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Victor 9k / Sirius 1 Software

Moonferret said:
Hi Gary,

Is the machine a dual drive unit? If so, does it attempt to boot from the 2nd drive. Was thinking of calling into the museum sometime next week while I'm off work. Can bring a good boot disk and my disk imaging setup (Greaseweazle v4 with a Panasonic JU-475-5). I may also have a spare Sirius floppy controller if needed.

Cheers,
Dave
Click to expand...
Its a single disk unit and was booting fine from disks made on my MF-504C which went missing. I suspected the disks themselves but it wont boot from newly written ones. So it may either be a problem with the machine, or the disks.
Trouble is, I'm neck deep in trying to resolve the museums Lisa so haven't got time to progress the Sirius and unfortunately wont be in for a couple of weeks now :(
 
No Probs. I'll drop off a set of disks anyway along with the spare disk controller which I know works. Hopefully that will help rule out a hardware problem with the machine and potentially fix it if there is a fault :)

Cheers,
Dave
 
That would be great, I will mention it to Joe.

Have you been before ? We are open 10 till 4 Wednesday to Sunday.
 
The Applesauce device does seem to be the one to use from your comments Paul

Shame they don't seem to be made anymore.
 
DiskBlitz is going to be making more AppleSauce units. He's in progress with upgrading the board that's the guts of the machine to a new version that's actually available. The fluxengine/greaseweazle solution is viable with other drives. I'm still hoping I can find a solution that will work for the Teac drives, as they're widely available.
 
westveld said:
If you do find combos and command lines that work well, I can put them up on the website.
It could use some more content, haha

Victor 9000

Victor 9000
victor9000.com
Click to expand...
Thanks @westveld I hadn't seen that yet, thanks for pulling that together. I had it in my backlog to create a site at some point. I'm glad you beat me to it.

In terms of booting the disk from serial, I'm working on a side project that will lead to that. I'm writing a device driver for the Victor that will allow it to read disks from hopefully either the parallel port or the serial port. But that's still a ways off from completion.
 
Hey all, getting back to the TEAC 55-GFR drive, with some suggestions from David G over at the Fluxengine GitHub repo, I figured out how to write a disk that works. The command:
fluxengine write victor9k --612 -d drive:1 -i 3.1working.img --no-verify --drive.high_density=0
Worked to create a bootable floppy. The --no-verify option tells fluxengine not to verify what it's writing and the --drive.high_density tells it to write a Double Density disk as opposed to a High Density one. Can you guys give this a shot and see if it works for you also?
 
Hi Paul,

thanks, I will give this a try tonight.

One question:

As the former command fluxengine write victor9k --612 -d drive:0 -i "MS-DOS MS-BASIC Ver 2.1.img" contained exclamation marks for the file name to be written and the new command above does not have any excl. marks, is this making a difference?

Sorry, maybe stupid, but as a mechanical engineer my script knowledge is very limited.

I have renamed the former file into 3.1working.img and had tried this without the GW at hand, the result is attached, so I am very curious.

Thanks,

Martin.
 

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Ok, so I wrote a disk on my GFR with density=0 (which I had tried before) and it still failed, but then with the no verify option.

Then running the fluxengine windows App in victor9k mode it read it back perfectly.

Just need some time with the machine now to see if I can get it to wake up.

I do so want to have this machine working again.
 
1302L said:
Hi Paul,

thanks, I will give this a try tonight.

One question:

As the former command fluxengine write victor9k --612 -d drive:0 -i "MS-DOS MS-BASIC Ver 2.1.img" contained exclamation marks for the file name to be written and the new command above does not have any excl. marks, is this making a difference?

Sorry, maybe stupid, but as a mechanical engineer my script knowledge is very limited.

I have renamed the former file into 3.1working.img and had tried this without the GW at hand, the result is attached, so I am very curious.

Thanks,

Martin.
Click to expand...
The quotes are needed when the file name has spaces in it. As Pauls last example was all one word 3.1working.img it didn't need the quotes.
 
Hi all, good news! :)

I managed to create a boot disk with the following command:

fluxengine write victor9k --612 -d drive:0 -i "MS-DOS MS-BASIC Ver 2.1.img" --no-verify --drive.high_density=0

I wrote a Sony MD2HD (!) Disk and my V9K booted! Even the internal HD seems to work.

As usual, the keyboard is completely not usable, so my next task is to get it repaired

Please see pics attached.

Happy greetings and many thanks for the help, initial work is done now.

Martin.
 

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Yes !!!!

Texelec are the people to get the foam pads for the keyboard from as as sure as eggs are eggs, they will be knackered.

texelec.com

105 "Foam and Foil" Capacitive Pads for KeyTronic & BTC Keyboard Repair - TexElec

This set of 105 count foam capacitive pads for repairing vintage KeyTronic and BTC keyboards with deteriorating foam pads. These are homemade in house and the 105 should cover what you need with a few extras for your convenience. These will work on keyboards for many different kinds of vintage...
texelec.com texelec.com
 
Hi Gary,

thanks for the Link!

Maybe you might have success with my command as well?

Best,

Martin.
 
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