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
Mazel Tov!
the later model CPU card, an MDS-AD3 disk controller,
1 Shugart
LAter cpu card??? The only one I know is the ZPB...
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.
The -a3 was better but the 16k design was poor, though once gotten working
they tended to stay that way.
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.
Yes their docs are sparse but do have useful info as a payback.
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.
Bad ram card. The dynamic ram is not refreshing correctly and forgetting.
That is the high probability guess. Try a different ram now that your up.
PS filtering may be a problem if the broken cap is on the ram card.
OH, AND MAKE A BACKUP OF THE SYSTEM DISK!!!
But I'm very excited about S100 and find that I
like it ALOT.
The NS* is a very capable machine and well designed.
NOTE: while it's s100 it is NOT IEEE696 compatable and will not work with
some cards (many compupro controllers, their ram is ok) without some
simple mods. It's design window is 1977 and many of the later 696 cards
are of the post 1980 design window. Just a heads up, they all can be made
to work with care but don't always expect plug it in and go.
Allison