ABUG Canada West - August 20th 2018 Meetup #3

[KarateEd]

Hi Folks,

Today Paul and I made some nice progress on a couple of machines. I will let Paul tell his story but I'll start with mine.

My objective today was to end up with a Music 5000 machine. It started with an ordinary Beeb B.

My first step was to take a GBS-8200 from a non (as yet) working machine and put it in my to be Music Beeb. I actually had to cut the econet circle out (how often does that happen these days) so I could put the RGB cable through it to the RGB connector on the back of the Beeb. All went well. When I powered up, after connecting monitor et al, it looked good..... then....... wonder of wonders, every key press failed to produce a result except BRK or CTL-BRK.

Nice...... so I was thinking that could be a couple things. Cable - tested ok with another known good cable. Keyboard, tested ok with another known keyboard. 6522, swapped the 6522 with the one near the 6502 and voila!!!! Success!

Put the Ample ROM in a ROM socket.

So now I have a working keyboard and hopefully sound system. I attached the disk drive and the Music 500(5000 working I think). Then I went and got my CD player and put the input from Music 500 to the line in...... started Ample - NO SOUND!!!!

Then I realized I would need another 6522 for the peripherals to work. I couldn't find them so I went to where Paul was creating SSDs from diskettes and reached for something he needed and there were my 6522s, right in front of my eyes the whole time just wrapped in the RetroClinic invoice, a disguise as it were. Very happy.....

Put the 6522 in the empty socket. Still no sound.

Great, now what. Simple steps, powered the Music 500 on ( I guess they need Voltage ) then noticed there is a line input button on the CD player. Voila!!! More success!!!!

Ok, so now we have the ability to play music from this machine......and it sounds great.

To hear a song from the sample songs, look here. https://youtu.be/Mp9butJB_uE

Here is a very simple song I created to demonstrate the input for the Music 500/5000 - https://youtu.be/tin-CHg7FEg

It was a fun day and this seems like not much done but I'm extremely happy and we had a great time sharing Beeb experiences and looking at different things that got nothing constructive done but built our tiny group into a cohesive entity. It's likely we'll be a very consistent group.

Ed......

[KarateEd]

Here are a couple of pictures from today.

Paul and I didn't take another selfie. We figured risking *. going down again wasn't wise so, sorry, no photos of the participants this time.

GBS-8200 from old machine to new (old) machine

The first task of the day for me was taking this from a non-working Beeb and moving it to my new Music machine Beeb.

New heat sink on ULA and AMPLE inserted after RAMFS taken out

So, I put a new heatsink on the Ferranti ULA and inserted the AMPLE ROM. I had to take out the DC RAMFS ROM for use on another machine.

6522 woes

The 6522 with the circle on it is the one I removed from beside the 6502. Once I did that, I was in business. The other 6522 is one Mark from RetroClinic sent me and it's working fine. I would recommend having a good stock of these chips around, they seem to fail frequently.

Interim setup

This was playing Cosmix at the time of the pic and the confguration of the setup was different than.......

Nearly final setup

which is how it is set up now.

Well, I have a lot of learning to do to figure out AMPLE and how to produce music with it. It will take some time but eventually I'll have some music to share with you, hope it isn't crap.

The last thing besides a lot of learning is to retrobright the beast and that will happen soon. The take apart of this machine is pretty easy.

Ed......

[richardtoohey]

Sounds good, Ed.

I got a Music 500 set-up from Mark some time ago and still haven't gotten around to setting it up.

[tricky]

Sounds like a good day, I'm always pleased (and often surprised) if more works at the end than in the beginning

[KarateEd]

Sounds good, Ed.

I got a Music 500 set-up from Mark some time ago and still haven't gotten around to setting it up.

Ah you should Richard. This will be my synth machine going forward. I love the retro sound. I have a Yamaha Tyros III and it has a great synth built in but it's not the same. It took a while to figure out how this system would be set up because you can't use the DataCentre with it. It interferes too much with memory so diskette drive is the key here...... and it works well and sounds great.

Ed......

[KarateEd]

Sounds like a good day, I'm always pleased (and often surprised) if more works at the end than in the beginning

It was a great day Richard. When it began I thought, oh boy, not even started and problems. I had tested this Beeb before and it had worked fine. Those pesky 6522s sure fail oddly at times but that's why I got a few from Mark.

Ed......

[klintworth]

KarateEd is correct - superb meet up yesterday! So good to get together with a fellow enthusiast who knows their Acorns!! And even better when we accomplish some useful tasks. I had two main goals: transfer old educational s/w from old disks to .ssd , and also to replace the battery on my newly acquired Castle A7000+.

1. KarateEd set up his Master with DataCentre, so it was quite simple to transfer the old s/w. A few times there was a Filling Buffer Disk Error - not sure how that happened. Once the Master was switched off and then rebooted the error would usually clear. There were only a few disks that wouldn't copy - Data Design's Castle Designer and Plane Designer by Dudley LEA. If I continue to have trouble with those I may have to mail them to FlaxCottage (John) for his attention! My plan is to upload the s/w on to the educational forum once I've organised it.

2. Next up was replacing the A7000+ battery. Here's the battery leakage when I received it.

After brushing off the crystals:

Yesterday I snipped off the old battery and cleaned up the area on the main board:

KarateEd then kindly donated me a Varta replacement which was soldered via long leads to place at the front of the case away from the mother board:

Then it was heart in mouth time to reassemble and switch on! Thankfully it booted back into a low resolution, which was then reconfigured. A power off, followed by a restart showed all was well and the battery was holding it's configuration. Hooray!!

As KarateEd says, this group is off to a good start. Now we just need to recruit more members from the Lower Mainland in BC! From little Acorns ........! And no, no selfies this time!!

[KarateEd]

Great write-up Paul.

One more thing to mention was that I was gifted a couple of very nice pieces from Paul for which I'm very grateful. Thanks Paul -

Ed......

Archive 1992 and VoltMace Joystick for the A3010.