Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Stickyfinger]

is it just me then ??

[CitroJim]

Zel, I just came across an auction with a number of old apple macs and also this Amstrad which I thought you might be interested in. Jim and I have been meaning to take a run up to Norfolk at some point and I may be after some other bits in the sale. Let me know if you would like it collected if you decide to go for it! https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auct ... 2800c28760

I had one of those Amstrads and they were surprisingly good when you binned the native OS and ran CP/M on them Then you could run Wordstar, DBase II and SuperCalc on them - three of the all-time greats Definitely worth acquiring one

I bet the CRT will have burn marks from displaying the native Word Processor screen for many years!

[bobins]

is it just me then ??

Don't give him any more ideas !

[Hell Razor5543]

A friend of mine was was in 'Stewarts' in Reading many moons ago (they had the nickname of Reading Junk Mine), where you could find all sorts of weird and wonderful electrical gadgets. He found a box with a large potentiometer knob on it, graduations around the outside of the knob, and a brass plate attached that read "Planck's Constant".

That has just reminded me of a very clever Sci Fi book I read by Greg Bear called "Eon". A large asteroid (270KM long, if my memory is correct) comes into orbit around Earth. When men go to investigate they find they can get inside the asteroid, and there are seven chambers running down the long axis. The end of the sixth chamber is 220KM from the entry point. However, when they entered the seventh chamber they were slightly bewildered to find it was longer than it should have been. They tried to measure the length by radar, and are still waiting for the echo! There is also (along the axis of this chamber) what appears to be a light tube, and things get strange when you approach this. A scientist asked for a specialist analytical device to be sent up, and one of the device's measurement capabilities was that of Planck's Constant.

[myglaren]

Read that years ago but as usual remember none of it.

[Zelandeth]

I am strictly avoiding getting any more tech in at the moment unless it's something I'm specifically after. I already have FAR too much stuff, nowhere near enough space. We've also got landscaping works (finally) underway which will be landing us a five figure bill in January. So not looking for things to spend money on!

I don't remember Hyundai i10s being so big...



No reason for taking TPA out for a run yesterday other than that I wanted to and it was a dry day.

Made an improvement to my utterly pointless workstation power meter panel. Version 1.0 only had space for two of the three gauges and was a bit scruffy. Now I could have gone and bought a proper project box for it, or I could repurpose something else that was destined for the recycling bin.



That used to be a bulkhead light fitting with a cracked diffuser. Bit of paint and you'd never know. Whole thing is totally pointless to be honest, but that's not the point is it. Does show how little power most things aside from heating loads draw these days though. The only time the current meter really moves is when the fuser in the printer cycles on - other than that with basically everything on it baaaaarely shows 2A. I'd have been better probably using a 5A meter but just keeping the printer in its own feed. That's something for future me to think about, not worrying about it for now though. It's one less thing taking up space and one other saved from the recycling bin.

[Gibbo2286]

I've got a Kodak DC120 digital camera that I bought new when they first came out £1200 it's been round the world with me twice and to the USA a couple of times.
Got it out and put batteries in it and it still works but it won't read the compact flash card so only takes two pictures and stores them to the internal memory, not sure if an electronics enthusiast can fix the CF card problem.
Anyone like to have it before I chuck it in the bin?, there are extra lenses and a case to go with it.

[Zelandeth]

I've got a Kodak DC120 digital camera that I bought new when they first came out £1200 it's been round the world with me twice and to the USA a couple of times.
Got it out and put batteries in it and it still works but it won't read the compact flash card so only takes two pictures and stores them to the internal memory, not sure if an electronics enthusiast can fix the CF card problem.
Anyone like to have it before I chuck it in the bin?, there are extra lenses and a case to go with it.

First thing to try would be another CF card as I have known them to just die in storage. Also worth trying to reformat the card at an actual PC as well.

[Gibbo2286]

I've got a Kodak DC120 digital camera that I bought new when they first came out £1200 it's been round the world with me twice and to the USA a couple of times.
Got it out and put batteries in it and it still works but it won't read the compact flash card so only takes two pictures and stores them to the internal memory, not sure if an electronics enthusiast can fix the CF card problem.
Anyone like to have it before I chuck it in the bin?, there are extra lenses and a case to go with it.

First thing to try would be another CF card as I have known them to just die in storage. Also worth trying to reformat the card at an actual PC as well.

I tried three cards, same result with all of them even after formatting them on the pc. It pops up error code EA8 when a card's inserted but there's nothing to tell what that means.

[Zelandeth]

I tried three cards, same result with all of them even after formatting them on the pc. It pops up error code EA8 when a card's inserted but there's nothing to tell what that means.

Not really sure what to suggest there, these things really aren't really designed to be repaired. Beyond maybe trying to clean the socket the cards plug into and looking to see if there's a damaged pin. Other than that I really wouldn't really know where to look.

Been chasing my own technological gremlins this evening. I dug my Amiga 1200 out again a couple of days ago, after having heard from my other half that they'd never actually played the game Lemmings.

This machine has always been a bit on the grumpy and unstable side if it's disused for any period of time, but it usually settles down after an hour or so. This time however it had developed a fault I hadn't come across before.

Attempting to copy a file from a disk resulted in it reading a couple of tracks then the machine hanging with the drive activity light solidly on.



I still really like the design of the status LEDs on these machines with the double-wide LEDs.

Eventually if left long enough the machine will eventually actually crash. On an Amiga this results in the power LED flashing bright/dim three times, the system rebooting and displaying an error code with a flashing red border.

In this case that code being 8000 0004.



Which my manual states decodes to "Invalid CPU instruction" which doesn't really tell us a huge amount.

Given this machine has some expansion hardware fitted over the base system I figured just simplifying it was a good starting point, removing the accelerator card and hard disk. Opening the case up I rediscovered some bodgery left by 25 years ago me.



I believe this quality addition to the floppy drive power connector dates back to the late 90s when I had a buffered IDE interface fitted and had a CD-ROM drive attached to the underside of my desk, and had the whole system fed via that power header. This was a terrible bodge, but back then pretty much everything I did was a case of making do with what I had to hand.

Nowadays I'm using the main power socket with a modified ATX PC power supply. The original Amiga supplies were only really up to handling the load of the base system and a hard drive - adding an accelerator to the mix was really pushing them. It's possible that bodge pre-dated the CD-ROM if the original PSU died in me. Time to tidy up that hackery a bit.



Better.



I've no idea where the hard drive bracket went...I assume I had it at some point, but it spent most of its life duct taped to an extra expansion bay cover. Apparently I upgraded that to cable tying it to the RF shield at some point. It's actually perfectly secure there so I'm not going to mess with it, even though in this day and age I could probably 3D print a new one.

I had in my head that it was an Apollo accelerator card I had fitted but apparently my memory was wrong there and it's actually a Phase 5 Blizzard 1230 IV.





I remember that this did cost me a small fortune when I bought it, to give me a screaming 50MHz of 68030 processing power, and not long after I paid nearly as much for 64Mb of memory. Those specs in the mid-late 90s though on an Amiga we're plenty to make a very capable system though, and it certainly wiped the floor with most of my friends PCs at the time where anything even vaguely multimedia related was concerned - and that remained to be the case basically until proper 3D hardware acceleration became commonplace. A few companies did actually make 3D graphics cards for Amigas, but they were pretty rare as Commodore were very much circling the drain by then. Also as they were full size expansion cards using Amiga's equivalent to a PCI bus (the Zorro bus) they'd never have been any to me on my A1200 as only the full size desktop systems had room for it.

Of course as time has moved on you can now get accelerator cards for the A1200 which do give that sort of functionality, and I do keep being tempted by them. Not so much for the performance side of things, but having onboard wireless networking and an onboard HDMI output without needing external scan converters would be really nice quality of life improvements. Video is always a headache on these machines as they can run in VGA/XGA modes absolutely fine - but the default screen mode (and the one used by a lot of software) is an old school 15kHz PAL/NTSC signal which modern monitors don't have the foggiest idea what to do with. I do have ONE multi standard monitor, but being a CRT it's not exactly space friendly so is basically only pulled out if I need to fault find on something where I don't know what's going on as it was basically display pretty much anything even vaguely resembling an analogue video signal anywhere from 640*256i to 1280*1024p at virtually any sane frame rate. It's a bloody useful tool, but not something I want on the desk! So annoying external scan converters are currently needed.

Enough waffling...back to our problem.

Turned out that there was no difference with just the bare bones system.

I found that I had exactly the same behaviour happening if I tried to copy a file onto a floppy disk - though not to/from the RAM disk to/from the hard drive, so it's not a problem on the IDE side of things. Curiously, while it wouldn't successfully write a file to the floppy, it would still quite happily format one.

Curious, I tried writing a disk image to a floppy...which worked absolutely fine.



Worked fine. It was also quite happy to read said floppy back to an image file.



Producing a file which is exactly the correct size at least.



Most curious.

Attempting to boot from that disk I'd just created (Lotus Turbo Challenge 2) resulted in it reading two or three tracks then hanging...Unless I pressed a key. Then it would read another track. Rinse and repeat, it only went and loaded. That is really strange behaviour that I don't know quite what to make of. It's as though there's some sort of halt happening unless there's something externally triggering an interrupt that then wakes it up again.

At this point my fault finding on that was interrupted as we developed *another* problem. My video output vanished. Or rather, half of it did... there's no actual video on the main video out connector. Still a sync signal but just a black screen. However the video signal is still present on the composite video out connector, confirmed by plugging it into the little screen on the wall by my desk which usually serves as an interesting if objectively really bad digital photo frame.



While the geometry is appalling it does surprise me how sharp this little flat CRT is.

I'm slightly confused by this fault as well though, as if I remember the architecture of the A1200 video circuit, the composite output is generated *downstream* of what's fed to the main video connector...so if there's nothing on the 23-pin video connector there shouldn't be anything on the composite either. Yes I did try different cables and a different scan converter just in case.

Guessing pulling the RF shields off and hunting for any suspect looking caps would be step one. I've never had any issues with things like that on this before - or being honest any major issues - but it is 31 years old now and this absolutely hasn't ever been babied, so I guess it's allowed it's first actual breakdown.

Obviously I need to resolve the no video issue before I can really delve any further into what the heck is going on with this disk I/O issue.

Looks like this is going to require some thought and some research to diagnose and (hopefully) repair.

[CitroJim]

Never played Lemmings Even I've played that!!!

A most interesting post Zel Enjoyed reading that and do keep us updated on resolution progress

[xantia_v6]

I would be looking for a drooping or noisy power supply with those degrading symptoms.

[myglaren]

I've got a Kodak DC120 digital camera that I bought new when they first came out £1200 it's been round the world with me twice and to the USA a couple of times.
Got it out and put batteries in it and it still works but it won't read the compact flash card so only takes two pictures and stores them to the internal memory, not sure if an electronics enthusiast can fix the CF card problem.
Anyone like to have it before I chuck it in the bin?, there are extra lenses and a case to go with it.

First thing to try would be another CF card as I have known them to just die in storage. Also worth trying to reformat the card at an actual PC as well.

I tried three cards, same result with all of them even after formatting them on the pc. It pops up error code EA8 when a card's inserted but there's nothing to tell what that means.

Prompted by this I had to take a look at my camera. I have an Olympus E-500 SLR that I bought over 20 years ago that has an EXD card and a CF card installed.
Always use the EXD as it has a greater capacity.
Checked the menu and couldn't select the CF card. Removed the EXD and took some test shots that all worked as normal.

[Zelandeth]

Someone had a lot of fun today, saving us from the evil scourge of the wrapping paper.

Absolutely worn himself out though and spent a large portion of the evening snoring quietly on the sofa.

This was gifted to me by the family.

A thermal camera has been a tool I've really wanted to add to the lineup for a few years now after getting to play with...sorry, I mean test...the Flir one my other half had access to through work. This is far more basic, but it's still plenty functional enough to be really useful both on the cars and for electronic faultfinding.

[CitroJim]

Magic One happy dog!