Ahh. 49 disks, 81 sides (some disks only have data on a single side), two unreadable sides, and 7,466,256 bytes later I now have images of all the disks available to me on my parents’ Atari 800XL.
Now to do a bit more cataloging, sort out what contains personal data, and find a good way to post them. That bit may come another day. ;)
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Imaging Atari floppies.
I’ve spent most of today thus far imaging floppy disks using my work laptop, an Atari 1050, an Atari 800XL (as a SIO power injector), a Universal SIO2PC Interface, and ProSystem.
I still haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to archive and distribute them, but it’ll probably involve serially numbered disks, a page (or pages) on nuxx.net, a listing of files on each disk, bad sectors in each image, and an optical scan of each disk. There will also be scans of the different varieties of Tyvek and paper sleeves, including logos of the computer stores advertised on them.
Doing this will be a good bit of work, but then (at least) the disks will be archived.
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The Last Starfighter on Atari 800XL
(No emulation, booting from a >20 year old floppy.)
So, yes. The Atari 1050 floppy drive that I was attempting to fix is… Well… Fixed. I also played some Necromancer too, before turning it off and ceasing working for the evening. The new caps are considerably smaller than the old ones, but the snap in pins were large enough that they had to be ground down to fit. Once all the new electrolytic caps were in place and I’d jumpered around the trace I lifted earlier and tested everything, it was time to put the RF shied on the board and put it back in the enclosure. I was a bit nervous about reconnecting the floppy drive because of the many different connectors, but it worked out.
I then put it all together, hooked it up to the TV, and tried to boot a game disk, which failed. Next I tried a DOS disk and that worked, then finally The Last Starfighter beta and Necromancer. So, it looks like that first failure was just a problem with a single disk. Hopefully I can still read the rest of it.
With any luck the SIO2PC adapter will come pretty soon and then I can image as many of the old floppies as possible. Now, bed.
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My favorite local shop for purchasing beer just happened to have a whole bunch of Founders’ Kentucky Breakfast sitting on the shelf. Imagine that. ;)
If I hadn’t brought one to share last Friday when playing Wii with friends there’d be a six pack. Mmm.
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Me with two halibut in 1996.
(Click for more photos…)
Since I got a good bit of work done in the quiet of this morning I decided to finish up something else I’d been slowly working on for the past while: captioning of the re-scanned photos from Alaska in 1996 (photo gallery retired).
Back in 2004 I had scanned these photos using a transparency adapter on a Epson Perfection 3170 PHOTO. This didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, so when I acquired the Nikon Coolscan V ED I decided to rescan these negatives. Well, that’s finally done. (Information about 110 Slide and 35mm Negative Scanning is here.)
They look much nicer now, and I’d now consider them fairly well archived digitally.
If you’d like to look through them, the rest of the images can be found here (photo gallery retired)
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Walking into work early…
(Click for more moblog photos.)
Just after 5am I woke up and realized that I wasn’t especially sleepy, and I could just wake up then. So I did. I took a nice, long shower, then made some coffee in the Moka before heading out to work.
It was nice driving to work in the dark, windows partially down, singing along with TMBG‘s Lincoln, feeling the slightly-warm air from the car’s heater swirling around with the ~56°F outdoor air. I took the 22 Mile -> Ryan -> Hamlin -> West Entrance Drive route, which was empty enough that I had to occasionally use my high beams, just to make sure that there weren’t any deer on the road.
Now I’m here, and I’ll see what I can get done before the time I’ve been coming in lately (~9am). Hopefully all of my work for the day.
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There are a few times each year which sticks in my mind. The first time the furnace has to be turned on (and the accompanying burnt dust smell). The first snowfall which makes it too difficult to go somewhere. The first day so hot that one must retreat to the cold of the basement.
Growing up I remember this day as the time when my dad (and eventually I) would open my bedroom window, slide the glass panes out of the way, and slide the screen into place. That was also the amazing day where there would be nothing in the window and I could lean out, looking straight down at the ground. This was also the day when my dad would get the screens for the front and side storm doors out of the rafters of the garage, replace the screen material (if needed), remove the glass from the doors, and replace them with screens.
After this point all the doors and windows could be opened and the finally-warm Michigan wind would blow through, airing out the house from months of being closed up against the cold.
Today is that day.
Well, it looks like the total cost to replace all the electrolytic caps in the Atari 1050 is about US$12. The 35V 6800μF caps were a little pricey at $3.02 each, but it should be worth it. Hopefully I’ll have all the parts and bits to connect things by the end of the week and I can image the floppies this weekend.
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Atari 1050 drive PCB with most of the electrolytic caps removed.
Well, it appears that I’ve got the problem with the Atari 1050 sorted out. It seems that some of the 47μF caps (C42, C43, C69, C70) were bad, causing the shorts. I’ve also removed all of the other electrolytic caps and will be ordering replacements from Mouser tomorrow. (The board had looked like this before.)
I did make one pretty substantial mistake and inadvertently lift a trace on the top of the board when removing one larger caps. The hole really didn’t seem through-plated and the leg of the capacitor didn’t let go from it, and I peeled it right back. Thankfully it should be very easy to jump around with a 2″ piece of wire, so when I put it back in place I’ll do that.
Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be able to properly image old 800XL floppies. Yay!
Question for anyone who can answer it…
When electrolytic caps eventually fail due to aging, will they ever fail in a shorted state? That is, a state of being conductive?
This is going back to the Atari 1050 floppy drive I mentioned before. I’ve pulled the mainboard, removed all socketed ICs, and disconnected the electromechanical bits of the board. The short is still there, so I know that the problem is somewhere on the board. As it was working fine the last time I tried it (a number of years ago) I’m guessing that the failure is in a part which degrades with age.
There are some rather large electrolytic caps on here, including some smoothing ones which are (likely) located right after the LM7805 and LM7812. I figure if these have failed shorted, they could cause the problem that I’m seeing.
I’ll probably try pulling them tonight or tomorrow and seeing if the short(s) go away. If so, I might just replace all of them. There are only nine, so it shouldn’t be too expensive to try, and I need to place a Mouser order for other stuff already.
(And no, I can’t find a schematic for it, unfortunately.)
