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Another Action Computer Enterprise machine....

geneb

geneb

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 19, 2003
Messages
525
Location
Graham, WA USA
Yesterday I picked up a nice little S-100 machine for a project and I'm trying to learn more about it.

It appears to be an earlier version of a system billdeg posted about here: www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?14823-Action-Computer-Enterprise-Inc-Discovery-500

Photos of mine: http://www.geneb.org/s100/index.html

I've not powered it up myself yet, but the person I got it from has - he sent me a screen shot of the output from the "master" CPU serial and it identifies as

Action Computer Enterprise
Modular Boot Prom (vers-1.1)

The system has an 8" hard disk in it that appears to be operational, but the commands to boot the machine aren't known.

Before I take the step of pulling and disassembling the monitor ROM, does anyone (billdeg?) know what the boot commands are for the monitor?

If I can get this thing to boot from the hard disk, the first task will be to make a backup of the contents and make bootable 8" disks if I can.

The system enclosure is built by Morrow and it has one master CPU card that's ribbon-cabled to the next card in line (RAM?). It's got a Morrow hard disk controller, a Tarbell floppy controller and 6 (I think) slave CPU cards that I've been told present a menu of some kind if there's a terminal connected on power on. (I'll know exactly what it says tomorrow when I power it up.)

tnx!

g.
 
The following information was pulled from Micro Cornucopia Oct 1982, post some more pictures and the results of your tinkering after you pick it up.

WRAM Computer Corp.
P.O.Box 19281
Portland. OR 97219
(503)244-2168

Dealers for Morrow,
North Star, Godbout,
Tarbell. PMMI, A.C.E.,
TALLY, and 3M.
 
I've gotten it powered up, no horror noises out of the hard disk, but it doesn't boot from it either.

The main processor signs on with the text below (after I rush back to the terminal and bang on the spacebar a few times):


Action Computer Enterprise
Modular Boot Prom (vers-1.1)

--detected:
MORROW F => primary boot, O => secondary boot
TARBELL H => primary boot, Q => secondary boot
monitor I
--system IPL from: MORROW , or enter IPL override code -
--system IPL from: TARBELL , or enter IPL override code -
hit any key to remain in monitor

-

If I plug into one of the slave cards, I get:

Action Computer Enterprise
Modular Boot Prom (vers-1.1)
Proc id = C
--system IPL from: MORROW .

If I hit the space bar soon enough, I also get:
enter IPL override code:
F => MORROW
H => TARBELL

The backplane has 12 slots. Count Slot # 1 as being closest to the power supply, the configuration is:

Slot #1 - Empty
Slot #2 - Tarbell MD2022 Rev. G double density floppy controller. (found the manual for this)
Slot #3 - Empty
Slot #4 - #9 Slave CPU cards
Slot #10 - Master CPU card with a 50 pin ribbon cable bridging to the card in slot #9.
Slot #11 - Morrow HDCA-4A Winchester Controller

Here's a photo of one of the slave CPU cards: http://www.geneb.org/s100/slave-cpu.jpg - BIG image!
Here's a photo of the master card: http://www.geneb.org/s100/master-card.jpg - BIG image!
The master card doesn't seem to have it's own CPU or what I would consider to be a "typical" UART. The blue connector on the master (and the slave cards) go to chassis-mounted boards that contain 1488/1489 line drivers and female DB25 connectors.

On the slave card, next to the CPU is a part I haven't been able to identify. If the pin count was lower, I'd suspect a mask-programmed ROM, but I'm not sure.

The slave cards have 64K of RAM in 32 16K chips.
I carefully re-seated all the cards in the hard disk controller and noticed no difference. The hard disk is a Fujitsu B03B-4605-B004A and appears to have a translucent plastic cover over the platters. The manufacture date is 1982-3, so I'm assuming March, 1983.
The hard disk doesn't make any of the sounds I'm used to hard disks making - it does spin, but I hear no head movement

Should the next step be dumping the two ROMs on the master card? I haven't found any documents that relate to this system at ALL. :(

tnx!

g.
 
geneb said:
The hard disk is a Fujitsu B03B-4605-B004A and appears to have a translucent plastic cover over the platters.
Click to expand...

Fujitsu 8" SA1000 compatible. 10 or 20mb. Very common in Morrow systems.
Are the heads unlocked? There is a white plastic lever to do that. Manual on bitsavers for the drive and controller
 
Al Kossow said:
Fujitsu 8" SA1000 compatible. 10 or 20mb. Very common in Morrow systems.
Are the heads unlocked? There is a white plastic lever to do that. Manual on bitsavers for the drive and controller
Click to expand...

Yes, the drive is unlocked. It's got a sticky label on it that someone has labeled "locked" and "unlocked'. The little white lever is all the way over to the right, under the "unlocked' part of the label.

I'm concerned that unless original software could be found, I've got two disk controllers, a nice backplane and a pile of scrap boards. :(

g.
 
Have you tried powering on and letting the hard disk spin up, then holding the F key down on the keyboard and hitting Reset on the chassis? I'm just trying to decipher the meaning of the IPL codes that the Monitor talks about. Maybe the boot PROM checks for one of those characters from the keyboard at boot time to determine the device you want to boot from.
 
geneb said:
Yes, the drive is unlocked. It's got a sticky label on it that someone has labeled "locked" and "unlocked'. The little white lever is all the way over to the right, under the "unlocked' part of the label.

I'm concerned that unless original software could be found, I've got two disk controllers, a nice backplane and a pile of scrap boards. :(

g.
Click to expand...

Have you looked through all of Don Maslin's stuff?
Or, when the first machine showed up, Chuck mentioned he had a floppy.

The bipolar prom can be dumped with most older universal programmers. It's only 32x8.
You should certainly dump the 2732, I think this is the first S-100 systems I've seen that would auto-identify the slot configuration.

You should be able to get one of the Morrow CP/M distributions running on it. I think Tarbell was one of the supported ones.
 
Al Kossow said:
Have you looked through all of Don Maslin's stuff?
Or, when the first machine showed up, Chuck mentioned he had a floppy.

The bipolar prom can be dumped with most older universal programmers. It's only 32x8.
You should certainly dump the 2732, I think this is the first S-100 systems I've seen that would auto-identify the slot configuration.

You should be able to get one of the Morrow CP/M distributions running on it. I think Tarbell was one of the supported ones.
Click to expand...

I've gone through Don's stuff and didn't find anything that looked relevant to the system.

The boot ROM is here: http://www.geneb.org/s100/acerom.bin

Just doing "strings" on the contents tells me that this one ROM is accessed by all the CPU cards - it contains the "Proc id =" text that appears when you have a terminal connected to a slave cpu and hit the reset button.

I'll get this thing disassembled and try to find out what it's doing.

I'm hoping that little PROM is just there to ID the boards...

g.
 
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