Retrochallenge: Starting position..

The Attic

Well here we are.  My starting position at getting the viewdata BBS sorted out..

Top shelf - misc DIY stuff, but there's a spare electron shoved in there.

Middle shelf - two VoIP adapters & firewall, elderly modem rack, two terminal servers running off old PC power supplies since theirs died, and a NAS box and external USB drives that is nothing to do with this!

Bottom shelf - ancient mono monitor, three BBC Micros, two magic modems, quad-video switch.

On the floor: various spare beebs and ARM machines....

On the right, another two beebs, a Tandata viewdata adapter sat in a touchscreen for a CUB, atop a portable TV, and lots of more stuff!

At present, in use: one VoIP box adapter, the magic modems, and two beebs.

Out of shot is an Acorn A5000 which runs the econet fileserver and a RISC PC, sharing an old 14" monitor.

Previously, I did have two beebs on modems and two beebs connected to one of the terminal servers accepting calls from the internet, allowing four users but only two by each method.  The aim is to use the modem rack and terminal servers to answer the phones, with as many beebs as I can get working connected to other ports on the terminal servers. This will disassociate the link between access method and bbc micro, and allow more people to use the system.  Should they want to.  

At the moment I'm lucky to find even one person visiting ....

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll be able to tidy this lot up as well as getting it working again!  As you can see, it'll need it!

Ephemeral Coding

I was thinking, last night, about the many programs I've written over my time, and I suddenly realised that the vast majority of them are now completely redundant, and that sort of saddened me. All that time and effort now feels wasted and my efforts are completely forgotten. So, just in case anybody is interested, here are some of the things I've either been paid to write, or were major unpaid projects, that are now of no use whatsoever:

Programs for use with the Prestel viewdata service:
SuperSub - to assist main IPs manage their Sub-IPs.
MailboxMassacre - bulk email handling software.
StopPress Viewdata terminal - the only implementation I knew of that correctly handled double height characters.
AutoF - moderated "bulletin board" and message handling system.
Various modules for the Autonomic Viewdata host.

Programs written in the BOS operating system
Almanac - Room booking and management system mainly used by Local Authorities.
Syrian - took over this EPOS system and almost completely re-wrote it.
COMP - poor mans' IDE for BOS Cobol/SpeedBase, handling macro for recompiling different versions of a project.

Programs written for use with WorldsAway (V.1 of what is now vzones "Dreamscape")
Various game hosts.
Various client mods to add functionality.
Clone server, written in VB. (And to be clear, I had NO access to any existing server code: it was written simply by seeing what the client did when I tried to talk to it.)
Clone client for UNIX, only good for "parking" an avater.

Web Applications
Various PHP based applications to solve puzzles that were being run on the Quiz Call TV channel.


I'm sure there are lots more, but that's what I remember for now.

What's most irritating, is that I can't actually think of anything that I've written that's likely to still be in use, apart from some code contributed to other peoples' projects. (e.g. the econet code in BeebEm.)

Finally!

Finally, after canablising and repairing motherboards of three dead A5000s I now have a working fileserver again! At last I can get on with the important tasks in life - getting set up to run a viewdata BBS up at the Acorn World show up in Huddersfield next month.

There will be intermittant access to it in the run up period; if anybody wants to re-live the glory days of being online in the 1980s, then watch this space for access details.

(And for those reading this on Facebook, click "view original post" below to get to the actual blog entry..)

Econet and furry batteries.

Firstly, I think I'm going to disable keyboard navigation on Opera, after yet again managing to press something that sent me forward or back a page and lost all I typed when I came back here. Let's try again.

OK, it's been a while since we had an update.

I've replaced my econet network cabling with some of PhilB's brand spanking new econet socket boxes. If you're into econet, then I really must recommend these. They link together with standard Cat5 fly-leads or cable, and have built in terminators where required.

That didn't help with my A5000 econet problems, however. Indeed, shortly afterwards the blasted thing wouldn't power up at all.

I put a plea out on comp.sys.acorn.misc and very soon have three offers of replacement machines. They really must be a nice bunch on there!

But a but of reading up has enlightened me to a standard problem with A5000s - Acorn, in their infinite wisdom, decided to solder Ni-Cad batteries directly onto the motherboard. You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the exploding battery packs on the Masters. Anyway, after 15+ years, these batteries grow fur, and leak battery acid all over the place, wrecking tracks and burning the legs off chips..

So, with two replacement machines here, plus my original, I have three fury batteries, and none of the machines will work properly. I clean out Maplin of tagged Ni-cads (they don't have anything remotely pin compatible, so I'll have to solder them in on leads.) and rip out the batteries and clean up as best as I can the boards here. One looks like it's had it, with a fair bit of damage. The second required one track repair, and that is now firing up to the desktop. The third, my original machine, looks OK, but still won't power up. I'll have to get back to that.

Next task is, of course, to rebuild a whole machine. I'm going to use the SD-IDE drive I got from Mark at retroclinic, which is already formatted. I just need to work out how to copy disc-to-disc on a machine with only one IDE interface, as it is reluctant to co-exist with another drive.

I may have to set up another fileserver, fire up the A5000 with the hard drive, and copy everything off across the econet, then copy it all back again. Assuming the econet works now .....

Econet ...

More on my econet blues.

I've now got a stable econet running with two Model Bs and two Master 128s. Wahay!

It seems that the network socket boxes I made myself some 25+ years ago were misbehaving. There was no strain relief on the cables, so some of the messing about recently tugged the cables, and introduced a short inside one of them. I guess all the dried out sellotape inside wasn't enough to insulate them any more!

So, one problem down. I've got a working econet between the Beebs. But the lot still goes down as soon as I plug the a5000 into it. Station not listening. Sigh.

Interesingly, with the A5000 powered off, the econet runs fine. If I set *Stations running repeatedly and power up the A5000, I get a valid reply from it, briefly, before it actually starts booting up, but as soon as it does, the econet dies.

I've also tried running netmonitor as I connect the A5000, and it seems that it's throwing all sorts of junk onto the lines. It doesn't look like valid packets, just garbage, enough to crash netmonitor, but it's something to investigate. Since I've now tried multiple econet modules, and the only thing between the module and the econet cabling is L8, I'm going to try bypassing that (the Masters don't have this, so it can't be essential, since they use the same econet modules) and see what happens...

Wish me luck!

Edit: 30th July. I made a little adapter to plug onto the pins on the bottom of the econet module rather than allowing it to mate with the motherboard, bringing out the connections to a DIN, so bypassing L8. Made no difference. Damn.

Econet woes..

I've posted before about my problems getting the old-style Econet back up and running. I'm still having problems.

I'm also limited by the machines I have available to test things out with...

BUT so far, I've got the following working.

• Station 103, a Model B. This one one of the ones I obtained recently. Along with my 6502dvd second processor this is running a Level 2 fileserver.
  
• Station 101, a Model B, pretty vanilla. This is one of my original machines that ran the BBS 20 years ago.
  

Both of these are working fine, talking to each other quite hapilly.

And because I now have a known working pair of machines, I can now determine that...

• at least one of the cables I was using to test things with, doesn't work.
  
• the Master 128, station 40, I was running the fileserver on before will only occasionally see station 103, giving variouslly Net Jammed, Not Listening or Not Present errors.
  
• the A5000 still can't see anything, nor anything it. Since I swapped over the econet modules in this and Station 40, it looks like both may be dead.
  
• ..as might be a loose module I tried, which came loose in a box along with two others, one badly repaired, and a pile of chis... I don't like swaping them about in Stn 40, though, as it's under a replay board that I have to take out first.
  
• a Master 128 from the recent haul behaves exactly the same ...
  

So, I've got two Model Bs working, but nothing later. If I had at least one Master that was working 100%, then I could start swapping modules about to test them.

The only other econet-fitted machines are a Master with no battery pack (well, it DID have one, but it was a bit of a mess, and the keyboard has lots of dead keys anyway..) and a German Model B which has a dead PSU.

Time to drag out the other Masters that don't have econet fitted, see if I can get any of the modules working. After that, it's time to desolder the line drivers..

Sigh...

Rescued beebs!

Thanks to a lovely couple in Marple, I today collected a pile of ex-school equipment! Two Masters and a Model B were the least exciting bits - there were lots of software and manuals and documents about how the school econet had been set up. 5 seperate networks with at least three fileservers! I got two of the fileservers, but unfortunately no bridges.. also included, a pile of slightly rusty floppy drives, some with discs still in them, a Music 97, grafpad, light pens, some experiment boxes, and lots of spare chips ...

Anyway, photos are up on my nice new flikr account here.

Fustration 2

OK. Time for an update.

I connected the A5000, Model B and clock box all up with a known good T-piece and still they cannot talk to each other.

I swapped over the Econet modules in the Master downstairs and the A5000, which still didn't work.

I connected them all back up, using the new run of cable, etc. and fired up Level 2 fileserver on the Master, and the Model B can see it and logion!! Finally a result that tells me something - the Model B works, the Master works, the econet module in it is the one from the A5000, so presumably both of those work. And, the new cable run works! But the A5000 can't see the FS on the Master, and still neither can log into the L4 on the A5000. Drat.

So... it must be something in the A5000 that's causing me problems other than the econet module, which given the buffers on the module blow first if there is a line issue, means it most likely is a software problem.

Of course all this power cycling of the A5000 has thrown up more issues; the poor thing has two elderly hard discs in it, and the second one seems to be dying - I'm getting all sorts of strange transfer errors on power up, even before the "RISC OS / Acorn ADFS" banner appears. One thing after another ...

OK then, let's go solid state: I try to fit an SD-IDE adapter I got off Mark of retroclinic when we were at Byte Back and after some hunting for hform, got it formatting a 2GB SD memory card. But it keeps failing. A quick email to Mark and he reminds me that there's a 512MB limit on RISC OS 3.1 .. argh. I'd forgotten all about that one; used to hit it all the time with DOS machines way back when... (At least it didn't do what one client machine with a caching IDE controller did to me once - let me initialise a 1GB disc, and as we were copying data to it, as we hit the 512MB, looped back to the start of the drive and trashed the partition tables and directory...)

So, rather than limit the format and waste 75% of the 2GB card, I've found some 512MB mini-SD cards on eBay for 99p with free delivery, so ordered one of those. I've disabled the second IDE drive in the A5000 for now, as there wasn't anything on it I need at the moment, and I hope I can copy everything off it when I get the new card. I've got master/slave issues to work out on that yet ...

And then, once the A5000 is all up and running on the new drive, I can try and find out why it's not liking the econet any more..

Fustration

Don't you just hate it when things just will not work.

Some time back, I pondered running econet over 2 spare pairs in a cat5 cable that was already runinng ethernet from the ground floor to the atic.

After much discussion on the mailing list over the merits of running econet without the earth connection, I tried it, and it worked, and all was good. However, the Beeb was not really decorative enough to keep out, so has spent almost all the intervening time in the cupboard!

I finally made enough room in the spare room to get it set up on a desk there, but there was no direct cable from the atic where the filesever is to that room. After much swearing, I did manage to run another cable there, and duly crimped RJ45 sockets on the ends, and transferred the Econet DIN-Cat5 cables over. And it didn't work.

All I get on the Master is "Station 10 not present" drat. It's got a clock though...

So I try..

• Adding a crossover (by re-crimping one end) but that made it worse - didn't even see the clock...
  
• Visually checking all the connections at each end...
  
• Spending half an hour looking for the cat5 tester, then a little longer for a battery, just to confirm that the line is absolutely fine...
  
• Added the earth connections to the DINs, now I have enough wires to use...
  
• Set up a Model B in the attic, which also cannot see the server right next to it..
  
• Tried a new drop lead from the server to the econet sockets..
  
• Disconnected all the new cabling and brought the terminate upstairs, still no joy..
  
• Reset the econet station number on the server and tried another version of !Server..
  
• Power cycled the server several times doing all this..
  

And it still doesn't work..

All I lave left I am able to do is disconnect everything, link the B and the server and the clock together using T pieces and open up the server and re-seat the econet board.. it USED to work...

Sigh...

Software or Hardware?

:-)

That's BeebEm talking to my a5000 running L4.

Actually, it's still somewhat unreliable. It works most of the time
in Master 128 mode, with ANFS 4.25, but in Model B with NFS 3.60 it
seems to get stuck.. I think it's a timing issue, I found my
initial problems with it re-sending the scout after I'd ack'd it once
already was cured by waiting a short time before creating the ack.
This may be something similar.

I'm glad to get so far, though - going to be unable to do anything
with it after this weekend for a few days, so it's good to stop on a
high note!

I'll keep playing in any spare moments over the weekend to see if I can get it any
better... and I've yet to check it still talks to itself ...

Rob

Random BeebEm Thoughts

Following talks at Byte-Back I have set myself  two tasks to accomplish.  

1. Adjust BeebEm's econet support to talk (optionally?) in AUN format, so it can talk directly to e.g. an A5000 running an econet fileserver, or simply via such as a gateway to other Beebs on the far side.  
   ..Hmm.. What happens if you are running tcp-over-econet on the emulated B?
   ..use mapping file like in RISC OS rather than current econet.cfg file?
   ..can real AUN talk to alternate port numbers, or will we be limited to one instance per IP address? - can we bind to individual addresses if host has multiples?
   
   
2. Implement another serial device "hayes modem" that will actually talk IP.  It looks like I can lever 'tcpser' to do the job - this is a GPL'd serial modem emulator which normally sits between a serial port and an IP network. I think if I modify this to talk via a pipe to BeebEm instead of to a serial port, this would do everything we need to accept and initiate telnet sessions without re-inventing the wheel!  On the BeebEm side, just need to bolt pipe code in alongside the touch-screen code..
   ..need to think about multiple-instances and how they behave.

(Since its over 4 years since I wrote the first econet code, it's high time I finished it... Thanks to Mike Wyatt for taking it and making it work properly.)

other things to think about -

• headless operation - disable all screen and sound output - incorporate vnc server instead
  ..encourage unix version to do offer same...
• 
  

Byte Back

Well, I spent much of yesterday in the outskirts of Stoke-0n-Trent at the 2009 Byte Back retro-gaming event.  Due mainly to the efforts of Dave More from Stairway to Hell, and the BBC Micro mailing list, there was a huge Acorn and BBC micro presence. It was my first trip to a show for at least two decades, so I met lots of people I'd only heard of before, and had lots of great chats and saw lots of wonderful bits of kit.  Seeing the Domesday was definitely a highlight. All in all, I had a whale of a time, and I even manged to get my old viewdata bbs back up and running for the first time in 20 years, all on possibly the largest econet still working in the country.   Well, with nine stations and three different types of fileserver...

Oh, and there were lots of video games there too.

I didn't take many pictures, just a few to set the scene those I did are here... Mine is the last photo of a table with the A5000 running Level 4, and a Model B running the Autonomic host software.  (I had more stuff with me, but no room!)