Evil Beeb Project Update

<%image(20060711-beebs.jpg|120|106|)%>I’ve managed to source some Econet bits including terminator boxes and socket boxes. There’s now enough bits to get a basic level 3 fileserver and workstation up and running, plus the ANFS ROMs which Chris has done for me will go nicely in the Masters together with the Econet modules which will arrive this week. I can then turn my mind to the dialup interface and the modems – probably the first BBs which will go up will be The Rabbit Run (since I wrote a lot of the code and sort-of understand it). I’ll do some touting once we’ve worked out the icky bits of connectivity – we’ll have a couple of Archimedes ones up too.

Paid a quick trip to Maplin after work to get some shielded 4-core cable, and got blank looks when I asked what the mutual capacitance on the cable was. Took a few seconds then got asked “oh, you want speaker wire?” *sigh* They really have gone downhill 🙁

I also appear to have Z80 coprocessors coming out of my ears, where I really want 6502 ones. Pfffff. Anyone out there want to do a swap?

Update: The Winchester drive appears to have gone pop. More specifically (according to this tech note) the LED error code translates to “Index pulse not detected during spinup”. So, time to find another drive, which will be a bit of a sod: to this end I’m now looking for a Miniscribe 3438, or at least some other half-height ST506 (pref. RLL) drive.