Thallanor wrote:

Jed118 wrote:

Afraid I've got you beat: […]
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Afraid I've got you beat:

🤣. Holy hell, you have that right! I'm glad that you got it to work though!

Believe it or not, first try!

Errius wrote:

McBierle wrote:

I have this Mitsumi 5.25" drive which has erratic behavior. So i decided to clean it and maybe replace the caps i can find.
First stage is done:

WP_20190415_011.jpg

How are you going to realign the heads?

Good question. When I did my 4/25 LTE drive, I kept adjusting it until I could reliably read, format and read a HD disk in it and other systems. Not surprisingly, DD disks were a lot more tolerant 😉

Errius wrote:

McBierle wrote:

I have this Mitsumi 5.25" drive which has erratic behavior. So i decided to clean it and maybe replace the caps i can find.
First stage is done:

WP_20190415_011.jpg

How are you going to realign the heads?

Well as Jed118 said i'll have to try and try and try 😀

McBierle wrote:

Errius wrote:

McBierle wrote:

I have this Mitsumi 5.25" drive which has erratic behavior. So i decided to clean it and maybe replace the caps i can find.
First stage is done:

WP_20190415_011.jpg

How are you going to realign the heads?

Well as Jed118 said i'll have to try and try and try 😀

I'll assume you've never done this before. Unless you use something like Dave Dunfield's Imagedisk and a factory-produced floppy you'll have a very, very hard time. In fact I can't imagine anyone succeeding by randomly moving the heads, plus how were you planning to assess alignment?

appiah4 wrote:

65C02 wrote:

I have been working on getting a classic 486, the DX2-66 with local bus, up and running. It has not exactly been smooth sailing, however. I'm having trouble setting up the mouse, of all things. Ctmouse installs the Mouse Systems/COM port driver, but the machine hangs as soon as it receives any input from the mouse.

I have a feeling that it all boils down to incorrect serial port parameters, but I cannot for the life of me find the related settings in the BIOS. Sad thing is, decades ago I used to be good at all of this stuff. 😊

You could also be using a wrong serial port breakout cable (sequential vs staggered, do a forum search 😀 )

I'll have to check that out after work today. Thanks! 😀

I don't know yet. If i would like things easy i could use dosbox, i chose not to.
The drive was not working. Maybe it will never again but mabye i'll get it to work again.
2-3 Years ago i never soldered, i never worked with wood and so on. Now i'm sodlering (In an okay way 😀 ), i'm building a special wooden case, i designed my own (small) pcb's and so on.

One has to evolve.

Errius wrote:

How are you going to realign the heads?

pfft

Played around with my 386 pc, which lead to this question: Where to find the M321 motherboards chipset datasheet? Chipset datasheet for M321 (PC Chips) [Found chipset! OPTi 82C391]

konc wrote:

McBierle wrote:

Well as Jed118 said i'll have to try and try and try 😀

I'll assume you've never done this before. Unless you use something like Dave Dunfield's Imagedisk and a factory-produced floppy you'll have a very, very hard time. In fact I can't imagine anyone succeeding by randomly moving the heads, plus how were you planning to assess alignment?

I rebuild carburettors and do other very fine work - generally I am decently skilled in aspects of precision. All you have to do is look at my glorious mirror IDE cable! 😜 (Hey, it worked first try!)

The way I did it is once I could read a DD disk, I would keep one side of the head semi-firmly screwed down, and move the other side in intervals from top down, in a circular way (kind of like shifting a manual trans car or calibrating a joystick). I remembered the range of successful reads from a DD, then switched to HD, and repeated my pattern until I fell out of range. Once those could read, I re-did the process (ever so carefully - I had to resort to DD diskettes more than once because of shaky hands - glass of wine helped there 😉 ) until I could format a diskette properly. Then that diskette went into several other machines for testing - read, write, format, - then back into the LTE to be read. I continued adjusting until I got no errors. The whole process took about an hour. This was all because I had to change a band.

Maybe I just got lucky - I had nothing but time in a snowstorm at a cottage 😁

What would be the right way to calibrate the heads? I got the idea from fiddling with a 1542 Commodore drive, which I will admit is much more tolerant of shift.

YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH?!?!

Somebody did that for about 4 pennies worth of copper. Did it to the 1071, too.

Luckily they were... shall we say... not energetic enough to get into the 1541 and C64 boxes.

The monitor will probably be easiest to fix ("easiest"), the rest will be harder to find proper connectors and pinouts for - though at least it's a C64 and not a Soroc or Cromemco so parts will be easier to find.

The shortsightedness is appalling.

I did get it all cheap because it had been mangled, though. Honestly it could be a load of broken junk, but I'll bet most of it works.

Too bad they threw all their software and manuals in the trash, apparently.

That sucks.

bjwil1991 wrote:

That sucks.

You know it does but as much salt as I throw (and as wasteful as it is) I got a C64 and 1571 cheap and that doesn't happen every day so cheers hope you had a good one.

Jed118 wrote:

What would be the right way to calibrate the heads? I got the idea from fiddling with a 1542 Commodore drive, which I will admit is much more tolerant of shift.

Using a calibration diskette and an oscilloscope.
Calibration diskettes are very special, they have the tracks written with various analog signals suitable to test/align not only the track placement, but the signal amplifier as well.
As these are unobtainiums nowadays, you can make a makeshift replacement by degaussing a diskette and format it using a known good drive.

I re-calibrated the top head position on a 3.5inch floppy drive by hand as well.

I used a disk reading program to see what tracks the drive could see and properly read, and using a floppy formatted on a different drive, I simply moved the head back and forth until it was able to properly read everything off the foreign disk.

There is only 80 tracks on a 3.5 inch floppy drive, the tolerances are not that tight.

I think what has happened is some clueless dingbat thinks they have cut the power cords to stop anyone being electrocuted by untested hardware.

I recently got a nice Woody Atari 2600 6 switch cheap because of that. The seller thought the power cable had been cut, but they cut the RF lead.
I'll mod the thing for svideo output anyway so couldn't care less about the RF cable.

I'm getting a VGA monitor like that too, with cut cables. I'm annoyed, but I can solder well and there are no shortage of VGA cables here.

Finished a simple music disk release for the Revision demoparty this weekend.

Sifted through my ancient backups and found the most important stuffs:
-the configuration files with the environment for the compilers I used in the 1990s
-backups of some *very* nice utilities I loved much: Underware Brief Editor 3.1, NuMega Soft-ICE 2.5

And also some of my old utility programs I wrote back then, which I will revive and update:
-the best DOS screen saver I know of: supports mouse, and cooperates with Windows (well, only 3.x yet, needs to update for 4), TSR size between ~200 and ~700 byte, depending on options used
-the driver for my 486 chipset (hardware UMB -> no need for EMM386, and some other things)

Now finally continuing to set up my P III AT, doing the DOS network config, to use Samba for file transfer.

Imperious wrote:

I think what has happened is some clueless dingbat thinks they have cut the power cords to stop anyone being electrocuted by untested hardware.

Actually I was specifically told it was for the copper. The person who told me did that embarrassed shrug when they said it (they didn't do it).

Anyway I should be able to replace the monitor's easily enough and I might luck out of the tape drive. I bet I'm on my own with the CardKey 10-key.

Now I need to rig a way to connect the 1541 to a PC and find a bunch of my old now-long-gone C64 collection. Then once I play for a bit I'll probably sell at least the C64, assuming it all works right.

Just for the copper?

Wow, this guy would lose his mind if he saw the amount of heavy duty power cables we simply throw out every week.