Mmmm, Level 3 Fileserver goodness 🙂

A brief overview of what I’m up to, since a few people have asked:

Way back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was involved in the Viewdata BBs scene: in common with my peers I used my Beeb to run a bulletin board (The Rabbit Run) and it had a couple of hundred users. Other boards around the time included Chipboard (which ran on EBBS in Leeds), CARBBS-based bulletin boards such as Odyssey, Optix and Cyclone, and FBBS-originated boards such as CCl4.

Having rediscovered the original disks for my BBs numerous times and archiving off portions of the board to more resilient media than the 5.25″ floppies they’re on, the data’s nice and intact.

Now comes the fun bit. One of “those” nights in the pub set me thinking about how the BBs could be put on the Internet, in a similar way to CCl4 and Haven. However, I’d want to keep a nice clean delineation and not “taint” the system with modern technologies or developments such as GoMMC. Thus the idea of using VoIP, modems, Econet storage and original hardware came along.

We’d take a BBC Micro running the BBs software using a Dataphone “Designer” modem to answer (no Hayes modems around this time, remember?), and connect the modem via a house phone exchange to another machine which would actually dial the line when an incoming telnet connection was made. The Beeb setup would remain on faithful pre-1990 hardware, and it’d be a solid recreation of an original Viewdata setup. The Java Viewdata applet could be used or we could write a new one with proper aspect ratio, etc.

Last week, that led to another thought – if we could get one BBs up, why not get others going? There are archives of pages and messages hidden in lofts (there are a couple which I’ve got copies of in any case); so the idea of using an Econet to have a stack of Beebs with modems came about. Believe it or not, I think the hardest bits to source will be the non-Hayes modems (Dataphone Demon-2, Designer, Telemod, Pace Nightingale, etc.).

The idea’s still work-in-progress until I get the stuff running, but it seems that we could end up with a live “Acorn BBs museum” using original hardware and files.

Update on the ST506 Problem: Ian and Jules over on the BBC Micro maillist suggested that it was probably the stepper motor in the Winchester drive being ‘sticky’ – rotated the stepper arm a couple of mm seems to have sorted the problem out. I’ll let Google index this for the next person to have the problem 😉

<%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.

I finally got off my arse this morning, fired up the RiscPC and reconfigured its IP address.

End result, Haven (my old Viewdata BBs) is back and available via a Java client again. Taste that 40-column retro Viewdata goodness here, but don’t expect any updates – the Sysop’s Bulletin still thinks I work for Mailbox, and that was at least 4 years ago.

Those of you who are really retro can probably telnet to haven.jml.net:23 with a Viewdata emulator such as Hippoterm. The truly retro will have to wait until I’ve got it hooked up to a phone line, but that’s probably best saved for the BBC Micro madness 🙂

[ Those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m on about (usually because you whippersnappers are too young, this was during the 80s dammit) can find more about Viewdata on CCl4’s site – be enlightened at the marvels of escape codes, attributes, and giant telephone bills ]

I did say yesterday that I’d post more once I’d stopped swearing. Truth of the matter is that I haven’t stopped swearing in the slightest.

There’s a BBC Master 128 in my collection: it’s almost 20 years old to give it its due, and the CMOS battery pack inside had badly corroded so I replaced it. I’ve also made an attempt to repair one of the shift keys – the internals of the keyboard switches are prone to oxidisation but the entire damn lot of spares I had were oxidised too. How tedious.

Anyway, as mentioned yesterday I’d picked up an internal 65C02 second processor, which upgrades the 128 to the Turbo model and enables it to run the Level 3 Econet fileserver software. I also picked up the 8-bit IDE module from JGH and set it all up. That’s where the troubles began. You see, things like the IDE module and the GoMMC rely on patched filesystems and external utilities for things like formatting, firmware upgrades, etc. which is all well and good, but a pain in the arse if you’ve only got 5.25″ drives attached to the Beeb and the only floppy drive in the house which will work on a PC is a 3.5″ one.

So, thinks I, I shall be clever. I pulled the RiscPC out from its resting place and connected it up to the sole SVGA LCD sitting in the house. Nothing. Nada. Not an electronic sausage. The RiscPC is just too old, and the LCD panel is just too limited in its range – fine for a Windows box, crap for something which requires some sort of odd sync. I swear for a short space of time, and then remember I used to do transfers like this using serial leads.

Problem #2 occurs – the BBC’s serial port requires a 5-pin domino DIN connector, which aren’t made any more. After fighting with a pair of pliers, I manage to construct a 5-pin domino connector and Google for a suitable pinout, selecting the first likely candidate. Soldering iron gets fired up, and I start building the cable (bear in mind it’s easily 5 years since I soldered anything, probably 10). At this point, there’s a huge crack sound from the garage. I investigate, and smoke is coming out of the Master 128’s switched-mode PSU. I turn it off, and then back on to be greeted with the familiar ‘beep boop’ – doesn’t seem too bad, so I leave it switched off while I go back to finishing the cable, which takes me about another 20 minutes.

Return to the workbench, start up one of the BBC B machines with ADFS in. Find the old Comstar-II ROM. Connect the serial lead. Try to talk to it. Nothing. I return to the laptop and Google some more to find out the relevant *FX command to change baudrates. In that time, I discover Angus Duggan’s serial cable pinout with a completely different set of pinouts. I swear once more, fire up the soldering iron, desolder my connector and resolder it with the correct pinouts. It works! Hurrah! Much celebration!

The celebration however is shortlived as I discover that Comstar’s XMODEM file transfer routines are shonky enough to barf at things over 200kbytes in size, and can’t do flow control properly so there’s retries every time it saves to floppy. So off I go to dig in the floppy disks eventually returning half an hour later with a copy of Gareth Babb’s term application, which does the job and at 19200bps as well. I now have, er, a 5.25″ floppy with all the software on I need. Time to plug in the IDE drive to the Master 128, and get it going. I duly do this, and find that I can no longer access the floppy disk. Bollocks. So it’s either the floppy or the hard disk. Further investigation reveals that the 1MHz bus doesn’t actually think it’s got anything plugged into it. There’s a tale involving the GoMMC as well, but that’s pretty much got the same level of success.

I’m starting to think that:

• The BBC Master 128 is so knackered that the 1MHz bus is blown, and it’s doing odd things internally.
• The MMC card I have for the GoMMC isn’t compatible “enough”.

So, I’m on the lookout for another Master 128 (got one in the loft? Give me a yell please!), and Kieran’s bringing round an MMC card he has kicking around the place.

I just keep thinking of the satisfaction I’ll have when it’s all working, and my mind inevitably wanders to the thought that I haven’t yet worked out a reason why I’m doing this.