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It's Alive!


sparkdrummer

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Thanks to an unbelievable effort by Marc Hull My Myarc MPES/50 is a fully functional unit.

 

I purchased this thing years ago from Ebay and it has never worked. I checked some stuff periodically through the years but with my meager skills never had any success getting it working.

 

Shipped to Marc and he fixed it. Marc felt that it probably suffered a lightning strike or some similar bad event. From what he told me it would be easier to state what chips were okay than which ones were toast. The PAL chips weren't hurt, Thank goodness.

 

This gizmo is kinda weird, It will only format a disk to 1280 sectors (DS/DD). This was TI's "standard" as I understand it and I guess at the time Myarc followed suit.

 

Thanks again Marc!!!!!

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My boys have one of these attached to their play machine. Normally they attach directly to the console, but the one my boys are using was modified at some time before I got it to add a four foot flex cable between the two. That cable is a bit unstable, so I will probably remove it now that I have found a good source of the proper 44-pin connectors. I have another one that wasn't modified, so I can verify that there are at least three of these in the wild when counting the one that started this thread (and I provided Marc some ID data on some of the chips that were unidentifiable in that one too). I'm really glad he was able to get it working!

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attachicon.gifDSC00456.JPG

 

Thanks to an unbelievable effort by Marc Hull My Myarc MPES/50 is a fully functional unit.

 

I purchased this thing years ago from Ebay and it has never worked. I checked some stuff periodically through the years but with my meager skills never had any success getting it working.

 

Shipped to Marc and he fixed it. Marc felt that it probably suffered a lightning strike or some similar bad event. From what he told me it would be easier to state what chips were okay than which ones were toast. The PAL chips weren't hurt, Thank goodness.

 

This gizmo is kinda weird, It will only format a disk to 1280 sectors (DS/DD). This was TI's "standard" as I understand it and I guess at the time Myarc followed suit.

 

Thanks again Marc!!!!!

Yeh, I felt the same way when I got one of my HFDC's functional the night before last. Bring it on.

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Thanks for the help to Marc, Ksarul!

Another funky thing - I did a dsrscan of this thing and all that shows is the rs232. No floppy controller at 1100 as expected.

 

I don't think the floppy resides at $1100 on the MPES although I'm not positive. MM could not find anything @ $1100. In fact I couldn't latch the CRU bits there. I think everything resides at the RS232 address. Kind of a combined I-O address.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was messing around while testing a new XB 2.7 Suite cartridge this weekend and on a lark, loaded a few programs that I hadn't tested much before. It was either the CorComp Diagnostic or Fred Kaal's DM2000, but one of those had an option to scan the DSR's for a list of active device names at each of the CRU addresses present. A whole slew of devices shows up at the proper address for the RS-232, so our conjecture that this thing used a master DSR is definitely confirmed. . .

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.

Fred´s DU2K (Disk-Utility2000) has this feature, I used it on all cards and hardware I have,

to read out (& document) the DSR´s / CALLs (in a list :) )

 

a really great tool, download the latest version here: http://www.ti99-geek.nl/

 

 

 

E/A-5-Start:

 

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Press 1:

 

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Press 3:

 

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Example:

 

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I have found that some disk usage software will not work properly with it or not at all. Rapid copy, Advanced diagnostics and even Myarcs own DMIII. The corcomp diagnostics will test memory but it finds no disk system when asked. Pretty screwy huh? It's still a pretty neat system though.

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Assuming that tools like Diag or RapidCopy are programmed very "close" to DSRs,

this sounds somehow "normal", especially regarding the DSR´s thing (better: the Not-DSRs) :)

 

Can you check the DSRs with the DU2K-Util from Fred ? Maybe this is somehow interesting.....

(but I think this won´t show up more, but who knows....)

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I know that "it's alive!" feeling, This New Year's eve as I was setting on the couch testing my Geneve, that still has the swan on the screen(eprom .98, I believe)15 minutes before the new year. I found that back in the 90's, sometime before I packed it away, that one of the dram chips had been plugged in with two legs touching and so when I found that and took it into my computer room, I found a living breathing machine, ready to be used and upgraded. Yep, a wonderful feeling.

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Speaking of Gennys, I've got to find the time to hook one of mine up again. They both had made the trip to Cecure Electronics back in the day (probably worked on by Tim) and some mods were made but I don't remember what. I'll have to dig them out of their boxes and check em out. I remember they have a sticker on the outside clamshell stating what was done.

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