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Pet 8296 no longer seeing drive

A

arnuphis

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Joined
Sep 1, 2020
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46
Hello everyone!

I have a nice pet 8296d. It was working fine with my SD2pet Future. Now it no longer sees the drive and reports a "file not found" error when I tried to load anything. a directory command just returns a blank as does a drive status command. I tried the device on another IEEE machine and it works fine. I also can save and load from cassette with no issues.

Where is a good place to start troubleshooting? Everything else works fine on the machine.

and no I don't have any regular pet disk drives. I wish I did!

Thanks in advance.
 
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One (or more) of the buffer ICs, or the PIA, has gone faulty in the PET IEEE 488 port. This is the most likely cause.

There is a short BASIC program you can type in and run to test the IEEE 488 port out. I will provide you a link to it once I have had breakfast...

There is a recent Commodore PET thread that I have posted on this very subject to.

Dave
 
Thanks for the prompt help. I typed in that program and assuming its all correct all 8 data bits failed with bad NDAC,DAV and ATN.
 
Err, that doesn't sound correct to me...

Can you post a picture of the failed screen please?

Dave
 
This will make you laugh. I had to take the dog to the vets so I put the Pet back in its usual place. Came back. Loaded up the test program from tape again and you see the results. Plugged in the SD2pet future all everything works! Power cycled and did it again and still all working. What the heck?

Then I noticed my cat was sleeping in the chair near the Pet and its clear she fixed it while I was gone haha.

Thanks again for all the help. If the fault returns I will let you know.
 

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I'm sure the dog didn't laugh though...

I like fixes like that. The usual IT response: have you turned it off and back on again sir!

Dave
 
robert_sissco said:
This is why you should never doubt the words of St. Trenneman

Click to expand...

This is because the programmers who did the micro-controller firmware got very lazy and decided not to bother deploying the watchdog timer.

So when a set of input conditions, that the programmer did not anticipate, feeds the uP, it gets it into an inescapable loop, it stays there.

Then the owner of the appliance wonders why, whatever the thing is, it wont respond to any commands. They either figure it out for themselves, turning the thing off and on at the power source, or call for help. Then the service technicians report, that 50% of the time, the "failed appliance" can be cured by switching it on and off at the wall outlet.

I had an induction cook top that did this. If you ran a cleaning cloth over the control panel, in one direction, it confused the micro and it locked up. The only way to fix it was to power cycle it at the breaker box. I got so sick of it, despite the fact it cost $1000 and was only a few months old, I took it out and threw the unit into the dumpster at work in disgust. I replaced it with a Gas cooktop and have never looked back. Induction cooking was a solution looking for a problem. You don't need badly programmed uP's and a truckload of unreliable electronics to cook great food. You need Gas.
 
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