sideburn
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Posts posted by sideburn
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2 hours ago, MrFish said:
I guess another thought would be to try it out in another 1050, if you have one.
[Not sure if someone else already suggested this; I haven't read the whole thread yet.]
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.
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2 hours ago, MrFish said:
Now that I think about it again, I'm pretty sure it was $125, not $150. Still expensive, at that time (and even now), compared with something like an Atarimax Happy.
[Edit]
It looks like Atarimax Happy upgrades are even cheaper than they used to be (or at least not any more than they were in 2012): Atarimax Happy 1050
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.
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28 minutes ago, MrFish said:
Yeah, I saw yours had a different RAM chip configuration -- but same board revision. That's why I posted a picture of my board: so you could see there was a difference.
I would think less chips less potential for issues. Maybe check/reflow the solder points.
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.
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On 3/4/2023 at 10:00 AM, MrFish said:
I bought a new/old stock Happy board from B & C back in 2012 (expensive... like $150). Installed it and it wasn't working (can't remember the symptoms now, though). Reseated the Toshiba chip (maybe cleaned the contacts with contacts cleaner too) and it worked fine after that. Maybe your symptoms are different than mine were though...
Thats a newer version with the single RAM Mine has 3 and I swapped them all out but no change.
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On 3/2/2023 at 9:25 AM, guus.assmann said:
This Eprom is usually a 2764. This is 8k
BR/
Guus
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. 😕
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39 minutes ago, ijor said:
That is pretty common in original Happy drives. I had more than one original Happy with this symptom.
And to be honest, I'm not sure why this happens, never investigated the issue. At the time I thought it could be that sometimes it "wakes up" at the wrong ROM bank. But now that we know the ROM well enough, it is ready to power up in either bank without problems. May be it only happens in older models with 6K ram chips, I'm not sure. It is certainly not an issue of old or corrupt rom.
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.
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I have stock 1050 chips. I can pull the happy off and make it stick and it works flawlessly.
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31 minutes ago, kheller2 said:
The issue at hand doesn't sound like it would be fixed with a new ROM... something intermittent feels like a failing component or heat related.
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.
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37 minutes ago, guus.assmann said:
This Eprom is usually a 2764. This is 8k
BR/
Guus
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?
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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 😆
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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
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13 hours ago, kheller2 said:
And having said that.. one should read through this:
Ahh yeah, Best Electronics of course may have one.
I tried out the bad disk / clean head trick and yep I think that’s the issue.
what about those 51/4” disk head cleaners? Wondering if those would be a bad idea on these single sided drives because the the felt piece rubbing on the cleaning pad.
Both drives boot up the NOS Dos disk perfectly but I re-copies the 1050 Diagnostics disk anyway now that they’re aligned as good as I could get.
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Just now, kheller2 said:
So, a few things...
1) Using Archon might not be the best idea .. copy protected disks might pose some issues. Someone else should speak about that.
2) "diag disks" do you mean 1050 Diagnostic Disk? That's great for running diags.. that isn't an alignment disk..
3) You need an alignment disk -- and there are ones made specifically for the Tandon mech. [Others might also work, hence using a factory supplied disk like DOS 2.0 might be our only bet right now)
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.
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9 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:
As getting a "real" alignment disk today is a bit of an impossibility, what I did to align my drives
was use a genuine commercial game disk, although not a perfect solution but I found after doing it
this way I could read all my game disks and my old personal disks too.
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.
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13 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:
Your diags disk needs to be made on a known good aligned drive, not from any you've fixed. If you made the disk on a non factory aligned drive or not using a factory alignment disk... you will create your own batch of drives that will only be aligned to each other and won't work with other disks or drives from anyone else including store bought commercial game/utility/business/whathaveyou disks.
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.
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5 minutes ago, kheller2 said:
"1059 discs disk" ?
Edited…
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10 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:
If your drives are not aligned they won't normally be booting reading or writing interchangeably with other disks from other known good drives. They may also have trouble with commercial factory games and software.
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.
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2 minutes ago, bandit said:
Jumpers on the 1050 board, only US doubler would have you check for ROM or EPROM and change jumpers if needed. Happy did not need.
ALWAYS Check drive speed first for errors 288 rpm
Both drives are spot on at 288.
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12 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:
All things described above are good advice, power down happy drive longer time before turning back on, clean connections are a must, sometimes a solder reflow helps as well. so get busy with deoxit cleaning of chip legs and sockets paying attention to orientation of EVERY component you clean, reseat, and reflow.
make sure everything is fully seated. Sometime they pop back out and BITD some upgrades came with very thin zip ties etc to hold board down by the sockets.
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.
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32 minutes ago, xrbrevin said:
does the happy mod require the jumpers to be orientated a certain way?
i know the USD does
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.
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2 hours ago, TGB1718 said:
I had exactly the same issue with a Happy 1050, nothing I tried fixed it and as I no longer use the "Happy" functionality
I put a US Doubler in and it runs perfectly, my guess is it's some code in the ROM, but didn't pursue it further.
I did remove the RAM and have a RAM tester and it checks out fine.
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 😂
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3 hours ago, xrbrevin said:
use high content isopropyl alcohol. the head is ceramic so you dont have to be too gentle if you find a stubborn bit 🙂
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).
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1 minute ago, kheller2 said:
It’s possible the old disks are losing their disk coating and it’s dirtying up the head. Clean the head after a bad disk and see if that helps. There are many threads here about this.
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.
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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.
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Happy 1050 ROM Dumps
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
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