The Northstar Boots!!! (LONG)

Just wanted to share that the Northstar Horizon I've been hacking off and on for two years booted tonight. I was able to load up NDOS 5.1 and run BASIC on it! I was leaping to and fro! =-D I've messed with it occasionally with the goal of getting it to work and always got frustrated at my inability to get some kind of variation in behavior out of it. This time, starting on Saturday, I approached it not caring if I got it working or not. I decided I just wanted to learn about S100 boxes, Z80 stuff and general troubleshooting. Currently it's configured as a N* Horizon with two serial ports, the later model CPU card, an MDS-AD3 disk controller, 1 Shugart SA400 floppy drive and a Northstar 16k (A2 version) RAM board. I have an A3 version board but one of the bypass caps is broken in two and I don't trust it anyway. (For your amusement, I was using a 4meg Mac SE as a terminal.) At any rate, it turns out that if you follow the troubleshooting flowcharts (written not diagrams) in the N* manuals, you can really isolate problems down alot. Turns out that it's been booting for two days but the serial ports are configured for a 3 wire interface and REALLY HATE anything else. I put in a breakout box with only a 3 wire and *poof* it gives me the NDOS banner and a prompt. There's still some flakiness I have to explore. I walked upstairs to announce my breakthrough to my wife and came back down and noticed some garbage on the screen (not random per se) and that it had become unresponsive to the terminal. Hitting reset did not solve the problem. Powering it down and rebooting did, however. And then it seemed to straighten itself out. I'm not sure if it's a warmup thing, a static thing (which it shouldn't be), poor filtering on the PS or what. I intend to increase available memory with some nice boards I have, swap out the single SA400 for some other less scarce standard floppy drives, configure so I can boot CP/M and add a Disk Jockey 2D and a nice 8" drive I have. Now I just need to find some hard-sectored disks for it. *frown* But I'm very excited about S100 and find that I like it ALOT. Just wanted to share my enthusiasm with the group. Anthony Clifton