New finds: enough Torch stuff to sink a battleship - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

28 Jun 2003

...
  This unit sounds /very/ like a Torch 68000 Hard Disc
machine I have, so
 definitely production quality.  Same ridiculous separate power supply.. 
ahh - so there's one other out there at least then! :)  Looks identical, but
mine doesn't have the 68000 stencilling on the front of the case. The brackets
securing the BBC board to the drive cage and the mounting for the UHF connector
(where it plugs into the BBC board) look very improvised on my machine, but
maybe that's the way they all were in production.

...
  Mine appears to be complete - it has the modem
(connects somewhere to the
 torch boards, rather than the RS423 on the BBC, so makes 100% of all BBC
 native communications software useless).  
yes, I just worked that out too; I'd found schematics for the SASI board which
wasn't nearly as complex as what I have, then schematics for a mysterious comms
board. Turns out that although it's labelled as a "Torch SASI board", the
board
also carries the control logic for the modem. Why the modem went walkabout from
my machine I don't know.

...
  68000 board is positioned where the Z80 board is on
yours, is just bigger. 
I don't think mine has the mountings in the right place to take either of the
two flavours of 68k boards I have.

...
  The barrel jack plug connector on your modems was
indeed the standard "plug
 and socket" telephone connector in the GPO days (before they became British
 Telecom) and was not a mass-market commodity - you had to pay quite a lot
 to have sockets installed; most phones were hard-wired. 
Hmm, I do remember phones being wired into the little box (typically) just
inside the front door on houses before sockets became common. Seem to remember
phones could only be bought from the phone company too.

...
  My machine /seems/ to run a 68000 version of CPN -
there is supposed to be
 a unix for it, but I never found a way to boot it into that, or software to
 reload it. 
I had a quick flick through some of the docs I have. They seem to suggest that
you need the later Atlas 68k board to run Unix and CPN from a hard drive, and
that the earlier 68k 'Neptune' cards wouldn't allow this. See what card you
have (it'll say Atlas if it's the later card) - I've probably got everything
needed to do a Unix install against one of those assuming any of the discs I
have are still intact.

...
  I got rid of most of my other torch stuff; the
communicator tried to sell
 for quite a high price on eBay.. makes me cringe to think of so many going
 to landfill.  
I heard they weren't that common and a little sought after. Maybe some more
will crop up at this guy's house...

Is your machine somewhere where it's accessible? I'm curious as to what disk
setup you have in your machine; whether it's a 1MHz - SASI - Xebec - drive
configuration, a 1MHz - SCSI - Xebec - drive config, or something else
entirely. 

Knowing what ROMs you had might be useful too in trying to work out how to get
my machine to boot as at least I can try to duplicate a known-working
configuration. And if you feel like getting your hands really dirty, pull the
MCP ROM temporarily so that the machine boots to Basic and see if your keyboard
produces sensible characters or not :-)  (the keyboard mapping is all over the
place on mine, but I don't know if it's supposed to be like that or not!)

cheers

Jules

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