I wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a very good new year.
I hope that everyone will have a nice new year with lot of Commodore fun, in good health.
I’ll be unpacking a lot of great presents this year 😊
My plans for this year will be a lot of Commodore repairing and projects.
Over a year ago I bought a strange Dual floppy drive.
The drive is called Micropower 2000 and was build by “Analog Digital”.
On the internet I couldn’t find a lot info, I only found some info on the website of Richard Lagendijk <Here> .
He also had a hard time getting more info on the drive.
The difference between our drives are the markings on the front of the drive.
First I thought it could be a prototype of the MSD SD2 As the drives have a lot in common.
To test I programmed 2 eprom’s with the firmware of the MSD and placed them in the drive, and it still functioned.
To get some more info about the drive I created a thread on forum64 <Here> to see if someone else had more info about the drive, but till today there is no reply.
One thing I know now is that the drive can’t be a prototype as the MSD SD2 was introduced in 1983 and my Micropower 2000 is produced in 1984.
So I think it’s a clone.
On use the drive is responding and loading most floppies, but has some issues while formatting and loading of long files.
As the Micropower 2000 uses the same drive units I searched the web and ended on the page of Ray Carlsen <Here> and found that the drive units have capacitors that will leak over time.
After disassembling the drive I could clearly see some corrosion on both drive units.
I ordered a new set of capacitors to replace them, and will start replacing them soon.
Other things that needs to be done is:
I’m saving to buy a new digital oscilloscoop, so I decided to sell so stuff that I don’t use anymore.
So last weekend I put my Blizzard 1220/4 and 2 old (to big for my desk) oscilloscopes for sale.
The Blizzard was one of two cards that came with my A1200, and I never use it as the other card is a GVP 68030 at 40 MHz and contains 16 Mb fast memory.
So if you are interested in a 68020 running at 28MHz and 4Mb fast memory expansion card for the A1200 go to Amibay. SOLD
I created a small guide on how to flash a Gotek drive Without the use of a USB to RS232 converter.
You can find it here
last week I received 2 prototype boards called “64 Tuning Board”.
This is a design of Matthias that he showed on Forum64.de.
This board is designed to use an Arduino or teensy and has several other “expansions” like the option to use sram over dram which does not show the VSP bug.
I wish everybody a good and healthy 2020.
I hope you may all spend a lot of time with your retro computer (and your family of course).
The Commodore Club of the Netherlands published an impression of the last meeting.
Next meeting will be on December 21th in Maarssen (near Utrecht)
Last couple of months I’m very busy with all kinds of little projects.
I’m looking through my stuff, collected over the last 20 years, My son is getting older and needs more space so I need to move my computers and other equipment to another room.
I also received a broken ZX81 (dead ULA and broken keyboard membrane), I already got another main board to check if it has a working ULA.
Another thing I received is a broken 1551, I think the TIA (6525) in the drive is broken, as this chip is rare, I need to find another way to replace it (CPLD ?).
I created about 15 pieces of the JoySwap to be sold, but currently I’m still writing a little installation manual.
I ordered some PI1541 boards and currently I’m waiting for the parts, the PI1541 looks very promising.
Last week I finished my Vic 20 Diagnostic kit.
The cartridge can also be used to expand the memory with a total of 35Kb.
I made this cartridge on request of a fellow club member.
More about this Diagnostic kit kan be found here.
The move of the website is now finished.
Everything should now work like it used to be.
Additional I added an event list at the right side.
Please contact me for any issues or items to publish on the event list