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Concorde C-221M Disk Drive PSU?


BeaglzNZ

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Just wondering if anyone can confirm the correct PSU for the Concorde C-221M disk drive? All I can find so far is that it is SS/DD drive.

Pretty sure it is meant to be AC input but would be good to double check before pluggin in and turning on! There is no info on the case or PCB.

Thanks.

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Wow, that is rare. Hard to even find a decent picture of one. Would love it if you could post some good ones!

 

Sorry, no help with the PS. You might need to reverse engineer the power circuit a bit to figure it out. I'm sure a few good pics of the board would get you some educated guesses.

 

 

Nezgar, you beat me to it!

Edited by JR>
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Interesting device. Z8 CPU, standard WD controller, 1K RAM. no visible UART. Must be a bit-banger. Excellent candidate for an UltraSpeed ROM modification.

 

I'd like to see the same thing done for the ATR-8000. It should be possible to re-use most of the code from the Indus UltraSpeed hack.

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I agree the diodes, capacitors, and 5V / 12V regulators suggest a standard Atari 810/1050 9V AC power supply is the correct supply.

 

The 2732 (4Kbyte) EPROM is like the Indus GT, 1050. Coincidentally, ver 1.2 was the latest Indus GT ROM version, maybe it actually is a workalike? Could be interesting to try running some Indus GT software like syncromesh and see if they work with this drive.

 

Many operational secrets could be revealed if you have the means to dump that "Ver 1.2" EPROM.

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One issue that I see is that the SIO port is only supported by the soldered pins, similar to what was done on the XF551. Check the solder joints and continuity to the rest of the circuitry, and also fasten the SIO port to the PCB with machine screws or plastic rivets.

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There's so little info about this drive, will be easy enough to include everything in this thread.

 

The attachment is the ad they ran in Antic for several months.

 

Also, their product announcement mentioned a lineup of four drive models, as reported in Analog: https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-23/page/n13

post-12065-0-38084500-1545966486_thumb.jpg

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That's a bit forward don't ya think?

 

There's channels for that sort of thing :)

 

Never ever seen one of those drives in my life, not even a pic, wow, nice as well.....

 

Lucky fella...

 

And the old 12V regulator gives the game away ;) as already spotted..

 

That drive would make a mint on Ebay....Just saying!

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Also, their product announcement mentioned a lineup of four drive models, as reported in Analog: https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-23/page/n13

 

Interesting concept of master and slave drives. Probably the slave drives are just bare PC drive mechanisms without controller, and that's the reason of the edge connector at the back of the controller card on the master drive.

 

Now the ad claims fully Atari drive compatibility. I wonder if the mechanism rotates at 288 RPM. It seems just a standard PC 300 RPM disk drive. And doesn't seem the FDC is overclocked like the XF-551.

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DOS 2.0D ? But even that doesn't support double sided, claimed by the '222' drives. The IC's all have 1984 date stamps, so maybe DOS XL was an option by then.

 

Edit: saw this in a wiki page "Several Disk Drive manufacturers shipped DOS XL with their drives, including Trak, Percom, Astra, Indus, Amdek and Rana." : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_XL

 

I guess it's possible Concorde was on the same boat.

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Is the UART able to be clocked for different baud rates? I didn't see a Z80-CTC chip, so I assume the answer is no. :(

 

I don't know for sure if the UART is actually used for SIO. It is not an external UART where it wouldn't make much sense if it wasn't used. It's an UART integrated in the micro controller. It's up to the firmware to use it or not. It is even possible to switch by software and sometimes do use the UART, and other times perform bit bang.

 

The bitrate is of course programmable but can't say for sure if it's flexible enough. I'm too lazy to study the datasheet, which btw, it's not the best MCU documentation I've seen: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_zilogz8Z86_1444462

 

According to the above datasheet, two stop bits are always transmitted. Two stop bits is not fatal, Pokey doesn't care about how many stop bits you use, but it wouldn't be too efficient.

 

Note that the main crystal frequency is, or seems to be, 7.3728 MHz, which is an exact multiple of 19.2 KHz.

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The power circuit does look akin to the 1050

I wonder what year they were released? it has the later WD2797 controller IC and a very nice more, modern stepper motor.

It would be nice if you could mod it like the Indus/LDW/California Access drives to have the sram-charger :)

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