12 Feb
1998
12 Feb
'98
10:28 a.m.
Amazingly enough, there is a ton (relatively) of F1 stuff on Apricot's UK
web site file library...
Kai
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell [SMTP:ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 1998 10:27 AM
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
Subject: Re: Apricot F1 - help, please!
Having just obtained a 1984 Apricot F1 computer (and a lovely looking
machine they are!) I find I can only get to the ROM boot stage.
Onscreen, I
have Aprictot F1, a floppy icon, a chip icon, a
hand pointing down, an
arrow
I have an Apricot F1 Technical Manual here, mainly because it's the only
thing that I've found that's at all relevant to the Apricot PC which I
have.
pointing up, and thats about it. The arrow and
hand are flashing.
When I place disks in the drive, it spins for a bit and places an X and
a
number on the screen. Numbers I've seen are
4, 8 and 99. So... any
proud
OK, here's the error table from Appendix A of the manual :
Boot ROM Error codes :
20 ROM checksum test
22 SIO register test
25 RAM test
28 Floppy Controller test
29 CTC clock chip test
33 Clock interrupt test
35 Drive 0 test (can it step correctly?)
Disk Error codes :
2 Drive not ready, or disk removed during boot
4 CRC error, corrupt sector
6 Seek Error, unformatted or corrupt disk
7 Bad media, corrupt media block
8 Sector not found, unformatted or corrupt disk, bad load address in label
11 bad read, corrupt data field on disk
12 disk failure, disk hardware or media fault
99 Non-system disk. Not a valid boot disk
I assume you are using an Apricot boot disk. This machine, while based on
the 8086 and running MS-DOS, is certainly not a PC-clone. According to
the manual, this machine uses double-sided 80 track 720K disks (my,
older, machine uses single-sided disks).
I don't know if boot disks for other Apricot machines will work. The
hardware is somewhat different (the F1 doesn't have the 8089 'I/O
coprocessor' (a fancy DMA chip) that's fitted on the PC).
If you are using an Apricot boot disk, I'd firstly try a different one,
and then suspect disk drive or disk controller problems. The Apricot uses
a Western Digital 2797 disk controller. There's a few tweakers associated
with this chip as well.
Any help appreciated.
Cheers
Andrew
-tony