounted part

Couple of quick phone calls and found a breaker willing to sell me just the tail piece rather than a whole 'box as long as I replaced it with my broken one. Seemed reasonable. So frantic spannering for a few nights and the box was out ... and it was then I could see why. It had obviously broken before ... it had been stuck together with silicon sealant or something. (So I cleaned that off before taking the bits to the breaker and picking up my replacement tailpiece!).

As I was leaving the breaker was .. you guessed it .. trying to stick the two parts together with silicon sealant!

You have to wonder what the story with some breaker parts is! I'm just glad this didn't go while I was driving or it would have probably tried to launch the centre console through the sunroof.

-- -- --

First wash of the year for the van as we're using it for a run out tomorrow and she had turned rather green over the winter.









Nearly three hours later...





It's not clean. That would be vastly over selling it. It is however a good deal cleanER. I'll need to get a ladder and the brush out to try to do something about the top foot and the roof later, that wasn't on the menu today though.

Hopefully this will slightly reduce the number of scrap dealers sticking fliers under the wipers of it for about five minutes...

Will be nice to get her out for a half decent drive again, it's been forever. Only an hour up the road, but just getting out of town will be nice.

Would a ceramic coat for the camper keep it clean during the winter?

Dick wrote: Sun Apr 23, 2023 6:47 am Would a ceramic coat for the camper keep it clean during the winter?

Possibly...the idiot that owns it making sure it went into the winter clean probably would have helped too. At the end of the day it's 33 year old non-clearcoated paint though so it's never going to shrug contaminants off like something made yesterday. A good machine polish would make a huge difference...if I had the odd spare month!

-- -- --

While the van wasn't exactly conventional transportation, the task at hand was dispatched absolutely fine and a good day was had by all at the British Motor Museum. Which I keep forgetting is so near to us here.



Definitely a sign I'm getting older I think. In days gone by it would have been the sportier things which really would have drawn my attention, but I reckon if I could have taken any one car home, I'd definitely have had to think long and hard about passing up this Alvis.



Not all that many years ago that's a car I would have walked straight past without a second glance.

Granted, wouldn't have said no to this either...or about 3/4 of the cars there!



I didn't take many photos given I was kind of struggling to keep up with folks as it was. I'll have to have a wander back over there one day by myself when I've a bit more time and my stamina is doing a bit better.

Later in the day I also took the van out to the supermarket, because I've paid my road tax just the same as everyone else, because I can, and because I enjoy driving it.



I have a long history of forgetting that Drive It Day is actually a thing, but this year actually remembered so made a point as the weather was lovely to pull TPA out and go for a wander around. Can't actually remember the last time I went out without a destination in mind.



Here's something very modern...and something very not.



Then about as close to a scenic photo as you can get in Milton Keynes I reckon.



I was out for about an hour and a half and covered about 30 miles. Sadly the only car of any note I spotted at all the whole time was a sole white MGB - which I spotted about 1/2 a second too late to wave the the driver as I was concentrating on dodging a couple of meteor craters masquerading as potholes at the time.

This did give me the opportunity to actually get out on the main road and I can definitely report that she's cruising more easily than she used to at around 60. So looks like the generator being properly regulated rather than just trying to pump more and more power into the battery actually does make a difference. Nothing else has been touched mechanically so that should be the only variable to change. To touch the coil feels to be running cooler as well, though that's hard to say for certain - though with the whole vehicle system sitting at ~16V when running at speed beforehand it would make sense for electrical things to be running cooler.

I'm thinking about getting my galaxy ceramic coated as where we live there is a lot of mud on the roads so it always looks like it's finished 1st in class on the lombard rac... just a thought as I'm skint...

Any Apache experts on here?

Been bashing my head against a brick wall all afternoon trying to get my site set up to support HTTPS.

Not that complicated... everything seemed to work just fine in terms of setting it up. However accessing it from any remote machine results in a HTTP 401 error. Works fine locally...my guess is there is some sort of file access permission issue - but what I've not the foggiest idea.

Everything is accessing the same files on the same machine on the same drive, as I understand it from the same program. So I've not the foggiest idea why it's not working. So far Google hasn't managed to offer anything useful.

Edit: After several hours bashing my head against this and trying to find anything useful in the logs I eventually figured it out. The server configuration it turns out was spot on (well, as close as it's ever been, I'm sure it could be optimized). The issue was our pain in the rear router which refused to actually apply the new port forwarding rules properly until I had *physically* power cycled it. Not the first time it's caused me headaches, and I really should have spotted it sooner. Nevertheless I got there in the end and definitely learned a few things along the way.

Was actually pretty simple all things considered, probably only took me about an hour, it was just the router side firewall that caused the headaches and much tail chasing.

Ah yes...that moment when you make the mistake of cleaning a spot on a computer that you know spent several years in the home of a smoker...



Yep...that's going to be a complete strip down and scrub job then! Which let's be honest was most likely going to happen anyway. This is one of my machines, and with my recent find on the T3200SXC I want to fully recap the power supply as a precaution anyway - and getting that out means you're about 85% of the way to an empty case anyway.

Definitely going to have to happen sooner now given that I now know how bad it is...plus there's a clean spot on the lid which is going to bug me. I'm also about halfway through its writeup. Will be satisfying when done though, and on the plus side the case itself is rather less yellowed than I thought it was.

This morning I had three fillings done at the dentist so hiding from the world was the order of the day for the afternoon as I felt like I'd been kicked in the head and my jaw had been half ripped off.

I had a computer needing some TLC, so attacked it.



Not the worst machine to get into, only real grumble with the T3200 is that step 1 in getting the top case off is completely dismantling the display as the cable doesn't detach from the motherboard. Only takes a couple of minutes to do, but I lost a good half hour swearing at it the first time I tried to dismantle one.

It was entirely stripped down and the case went through the wash while I attacked this.



There was no visible evidence of any leakage on this unit, but I decided that all the Nippon Chemicon ones were getting changed. Plus this one.



On account of the brown crustiness at the base - which I think is actually flux residue as there's a lot of on this board rather than capacitor goop. However I figured better safe than sorry.

The underside at least a better picture than the one from the T3200SXC.



Few dry joints on the heavier components but nothing horrible.

Just one capacitor was showing signs of just starting to leak visible once it was removed.



So it was definitely worth doing this job anyway as there was a failure waiting for me down the road if I hadn't, even if I couldn't see anything amiss just looking at it.

Case looks rather better after a good clean.



The case is slightly yellowed, but nowhere near as bad as it used to look.





Astonishing the difference a good clean can make. Despite this machine having quite a few miles on it it's scrubbed up not bad.



All back together and working.



...The second time around.

First time around it was immediately apparent something didn't sound right. Turns out that some idiot forgot to reconnect the fan in the power supply when they put it back together didn't they...which meant I had to basically take the whole thing about 80% of the way apart again. Rookie mistake.

Quite easy to spot though. The fans on these whine quite a bit, and as there are three identical ones they form quite an obvious slightly out of phase harmonic tone with each other - which while I'm sure some folks would find annoying, for me is something I've spent so much time around it is just nostalgic and strangely comforting. It was immediately obvious though it didn't sound right with only two of the three fans running though...which is probably a good thing. The power supply on this thing chucks out about as much heat as your average neutron star at the best of times, so don't imagine it would appreciate running for long without cooling.

Now just to finish writing the page for it.

Oh...and do a lot of web page updating...it turns out that having switched over to using HTTPS that my visitor tracker no longer works. I need to update the code embedded in the pages to fix that...all 184 of them. Not difficult, just tedious.

In news for other machines (albeit related), here's a sneak preview of what will be on the page for the T3200SXC. Got the annotated diagram of the motherboard made up for those who are curious.



Yes there's one messily corrected error on there which will be tidier in the finished version. This machine dates from 1991, and it's astonishing how much more integrated a lot of things are compared to the T1200 from 1987.



I really need to label those images to show what system they relate to...that's a derp on my part. Excuse me while I add it to the to do list.

The one for the T3200SXC took me about a quarter of the time the one for the T1200 did...you know why? Because I had the service manual in front of me rather than entirely reverse engineering the thing from scratch then realising when I was basically done that I had a manual literally on the screen to the left of where I was working on it! To be honest I'd probably have struggled with the T3200SXC one anyway when there are things like the "system integration controller" thrown in...

Funny how I'd virtually not touched this hobby aside from bits here and there for a good few years, but I've been really enjoying this lately.