5 Feb
2011
5 Feb
'11
7:33 a.m.
More progress,
I was kindly donated a IWM chip for the Lisa 2/10 by the original seller of
these Lisas I have. He extacted it from a Mac 128 board he had lying
around.
I'm happy to report the machine now boots up. I'm not sure how much further
I'm going to be able to take it though. The widget AND the floppy drive both
have issues. I feel I might be able to fix the floppy. The widget seems a
pretty complicated piece of machinery, info is sparse and I think might be
beyond my limited skills.
I seem to rememebr the Widget schematics are out there, which may be a
start. On the other hand it does look complicated, and there are some
custom parts in there that are presumably hard to find.
Here is a description of the problem with the widget. The certainly spins
and I can hear a definte clack when the break comes off. I can hear drive
seeking noises and the light flashes. I then get an "Error 82". From what
I can read this is a fairly generic error which just means the internal
drive is not working properly. I've tried to install the Lisa Office Suite
tThis does sound like it could a format/heads/disks problem. Or maybe an
electrronic failure in the read amplifier or in the serial->parallel
converter, etc.
and Macworks XL 3.0 from floppy. In the former case
I'm told there is no
suitable hard disk to install on, and the latter throws up an error 96.
I've reseated all socketed chips to no avail. It could be a case of just
requiring a low-level format, but I can't find anything on the web that
suggests anyone actually knows how to do this.
I am not an expert on these machines, but I seem to rememebr that at
least one Apple hard drive is controlled by a COP400 series
microcontorller, and to format it you need to (temporarily) fit a
microcontrolelr with differnetr firmware. There is a prototyping version
fo said microcontroller which takes an EPROM in a piggyback socket, but
that is hard to find. And AFAIK nobody has the firmware for it anyway.
The 400k floppy drive has a weird problem. The stepper moves a little on a
disk access call but the motor to rotate the disk doesn't go? The disk
ejects ok. Things have been cleaned and lubed and I am using DD disks this
time. I suspect it might be a sensor problem because once I was examining
the drive when the machine was accessing it and tilted the embedded disk up
slightly at the front. Suddenly it whirred into life and loaded the disk and
Mybe. COuld be a bad connection that you distubed...
How does the disk sensor work on this drive? Is it a mechancial switch or
waht? If it is a switch, it might well be dirty contacts in the switch
(Mac 800K drives were prone to this). Sometiems squiring propan-2-ol into
the switch and frobbign it will get it to work again, but it's better to
replac it if you can find one.
-tony