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... but now when I turn the computer on I get the normal colour cycle and then what appears to be the text cursor jumping around the screen a bit and then nothing, just a black screen. I removed the keyboard again and the same things still happens. This just sounds like the CMOS RAM has simply lost...

This is brilliant, many thanks for compressing and uploading to dropbox!

I've downloaded to experiment with this under emulation

Oh, yes please! I believe the J233 was the last revision of the RiscPC actually sold by Acorn? It would be great to recreate the HDD under emulation and have a play with it.

Have you tried the second floppy drive connector, and checked the nearby links 18, 19, 21 are set correctly?

It is also not uncommon for the motor select IC (IC42) to fail it there was a lot of battery damage.

Definitely run !Killer to clean up your computers. Icon and Extend were fairly tame viruses, but very prolific - they got everywhere, and I'm sure they will be lurking on retro Acorn computer users floppies and HDDs for many years to come... But on that point, is there a formal archive of old RISC O...

Interesting, if you look at the circuit diagram for the A5000, they were obviously thinking about fitting an 80C51 and using a PS/2 keyboard connector with a quadrature mouse. You can see the unpopolated pads for the 80C51 on the PCB. I wonder if they gave up on it because the found they couldn't g...

And just for completeness, here it is in my A5000

Following my own guide at the start of this thread (on a RPi B+ running RISC OS 5.24 with !HForm 2.75), I get exactly as I described previously, 503mb with HForm offering me a 1024 LFAU.

Does Alt-Break also exit PCem single tasking, or is that just for the podule PC card?

Interesting, what version of Windows runs under PCem? Does 3.1 run, or something even earlier?

So I tried this on an A4000 using !hform 2.48. All my tests have been using RISC OS 5 on the Raspberry Pi, formatting 512mb SD cards, which I've then taken to my retro computers. I think I listed the version of HForm earlier in the thread... I'm back home tomorrow and will dig out my Pi to test...

sh0dan wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 09, 2019 9:40 pm

I wondered why it stood out. Guess the others boards don't print it so I hadn't seen it before

The others probably have RISC OS 3.6 in that case?

RISC OS 3.7 introduced the Advanced Risc Technologies boot screen, along with the processor display at startup.

SteveBagley wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 02, 2019 1:02 pm

Did any of these ever get repaired?

Steve

I didn't hear any more about them, hopefully someone did?

I can rummage one up at the weekend, I'm sure

The above settings generate a 503 Mb drive, which is the best size for RISC OS 3.1. You could format up to 512 Mb, but going above 503 Mb doubles the 'LFAU' large file allocation unit, which has a very detrimental impact on space usage on the card, so stay at 503 Mb for best compromise. Where does ...

Usually this really does mean the !Boot hadn't been run at startup. When you installed the UniBoot, did you configure the computer CMOS RAM settings and HDD to Boot correctly? E.g. *Configure Boot ...etc? And *Opt 4,2? Ah. No! That'd probably be it :D See - I knew my bodge-alarm wasn't going off fo...

I've just tried this on my issue 3 beeb, several times and I am occasionally getting different results. Usually VSIRQTM gives 2/1 but sometimes I get 1/1 Once powered up it always seems to give the same result if I repeat the test even with a reset and try again, but if I switch the computer off/on ...

Under Resources.Configure I found and ran !InetSetup . No joy - it complained that it seemed like a !Boot application had not been run. Usually this really does mean the !Boot hadn't been run at startup. When you installed the UniBoot, did you configure the computer CMOS RAM settings and HDD to Boo...

But i got a black screen on my monitor. I tried everything. Hold key 0 on numpad before and after turn on the A3020 and so on. What monitor are you using and is it working ok? Holding down '0' at switch-on selects 50Hz TV resolution output, this is unlikely to work on any modern monitor. If you're ...

The issue 1, 2 and early issue 3's had larger vent holes under the PSU, presumably intended for cooling of the original black 'linear' PSU. This PSU was fully encased (the aluminium case was used as a heatsink, and gets very hot in use), so even with the larger Beeb case holes, you can't poke things...

Really interesting investigation...

Does your test code need to run on a B ?

I have an issue 2 model A.

Didn't eBay ban the sale of internet download links a few years back, so that all sales had to involve transfer of a physical item? Unless they lifted that restriction, this ad would likely be against their T&Cs.

Well done, great to hear your success! There have been a few posts in the past about modern SD->IDE adapters not working with Acorn's IDE interface in the A5000/A30x0/A4000/A4, but many have had success with these in 3rd party IDE interfaces (one exception being Castle IDE cards which seem to mimic ...

In the A3010, does ZIDEFS return size of disc, if you have the SD card plugged in and type:

*ZIDEFS
*Drive 4
*Free

This sometimes works when the full drive name or catalogue fails.

Also try *Map

Try the same commands *Free and *Map with the SD on your Pi. Any differences?

Definitely try Bryan's suggestions above.

Also can you confirm what make/type and size of SD card it is and how are you attaching it to the ZIDEFS card? Have you tried other types and sizes of SD card or a different adaptor?

No matter what disc I pretend to copy any of 2 versions of !Rat is giving an error right from the start at Drive 0 Track 0 Head 0: "Internal error: abort on data transfer at &000A5B88" Mode used is "1-copy full ds 80 track" and "7-use just drive 0" Then I start with code "11" = DO It is just about ...

I have also tried X-Copy but I have no idea how cloning an Archimedes disk would be working. From my understanding Amiga uses MFM encoding but Archimedes is using GCR encoding for the effective storage on magnetic media. Archi and Amiga both use MFM, but Amiga squeezes more data per track (5.5kb) t...

cmorley wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 23, 2019 5:48 pm

steve3000 wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 23, 2019 5:42 pm

Looks great, is that the same size footprint?

Yes. It all looked very tight at the weekend in XLT's A4000 so I tried hard to keep the PCB outline the same. The "Acorn A3020 RAM" text on the top was a casualty though...

Ah ok. Might want to say "A4000/A3020" RAM?

Thanks. I think so too, and shall be ordering new electrolytic caps for the whole board. It is perhaps instructive that the issue does not manifest itself when the Arc is powered on from cold; only when it's warmed up a little after a few minutes. I think that's meant to be indicative of a bad cap ...