If you remember: I have a CBM 8050 dual floppy disk drive with Micropolis floppy mechanisms. However drive 0 has a malfunction and is not working quite right. So due to the magic of buying two, I now have ANOTHER 8050. #floppydisk#commodore#commodorePET#retrocomputing
I've designed and made available a 40 pin DIL socket for printing in any colour(probably best with a resin printer; that's all I have tested the print on).
I did it as the white sockets in Commodore PETs are a bit rubbish and I can't find new white sockets anywhere.
I think I'm ready to move the drives to my real server. Hopefully I've got enough copied that I'll only be offline for a few hours. Level 29 BBS will be down too.
A couple of years ago I got a PET 3016 from 1979. The machine comes stock with 16KB of RAM and back then we upgraded it using a RAM/ROM expansion, giving it 32KB of SRAM and BASIC V4 ROMs. However it never ran stable in this configuration. So in this video we will use new old stock 8116 DRAM chips to upgrade the mainboard to its maximum and hopefully get a stable system.
Wow, the BACKUP command in BASIC v4 doesn’t even ask for confirmation. That’s a wee bit dangerous as it overwrites the whole target disk. #commodore#commodorepet
I added the resistor mod to drive unit 0 on my CBM 8050, too. It was running too fast as well. So with the 100kOhm in parallel to R62 I can dial down the DRV 0 pot so that the 50 Hz / 300 RPM strobo ring is perfectly stationary. And suddenly I can read and write correctly to the higher tracks! Neat. #commodore#commodorePET#retrocomputing#floppydisk
It lives. Well, I have a sensible display now anyway. Next steps are sorting out ROMs (one lost 8 legs when I removed it) - I'm testing with my bitfixer Romulator, testing the RAM and then all the ports. Clean the keyboard and then refurb the case.
Bit Shifter was so kind to provide me with a patched Z3 interpreter, so I can now play @8bitgames Hibernated 1 on my PET! Yes, it is slow as molasses, as it has to CONTINUALLY load from floppy, but it WORKS! It requires BASIC V4, and would profit from some extra RAM, but still! This would have been a hit back in 1977. Or even 1980 for that matter. ;) #InteractiveFiction#commodorePET#commodore#retrogaming
So I think the PET is now running really, really stable. I can play PETSCII Robots for a long time, and nothing is crashing. I managed to beat two more maps. Although I was looking for the last robot in the map "Robot Hotel" for a very long time... The Forest Moon map was much easier, though. #commodore#commodorePET#PetsciiRobots
The PET survived the cleaning. However I think the dust from the factory was slightly corrosive. The solder mask is somewhat matte and very much not shiny. The dark spots are where I applied deoxit to the sockets. #commodore#commodorePET#retrocomputing
The main issue with the Commodore 8050 and 8250 drives is: How do you get data onto them? The units use 100tpi floppy drives that are incompatible to the regular 48tpi and 96tpi disk drives used in the 1541 and in PC DD and HD drives.
So my PET 3016 crashes irregularly when using the RAM/ROM expansion to 32K RAM. I have no clue why. I am using the expansion shown below. It allows for both the whole RAM and ROM to be replaced. Which in theory is a good thing, as I gain 32K and also BASIC V4. #commodore#commodorePET#commodorePET3016#retrocomputing
So I am trying to get some Infocom games running on the PET via the 8050. However the interpreter can’t find the storyfile. I copied all files from the D71 image over. So it looks exactly like the original. Any ideas why it still doesn’t find the file? Original image runs fine using the SD2PET by @futurewas8bit
Disk images from here: