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.

Console Combat 2009

This weekend was the weekend of Console Combat. A chance to get together and play lots of old games in a City Centre Manchester Pub! Games aren't really my thing, but it was around the corner, and there were to be some Beeb people there, so I thought it would be best to show my face!

It was a fairly quick visit, I'm afraid to say. I had my youngest with me, and whilst she enjoyed a 3D Pacman on the A3010, squeeling with delight when we caught a ghost, most of the games were still a little complicated for a toddler to have a go at herself. We did enjoy a bowl of chips and a drink, though, and she was quite attracted to some cocktail arcade machines!

Apparently we missed most of the Beeb people, but I got a quick chat with the Beebmaster Ian, and a longer one with Dave Moore. He's got ambitious plans for the Acorn World show later in the year, but more on that at a later date.

Hope to see you all in September!

Edit: 30th Jul 2009
Thanks to Arcadian at STH for posting some more pictures 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..

Copying files between machines...

I'v almost got the BeebEm AUN Emulation working... but I wanted a copy of the Map file from the A5000 on the (windows) laptop. Now I'd previously played with trying to get ftp, samba and nfs servers working, but failed miserable. So how did I do it?

Run BeebEm and log it into the econet fileserver on the A5000, which still has $ as ADFS::IDEDisc4:$.

Created a new SSD file in drive 0, and un-write protected it.

*DIR $.!Boot.Resources.!Internet.Files
*Info AUNMap
(gave me length of file as 6E3 bytes)
*Load AUNMap 1B00
*Disc
*Save AUNMap 1B00+6E3

Ejected the disc, loaded it into DFS Explorer, dragged the file out to my desktop.

Simple ...
:-)

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

It only took 20 years...

Back in the 1980s, the computer I used pretty much exclusively was the BBC Micro.  I had written a fair bit of software for it, including two products sold commercially, and a number of items I was commissioned to write.  I ran two dial-up bulletin boards and a moderated chatline/forum thing on Prestel. I was a committee member of ClubSpot 810, responsible for the BBS listings, and was employed by Micronet 800 in the Technical Help Department.

Most of what I did at home, including a multi-line viewdata bulletin board, was run from an "Econet" network I had at home.  Using a slightly modified BBC Master ET and a 10MB hard disc. (Yep, ten megabyte... I've got nearly a million times more space on the home LAN now!)  It used to take over 30 floppy discs to back-up, and the external drive unit was almost the size of a Mini-tower PC today!

By the end of 1989 and after two house moves, a new family and a full time job, most of the Beeb stuff was packed up and in boxes.  Over 15 years later, in about 2006, after two further moves, with nostalgia in my mind, some of it got unpacked again.   The hard disc seems to be unwilling to perform any more, but I did still have some backups.  In odd moments over the next year, and with an A5000 obtained from Freecycle running as a filesever, I managed to get a network up and running again between a stack of machines balanced on an overly small desk, and after a few false starts, restored a backup set!  Then we found out we were having a baby, and all time for tinkering stopped.

Three years later, with the addition of an ethernet card in the A5000, and much help from members of the BBC Micro mailing list, I got IP working and the A5000 on the LAN.  Unfortunately I was unable to find any SMB, FTP or NFS server software for the A5000 that would run on the RISC OS 3.1 A5000 , so nothing would actually talk to it.

In steps a RISC PC... It only took three days of snatched minutes here and there to get it to log into the Econet server across the ethernet.. and I finally had a machine that the riscos samba server would work on.  It crashes a LOT, so it's going to be unuseable, so I'm going to have to try another protocol, but at least it's a start: I mapped a drive on one of the PCs, and was able to list the directory!

So, over 20 years since I was last able to properly access this data, it looks like it's going to be available again!

I'm thinking that I'll have to move it all from the A5000 onto the RISC PC, and run the econet fileserver on there, then just use the A5000 as a gateway between the econet and the ethernet -that way I don't need to have both machines on as much - most of the time I'm going to want to be accessing it from a PC.

Once that's all done - next task is to sniff some of the AUN traffic (econet over ethernet) and adjust BeebEm's econet support to use that protocol - it will be rather cool to have an emulated BBC Micro talking to a real one across the networks!