OK! I finally used 2, 3 brain cells, worked out the problem
with my Centrol Data 64K RAM and got my CP/M machine working
fine. (ANother SRAM dies in the Seattle 16K card... a bad sign).
Ran a half day's worth of mem tests (good ones) seems OK.
Took the bad bearing out of the noisy B: drive (it was a sealed
ball bearing ass'y, not a plain like I thought; I washed it out,
added some light lube, wrote down the part number, will order
one, it's quieter in the mean time).
Got the serial port working (simply plugged into the "PC"
serial card (PCMCIA) in my linux laptop), default 9600 baud
worked as-is!
Using minicom on linux. XMODEM protocol failed; not sure what
the problem is. Possibly minicom's XMODEM doesn't do checksum
xmodem, only crc, my program (telink) doesn't do crc. So I did
everything as ASCII.
I converted a few diskettes worth, most notably CBBS 3.5,
1980 version. I had a read error on MODEM 2.17' diskette,
but a head clean might solve it (the head goops up every 30
minutes... not a good sign).
This was just a half-assed first-pass at the job. I really
should simply plug the drive into linux and copy them, I'll
probably do that, but I want to shake down the system too.
http://wps.com/CPM-80/
Just a raw dir for now, it'll grow into a real web page.