Resurrecting my old Percom 6809 system.

[james spears]

Greeting all,

I have decided to resurrect my Percom 6809 system (just because)

the system contains:

* Percom SBC/09 processor card
* Percom Electric Window video card
* Percom LFD-400 floppy controller with a single drive
* Boaz 64k dram card (48k populated)

The processor card and memory appear to be fine, the video card is not syncing with the monitor (using serial for the time being)

The big issue (not surprised) is the drive controller, drive or boot disks are no longer good, does anyone out there have a Percom MPX/9 boot disk and the ability to make a copy of it? I can send a blank disk if needed.

Plan B would be to put Flex on the system and use that instead. if it will work with the LDF-400.

Thanks,
--James.

[james spears]

I thought I'd share some good news/bad news.

My disc controller and disc's are healthy (well some crc errors :-) but the memory card is history. I have been able to get mpx/9 and some of the tools running in emulation and I am capturing the rest of the data from disk.

I have about 64k worth of TMM6264's laying around and was thinking of building a 48k sram card with them (since I apparently need one :-)
--James.

[james spears]

While searching for other things I'd like to have, like a MP-T card. I came across Bob Anderson's pages at http://www.corshamtech.com, He is in the early stages of cloning the SWTPC 6800 system. He was planning on doing a memory card. after talking with him, he moved it up in the to-do list and let me beta test it.

The prototype memory card arrived Monday it is a full 64k of static ram that can be mapped out in 4k chunks. I configured it for the lower 48k of memory and, put it in the system last night and did a quick check using the monitor to write and read memory everything looked good. I then booted MPX/9 for the first time on real hardware in about 25-30 years. I reconfigured the card for only 32k and repeated the experiment, everything worked fine. in both cases I verified that the OS loaded at the top of available memory as it should.

The system appears fairly healthy, I have some issues with the serial connection to the host, the LIST command only outputs one character at a time waiting for a key press from the user, probably the polling for cancel is not playing nice with the terminal software on the host. I also tried to load BASIC and Forth from floppy with out success. I'll have to investigate those issues.

All and all I'm a happy camper at the moment

--James.

[james spears]

I have had Bob Applegate's 64k RAM card for a week now, and run memory tests repeatedly with no problems. I have tested everything $0-$BFFF,and $Dxxx everything else has dedicated devices. I am quite happy with the card. It is great to have my vintage (well mostly now) SWTPC/PERCOM system up and running.

--James.

[james spears]

More Progress on my old SWTPC & PerCom system. I found a copy of PerCom's Super Basic and it loaded just fine. Debugging the copy of FIG-Forth I determined that the patches made to make it work with the PerCom Electric Window and a parallel keyboard interface, so of course it would not work with the standard ACIA on the SBC/9 (what can I say it was 30 years ago and I did not know any better ;-j So I'll look at revising the keyboard interface code to work with the ACIA and see how that works out.

--James
"Computer... Computer... Aye. Hello computer."
"Just use the keyboard."
"Keyboard. How quaint."

[james spears]

The revised patches for console input/output are in-place and working :-)

Now it appears the the Forth block read/write to disk are having some issues.

--James.