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ADC Super Six software

E

Endersending

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2023
Messages
172
Location
Walker, Minnesota
Hello everyone.
I have recently purchased a S-100 chassis with an ADC Super Six and WDC-01 disk controller with a IBM WD12 hard disk. I cannot get the monitor (version 3.5) to show up in a terminal. I have tried a few different baud settings. Once in a while I get a goofy character on the screen on power up. Probing with a scope on the serial connector shows no sign of life and same with the Tx pin on the Z80 DART. Most output pins on the DART are silent. probing the Data lines on the Dart show signals on the line, although the wave forms look distorted.
The clock signal looks fine. I am seeing 5 volts on all the chips I have checked. I have a Jade bus probe and that is showing activity on the Address and data lines. The Board acts like it is working, but everything on the output side of the DART seems dead.
Either the DART chip is bad or the Data lines are connected to a bad chip somewhere on the board. Looking at the schematics, there are many chips connected to the data lines. I have a few ideas for tackling this problem:
1) remove all chips, spray connections with deoxit. Stick the chips back in and see if that changes anything.
2) remove all the chips and add the bare minimum to the the Z80 and EPROM working, while monitoring the signals and see at what point the signals start getting distorted. Then I would know the chip I just added could be bad.
3) start pulling chips and hopefully pull the right (bad) one.
4) order a new DART and hope that is the problem.

Maybe someone else has a better suggestion to the problem. The board has a lot of chips and looks overwhelming to figure out where the problem is. Maybe someone knows which chips have a tendency to go bad.
I am also looking for software for the Super Six (super bios?). CPM 2.2 is what I think they were running. The WD12 disk drive works and I was able to create and image using a mfm emulator/reader. I think I need to boot off floppy first, and then the disk drive. I have found 1 image for the super six (8" floppy) but appears to have a bad sector and a forum post about the disk not being usable.
Any suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Endersending said:
probing the Data lines on the Dart show signals on the line, although the wave forms look distorted.
Click to expand...
Did you check the control lines CE, IORQ, RD? Datasheet shows the signal states for read/write to the chip. If they aren't correct you can trace them back through the logic.

1) Is a popular option that does sometimes fix old boards. Watch out for bending pins removing and installing. Works a lot worse if they don't all go back in the socket.

Goofy character on power up is common and normally just do to circuitry transient behavior on power up.
 
I think that the Serial port on the ADC Super Six required a daughter board to convert ttl level signals to rs232 level, just like the Super Quad. Do you have this daughter board?



superquad.JPG
 
Last night I worked on this board. I could see signals on the CE and IORQ lines. RD signal was there but very ugly looking. I swapped out a buffer that was on the RD line. pulling it made the signal look better but swapping with a different buffer made no difference. I also tested all of the 4164 ram. It is Mitsubishi brand ceramic with a gold top. All 18 chips tested bad! Now I don't know if they are a too slow and the tested fails them and seems really odd they would all be bad. I had some plastic cased 4164 that I tested (all good) and stuck them in the board. No change in serial console output. This makes me think that the board is not booting to a point of even accessing the ram.
I ordered a Z80B CPU to swap out and also a Z80 DART chip. I am also going to go through the board and test each logic chip that I can with a chip tester. Right now it's the brute force way since I can't figure anything else out.
Thank you for all the help and I will post more info if anything changes.
 
I received the new DART chip today and saw an improvement on the serial line. When I plug the serial LED box on the line the TX and DSR lights light up, but look dim. As soon as I connect a terminal to it the TX light goes off. I have tried swapping the buffer chips on the daughter board and I am noticing some weirdness in the way they act. I think the MC1488 and MC1489's are bad. I ordered some new ones so I will have to wait another week.
Hooking a scope to pin 6 (TXDA) of J5 on the ADC I can see a short burst of pulses on the line which was not there with the old DART.
Two steps forward, one step back. I will post more when the new chips arrive.
 
When I got my ADC S6 it refused to bring up the monitor until it warmed up awhile. It turned out to be a leaky C10 in the reset circuit. I circled the new replacement in my photo.

C10 close.JPG
 
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I have a few questions and since you have a board maybe you can help me.

C6 showed short. I clipped 1 lead and still shows a short on the board.
Otherwise I think the board is running. I can see a clock pulse and the serial output (TTL) looks like it restarts when I press the reset button. C6 is part of the floppy controller so that is going to be another hurdle after I get the monitor to work.
 
I get about 600 ohms across C6 in-circuit. Since it's close to the regulator I would think it's on a power rail. I had a shorted transistor on one of the serial (ADC called them paddle) boards.
All the power rails go to the paddle board. I would chase down your short reading. I could not find C6 in the schematic.

Larry G
 
Endersending said:
I received the new DART chip today and saw an improvement on the serial line. When I plug the serial LED box on the line the TX and DSR lights light up, but look dim. As soon as I connect a terminal to it the TX light goes off. I have tried swapping the buffer chips on the daughter board and I am noticing some weirdness in the way they act. I think the MC1488 and MC1489's are bad. I ordered some new ones so I will have to wait another week.
Hooking a scope to pin 6 (TXDA) of J5 on the ADC I can see a short burst of pulses on the line which was not there with the old DART.
Two steps forward, one step back. I will post more when the new chips arrive.
Click to expand...
I have a Super Six, and quite a while ago I got it working with CP/M 2.2. The exact details escape me, but I think that I used one of the S-100 computer group's IDE/CF cards for "disk" and a separate 64k static memory card. As I remember, I had a lot of trouble with the on-board memory and figured out a way to disable it with OUT ops. from the monitor I used (a re-work of the old SDSystems monitor). You mention a DART. Maybe it would be worth trying the CMOS version of the SIO/0? I think they are pin-for-pin compatible? They seem to handle higher clocks better.
Also, the TO-3 regulator on my board gets very, very hot. I got a very small fan that I fasten on top of the regulator, and that kept the temperatures much lower.
I can dig out my board and try to start it up again if that would help?

Roger

P.S. Mine looks very different than the photo above (from ADC advertising?).
 
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As of right now I am finding that all of the bypass caps are shorted. I clipped a few and wasn't getting anywhere. I think I have to pull all of the chips and if the short is still present, then I will clip/replace capacitors. The short is around 67 ohms so I guess just enough the board can still function.
 
Well the ADC Super six is running. After replacing the IC's on the daughter board and then realizing the fuse for the +16v rail was blown, I am getting output from the serial port.
adc_monitor_1.pngadc_monitor.pngadc_dir.png

Now I have more questions.
Reading from the manual, a standard install is 60K. Why not 64K? why does it let you go up to 63k in the config (but not 64k)?
The Super Six has 128K of ram. How do I use it all? I booted CP/M 2.2. Do I need CPM 3.0 to use the ram? can I use it as extended or do I bank select with multiple users?
should I be using Turbo Dos? I also have a WDC-100 disk controller and a IBM WB12 disk drive. I am not sure which OS is on it.
Any tip or guidance is appreciated.
I'm just not sure which direction to go from here.
Thanks for all the help!
 
Congratulations for getting it up and running, it's great to follow your success story!

Whether you are going to use CP/M 2.2 or CP/M 3.0 or TurboDOS, in order to use the 128K of memory, bank switching needs to be enabled in the operating system. The Z80 can only address 64K of RAM at a time, in order for bank 0 to communicate with bank 1, there needs to be some "window" of memory that is shared between them. I am guessing that ADC configured 1K at the top of RAM to be shared between banks, and thus the reason why 63K is the highest config you can select.

I'm not familiar with the WDC-100 disk controller, but I would like to see a picture of it. If there is an operating system on it, I think that the direction I would go would be to image the drive with David Gesswein's MFM Emulator and see if the data can be decoded, then drop the config from the HDD onto a floppy and put the system back to how it was when it was shelved.
 
Its a ADC HDC 1001 Controller and IBM WD12 Disk Drive. I have already Imaged the disk with Dave's MFM Emulator but I don't know how to mount/access the information on it.
hdc1001.pngwd12.pnghdc1001_1.png
 
Endersending said:
I have already Imaged the disk with Dave's MFM Emulator but I don't know how to mount/access the information on it.
Click to expand...
There are two steps to this. First you need to create an extracted data file which is a sector image of the disk. If you didn't create that when you read the disk you can use mfm_util to do that. If --analyze can't identify the disk format send me a transitions file and I can take a look.

If you have an extracted data file and want to get the files from it you need to use a tool that knows how to decode the filesystem. I don't provide that type of tool. If your not sure of what OS it is you can use Linux strings command to look at the strings in the file and see if anything says what the OS is. Can also use a hex editor that shows the text also.

If its CP/M cpmtools http://www.moria.de/~michael/cpmtools/ is the tool I know for extracting files. You have to create a disk format table in the config file. I've played with it a little but not good at configuring it. There should be more experienced people on this forum who can provide help.
 
This disk image might not have what I need. Using hexdump and looking at the sector data I am seeing things like "IBM Personal Computer DOS Version 3.2".
someone may have put the disk in a PC and formatted it, and then eventually stuck it with the S-100 unit that I have acquired.
I just hooked the disk up to an IBM 5160 and it detected it but did not boot, which I can understand since it wasn't formatted with that MFM card.
 
I guess you can go any direction with CPM 2.2 3.0 or TurboDOS since you're starting from scratch. TurboDOS is my favorite.
 
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