sideburn

All good. I’m just as guilty for not noticing the pin count. And I’m even more rusty since I haven’t programmed an EPROM since 1990. I’ve ordered some 2732’s

Yes I could try that. Right now I’m playing with my eprom burner annyway and was hoping I could use the 1050 to test it out as well as troubleshoot the drives issue. I guess the ROM is a 2732x. As for the stock ROM I’m struggling to find out which rev of the ROM images to use to try that out as well.

For me it’s just a nostalgia thing. This is my original drive and happy upgrade I bought when I was a 16 year old software pirate 😂 today I only really use it for the extra speed and even then I really don’t need it since I have Unocarts and an SDrive-max. I use the 1050 to salvage my programs and stuff I wrote back in the day off my old barely hanging on floppies.

It’s so weird. I’m just living with it. I just powered it on and it was dead. Turned it off. Wait 10 secs turn back on. Nothing. Do that about 5 times and it’s back in business. Other times it spins up on first power on. Totally random. Only thing I can think of is temperature but heat gun and freeze spray don’t seem to make a difference. And apparently this is common with the Happy 1050 and I think I remember it acting like this back in the 80s.

Thats a newer version with the single RAM Mine has 3 and I swapped them all out but no change.

I just got around to burning the HAPPY 1050 ROM onto a 2764, opened the 1050 drive up and realized that the HCI ROM chip is a 24 pin so it can't be a 2764. 😕

Ok. Yeah I thought I remembered it doing this back in the 80’s. So strange. It has a mind of its own. Sometimes it’s working perfectly power cycle after power cycle.

I have stock 1050 chips. I can pull the happy off and make it stick and it works flawlessly.

Well, I tried heating the chips with hot air gun and freezing them with freeze spray and no change. I’ll try new RAM first. It’s isolated to the happy board for sure. Drive works fine without it.

Ah ok and the rom link above is the correct one? When I ram the diagnostics it had the lowercase “Pass”. So a TI TMS2764-20JL EPROM 8K x 8 200nS 28 Pin would work?

He all, I have an original rev c 1984 Happy with the 3 ram chips and although it works it’s hot or miss of the drive will spin up. If not I have to power down, wait a minute and power up again and there’s about a 30% chance it will spin up and init and then I’m good to go. After that a power cycle usually spins up again without issue unless it decides not to and then I’m back in the same boat. I’ve got replacement RAMs coming to try but if it’s not that, I suspect the only other thing it could be (I’ve tried another 6502) would be the ROM. I have no idea what type of ROM/EPROM I need in order to burn a new one. I do have a TL866 II Plus EEPROM Programmer that I assume would work for burning the ROM? But is the ROM dump for this version of the happy available for download? and if so what type of EPROM would I need? Total n00b with burning roms. It’s been 30 years since I burned one 😆

I just 3d printed a floppy disk cleaner, cleaned my bad and doomed floppy that had a bunch of programs I wrote as a kid and it revived it enough to where I was able to back it up to my SDrive-Max sd card! It’s bringing a bunch my old disks back. I’m amazed. Here’s a link of anyone wants to print one: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4964437

Ohhh right. Yes I meant the 1050 diagnostics disk. Track zero sensor. Right the alignment disks are impossible to find. So haven’t been able to properly check any of those signals noted in the service manual. I’ll try out the NOS DOS disk i have. Just realized I have one new in a box.

Right. I have maybe one or two original factory disks. I did try and original Archon disk and it got about half way and froze up. But no telling on its condition because tons of these old disks aren’t working. i see diag disks on eBay but a bit pricey.

That’s what I was afraid of. I now recall that I made it from an”working” drive I bought off eBay. It looked factory but no telling. The drives are reading many of my original disks from the old days. I do have a factory DOS disk I can try too.

Edited…

Pretty sure I’ve got them as good as they’re going to get now. Using the track zero alignment on then 1059 discs disk. As long as using a copy of that is ok. I mean once I got a drive to work I made a physical diags disk from from my virtual floppy drive.

Both drives are spot on at 288.

Yeah I’ve been working on this drive off and on for a couple months. Everything’s deoxited, cleaned, reflowed etc. after that and the track zero sensors replaced and cap kit I almost threw in the towel and thought the drive head was bad. Long before i finally pu the happy board back on it. I FINALLy got it to work by starting up a read and then unplugged the stepper motor cable and manually moved the head up and down until it started reading and then I knew I was good and it was just an alignment problem at this point. Same went for the other drive. So then I got them dialed in using the 1050 diags disk. And after all that I figured I’d see if the happy still works.

What jumpers? This is an original happy drive I bought back in 1983 or so. No jumpers on the board. Looks like it’s just a 6502, 3 RAM chips, and a ROM.

Yeah I don’t need it either these days. I just hate broken stuff. But I think I remember as a kid it acted like this when I was using it it all the time to support my piracy business 😂

Good to know. I was wondering when I was trying to fix them. Both needed track zero sensors and alignment. One also needed a cap kit job and had a bad U7 (RIOT).

Wow I visually inspected the disks but I didn’t think it could put that much “dirt” on the head that quick and cause it to fail but it seems like the only thing that could be happening. I’ll crack it back open next time and try cleaning the head after. I have another weird issue with a drive that I put my original Happy 1050 board in it and it will init properly on power up and zero the track head and spin up the motor as it should but then it will quit doing this intermittently and be dead. Then I wait a while and it’s back to life again. Similar situation l, I just have to wait and it comes back to life. I’m guessing that it might be a RAM issue on the Happy board but when it powers up ok and I run the diagnostics in a loop the RAM and ROM tests pass consistently and the drive will run for hours without issue. Then you power down and back up and there’s a 30% chance it will be “dead” again and then come back to life when it feels like it.

Hey all I’ve noticed this odd behavior with more than one 1059 drive and wondering what the issue is or how this could be happeneing. I recently repaired a couple drives and they can now read and wrote to “new” floppies without issue but when I pull some old disks out that I’ve had from the ‘80s l, some disks, of course are bad and won’t read or intermittently read. the weird thing is after I try a bad disk and then put a known new good disk it the drive struggles to read them too. It slowly recovers and then can read the hood disks. I problem. I power cycle the drive and it makes no difference I just have to keep trying to good disks and eventually it recovers back to normal again. I’ve seen this behavior on at least two drives I had maybe even the third drive I’ll have to try it again and see. how could this be happening? It’s like the drive had a memory even on power down. Could something be happening to the head itself? It doesn’t matter which “bad” disks I try. Any old disk that has read issues causes the problem.