Sick Sorcerer. Diagnosis, Doctor?

From: Andrew Davie <adavie_at_mad.scientist.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 18:10:31 1999

I'm hoping for some insight from the clever people on this list.

I am attempting to bring back up an Exidy Sorcerer disk system. I have a
hundred or so disks for this system, and have just realised that I probably
have everything I actually need for the disk system, too. Cleaning out the
garage, found a twin-floppy drive which I thought had been gutted. But on
internal inspection, it appears to only have had the cable removed.

First question: there are two drives, and each has a set of jumper pins.
The pins are labeled..

DS 0
1
2
3
MX
MS
H M
H C

The top drive, on which the red LED lights when I power the drive, has
jumpers across DS1 and HC. I am guessing that this drive is the second
drive, and that the two jumpers that fell out of the casing belong on the
second drive. That should be, I'm guessing, DS0 and mmmh... HM? Can
anybody enlighten me on this?

Second question: Powering the Sorcerer (I thought I didn't have a monitor,
but the VIDEO IN on my VCR works nicely - it shows up well on my TV) exibits
some strange behaviour. What's trying to come up on screen is "EXIDY
STANDARD MONITOR" and a few lines after that. But it simply stops after the
second or third character. Repeated efforts see it stop in different
places - sometimes you see the whole lot, and it's actually usable for a few
minutes - sometimes you only see a character or two. Out of 100 resets, I'd
say that it actually works on one (ie: 1%) and then only for a short while.

But the strange thing is that, very rarely, it misses a character. So,
something like "EXID STAN". Furthermore, it's quite obvious to me that the
text is being put on the screen in a serial manner (slow enough to see).
And finally, occasionally some of the text changes case (ie: eRROR -
COMMAND NOT FOUND). At first I suspected the RAM, but have carefully
reseated all chips that are socketed, with no effect.

I found a homebrew cartridge for this machine, and when its plugged in, the
wordprocessor it contains appears to work fine - everytime - with no
apparent problems. Sure, I don't know the commands, but it does let me
type, doesn't crash, and doesn't have any visible screen glitches as
described above. For this reason I lean towards giving the machine's RAM a
clean bill of health.

So, the question is, what's wrong with the monitor?

Third question: Assuming I actually get the machine powering up correctly,
and that the drive I have isn't missing some vital component - it will be
time to insert a disk. Can anybody tell me how to actually use a drive with
the Sorcerer system? I'm afraid it's going to be some arcane "GO C800" or
something like that, from the monitor. I think I might need someone with
documentation!

Any help appreciated.
A


--
adavie_at_mad.scientist.com
visit the Museum of Soviet Calculators at
http://www.comcen.com.au/~adavie/slide/calculator/soviet.html
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 18:10:31 GMT

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