9 Jan
1999
9 Jan
'99
4:48 p.m.
On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Andrew Davie wrote:
I am attempting to bring back up an Exidy Sorcerer
disk system. I have a
hundred or so disks for this system, and have just realised that I probably
have everything I actually need for the disk system, too. Cleaning out the
garage, found a twin-floppy drive which I thought had been gutted. But on
internal inspection, it appears to only have had the cable removed.
Oh cool. Is yours the Exidy branded dual-drive system, using full-height
5.25" drives? I have such a cabinet but no drives, and no internbal
circuitry save for an interface in the back. What I'd like to know is
what circuitry populates the front of the chassis where the LEDs used to
be (mine has labels for track read/write and I think track number LED
displays but the circuitry is gone).
But the strange thing is that, very rarely, it misses
a character. So,
something like "EXID STAN". Furthermore, it's quite obvious to me that
the
text is being put on the screen in a serial manner (slow enough to see).
And finally, occasionally some of the text changes case (ie: eRROR -
COMMAND NOT FOUND). At first I suspected the RAM, but have carefully
reseated all chips that are socketed, with no effect.
If the cart works then it sounds like you have bad BASIC ROMs.
I found a homebrew cartridge for this machine, and
when its plugged in, the
wordprocessor it contains appears to work fine - everytime - with no
apparent problems. Sure, I don't know the commands, but it does let me
type, doesn't crash, and doesn't have any visible screen glitches as
described above. For this reason I lean towards giving the machine's RAM a
clean bill of health.
I have this cart too and the commands are printed on the label. I'll try
to a) find mine and b) transcribe the commands.
So, the question is, what's wrong with the
monitor?
Nothing, check the ROMs.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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