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.

I’ve been spending some time recently with my new non-work project, which involves a pile of BBC microcomputers, various ancient pieces of kit, a phone line and an Econet. To date this has largely involved me just piling stuff up in the garage, but tonight I decided to actually do something about it.

The plan is this: I used to run a Viewdata bulletin board many years ago on a BBC Micro model B, with a V23 (that’s 1200 baud) pre-Hayes auto-answer modem and a 20MB Winchester hard disk. I am going to get that working over the Internet, still using a modem but dialling over the house VoIP system to the ancient Dacom Designer modem. It will mean that only one person at a time can use the BBS but that’s the way it used to happen. It’d be ace to get that authentic speed 🙂

Having said that, I don’t particularly want to lock up the Winchester disk, so I’m killing two birds with one stone and setting up a Level 3 Econet fileserver as well complete with home-constructed clock boxes. As a plus I can probably get the RiscPC connected to it, but that’s a bonus and if I can’t well so be it. There’ll be a third machine (a BBC Master 128) which I’m going to fit John Kortink’s GoMMC system to, as a backup storage device since I don’t entirely trust the MFM drive which will be attached to the fileserver, and it’ll give me a Beeb to play with while the BBS is in use.

I was quite proud of myself tonight – managed to fault-trace the 1770DFS and get that working which then opened up all the old 5.25″ DFS disks I have kicking around; then fitted the ATPL Sidewise board and got the 6502 second processor working using an old Beeb PSU. It’s still an inconvenience having to load ADFS into sideways RAM so I’ve put a shout-out on the BBC Micro maillist to see if anyone has an ADFS ROM I could grab, or can burn me one on an old 27128 EPROM (I have loads of the damn things, but none with ADFS on).

I’ve saved the fun of getting the old Winchester drives working for next time. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a long haul, that one – there’s an ST-225 drive and an old Miniscribe 3650, both of which haven’t seen action in years. I think I’m going to need an enclosure as well, I’ve got an old SCSI one in the garage somewhere which will come in handy I think. Mmmm.

(Update: Looks like I need to get some more 34-way cable and IDC connectors for the 1MHz bus, so I guess it’s a trip to Maplin for me tomorrow!)