Today I set out to debug my other (previously donated/defective)
16K core board in order to have a full 32K in my 8/A. The board
was completely dead (0000 at all locations). A quick test program
to read all locations in field 4-7 and a little scope work (it's
handy to have a current probe) showed that one of the two
paralleled X Read/Write drive transistors was defective and so
that stack current pulse was only half amplitude. After replacing
the transistor, powering back up and booting OS/8 from my RL02, a
MEM command now showed "32K MEMORY!" :)
Everything pretty much seems to be working just like before (such
as LUNAR in PFOCAL, and various BASIC programs). But when I
attempt to run ADVENT I get the following bizarre error messages:
DIVIDE BY 0 ID("IL 0000
DIVIDE BY 0 ID("IL 0000
DIVIDE BY 0 ID:SIL 0357
DIVIDE BY 0 IE\/IM 0000
BAD ARG IE\/IM 0000
ID:SIL 0357
IANBII 0000
IEG8IM 0000
IEH?IM 0000
IE BIM 7240
IAVBII 0000
and then it either returns to the dot prompt or crashes.
This disk image works perfectly (including ADVENT) on my laptop
running SIMH.
This looks to me like part of a file is corrupted (the presumed
garbles are repeatable), but I don't know which one... any
thoughts? I haven't run a test pattern on the "new" core board and
wonder if it could be the source of this error. Rick M. are you
out there? ;)
thanks for any help.
-Charles