With a semi-operational keyboard, it was now possible to issue a boot command.
I had already imaged the disks that came with the machines. This was two or three years earlier when Michael have first acquired the machines.
I put the disk images on to a Gotek running FlashFloppy. At first there were just errors, but it was good that the machine was even trying to read the emulated disks. The select lights were coming on as expected.
Often it looked like the machine had thought that the code had been loaded and had attempted to run it (the ROM was being switched off) but the screen was full of garbage. I thought it could be a RAM problem.
I was able to initialise a disk using the monitor “v” command. When I read it back with a greaseweazle and looked at the image in the HxC software, it did seem like the initialisation had worked.
I left the gotek attached, and while I was messing with the keyboard mappings I was surprised to find that it had booted. This only happens with the first image which is the 64k version of the system. Ok, i thought, i’ll run with that for now!
The three DIR entries above were with different scan codes.
I was dismayed to find that the mappings did not seem to work, but in many cases changing to alternative scan codes fixed the problems.
One of the disks does suggest that there was a “new keyboard”. The ROM would allow for different mappings for different keyboards, perhaps.
Still, only one disk image booted. When I looked at the images with the HxC software they seemed to have the wrong number of tracks. I did these images a couple of years ago using one of the drives in this machine, but it didn’t seem entirely reliable then. Since then, I have acquired several of the same 77 track 100TPI drives (although this machine seems to push that to 80).
I re-imaged several disks using the single Micropolis drive unit from the Exidy Sorcerer, and this returned much better results with the gotek.
A couple of the system disks complained that the “floppy disk gate was not closed”. I thought this must have been a door closed signal that’s being expected. What it was trying to say is that the controller expects Ready on pin 6 because that is where it is on Micropolis drives. On a gotek it is on pin 34 and pin 6 is unused. I added a wire on the controller to connect pin 34 to pin 6.