I have a Victor 9000 I'm restoring here, and I have a few questions:
1. Where do the two plugs for the 5 1/4 drive heads connect? This system
has the Universal bios, a 10MB winchester HDD with DOS 3.1x and the
later 1.44MB GCR/MFM floppy installed, but I can only seem to get one of
the drive heads working (using catweasel on PC to dump a 'formatted'
disk afterwards results in clear data spikes on one side and the other
side blank, and format.exe won't format disks properly unless given the
/1 1-sides flag)
2. The victor 9000 does NOT say anything when I turn it on. I know the
Sirius 1 did, but I'm not sure the Victor does. Is this normal, or does
the system need the HC-55564 delta modulation chip replaced?
3. Does anyone have a schematic or service manual for the victor
9000/sirius 1 anywhere?
I also discovered that both of the victor keyboards I have need
re-foaming between the contact discs and key plungers, which is gonna be
a whole bunch of fun to do.</sarcasm> They also both need new snap-tabs
on them as both of the tabs have the tooth broken off (though they work
fine other than having to hit keys really hard and the cord occasionally
falling out of the computer)
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgevaryahu(@t)hotmail(d0t)com
jzg22(@t)drexel(d0t)edu
P.S. Does anyone have dumps of the older BIOSes for the system? The
universal one is the 'last' one of at least three I know existed. More
than one version of the universal one may exist. The one I have is
labeled 'V9000 UNIV. FE F3F7 13DB' and 'V9000 UNIV. FF F3F7 39FE' with
respective crc32s of 25C7A59F and 496C7467 for each ROM. The sum16s
match the last part of the labels, i.e. 13DB and 39FE.
P.P.S. does anyone have documentation for the winchester disk controller
it used? I'm trying to make a raw binary dump of the hard drive,
preserving partition tables, information, etc. and the only way I can
see of doing it is to use BASICA to poke and peek at the proper memory
addresses to make the disk do its thing.