Hmmm, ozone-y smell coming from my jerry-rigged Winchester interface. On further investigation, it appears that the old Miniscribe drive has gone pop in a smelly smoke-escaping fashion. Well it is almost 20 years old…

I’ve replaced it with the ST-225, which at least powers up. Still no response from the Winchester board – not the SEL/BSY handshake, nor the quick status test from ?&FC41 which indicates that it’s not even recognising the host card – and it does the same in the Model B and the Master 128 so it really is that card itself. Bother. Power rails look fine, so tomorrow I guess I’ll replace the 1MHz bus cable and see if it’s that although D0..D7 are at the right voltage so p’raps not.

It’s the Wakefield Acorn Show on Saturday, maybe I’ll find something of interest there.

In any case, ADFS 1.3 loads into the Sidewise board I built up yesterday, and it seems that most of my 5.25″ floppy disks are in a readable condition, so not all is lost and I can get most of it onto an MMC card for archival purposes. Woot.