Sick Sorcerer. Diagnosis, Doctor?

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_ncal.verio.com>
Date: Sun Jan 10 00:48:05 1999

On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Andrew Davie wrote:

> 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.

Oh cool. Is yours the Exidy branded dual-drive system, using full-height
5.25" drives? I have such a cabinet but no drives, and no internbal
circuitry save for an interface in the back. What I'd like to know is
what circuitry populates the front of the chassis where the LEDs used to
be (mine has labels for track read/write and I think track number LED
displays but the circuitry is gone).

> 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.

If the cart works then it sounds like you have bad BASIC ROMs.

> 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.

I have this cart too and the commands are printed on the label. I'll try
to a) find mine and b) transcribe the commands.

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

Nothing, check the ROMs.

Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Sun Jan 10 1999 - 00:48:05 GMT

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