Fixing a dead Amstrad PCW9512+, Part 2

In my previous post I yanked enough of the PCW9512+ apart and debugged why the power supply just plainly wasn't working.

Now it's time to see if the rest of the board was working.

The first thing to do is test the power supply without having the 9512+ logic board (and the CRT side) powered up. The switch mode supply may not be happy with a load, so an initial failure isn't necessarily fatal.

So it mostly looked like this whilst I was testing it - with that EHT anode cap moved out of the way (just in case - it shouldn't have been powered!)

And honestly? The power supply just worked fine. The caps I tested were fine. All the rails tested fine. I'd have to test them under load to calibrate them, but before doing that I should verify that the 9512+ board and CRT hardware works fine.

So after a bunch of cleaning up, it was ready to put aside and test the mainboard. Testing the mainboard only required 5v - 12v is required for the earlier 3" drives but this drive doesn't require it, and the 28v rail is only used for the 9512+ daisywheel printer. I needed neither, so I just hooked up the 5v rail for testing.

.. and again, the mainboard tested fine. Here it is with the disassembled floppy drive for testing.

The board initialised and showed video/sync on the output side. Ok, great. It needed 800mA at 5v to power up, and it would peak above 1A to load from floppy disk. So pay attention to your power supply!

Next up the floppy drive. It had something in it.

I don't know how or why a sunglasses lens showed up in here, but ... well now I am its proud owner. So I removed that and plugged it all back in.

The motherboard and drive worked enough to fail booting a non-boot disk - and beeped loudly whilst doing so. That tells me the hardware is starting up fine and running the boot ROM code, but it's not reading from the drive.

And well, the drive was dead. The floppy drive rubber band was toast.

.. I could figure out the belt width (~2mm) and thickness but I couldn't figure out the size. The drive is a Citizen UODC-45A and I couldn't find any service manual / documentation on this drive at all.

But luckily someone had! And the belt he ordered from DataServe Retro is for a cassette deck - flat, 71mm diameter, 2.8mm wide, 0.6mm thick! And to make life easier, here's the link to the belt in question.

 

I recommend watching the video to get an idea of how to get the belt correctly around the capstan to line up the belt between the small motor and the large drive shaft. It's quite a squeeze.

First up was cleaning up the old bits.

First, the motor spindle.

Finding all the fun bits of the belt stuck in the drive - I had to shake it multiple times to get it all out.

And here's some on the drive spindle itself. In fact, after doing all of this I found more stuck UNDER the spindle which kept the drive from reliably spinning at the right RPM, resulting in loads failing! (Phew, I wasn't looking forward to having to calibrate it.)

In any case, once I had assembled the unit and stuck in a disk, it made the right kinds of seeking noises and .. well, I guess it had booted.

And .. well, it started booting fine. But the keyboard didn't work, and the display was way too bright and over-sized. Let's tackle the keyboard... oh it's just cracked solder joints. Easy.

And now the picture!

Now the important part - this is now under load, so I need to double and triple check the power supply calibration. If it's getting > 12v then this'll happen. So before you go and try re-calibrate your monitor, check the power rails.

And yup - it was dumping 14.5v into the monitor B+ rail. Things look MUCH better after calibrating this back to 12v.

No obvious calibration needed!

And finally, running a basic RAM test.

So, it boots fine, RAM tests fine, copies disks fine. I haven't yet dumped CP/M software on here to use - I think I'll make up a disk full of CP/M games.

The next post will cover MAKING a 720k CP/M boot disk for this thing - more of a pain in the rear than I'd like, even with a suitable MS-DOS 80386 IBM PC clone available.

fixing a dead Amstrad PCW9512+

I'm on a bit of a "i wish I had a PCW as a kid" kick. So yeah, I have a working out of the box PCW8256 that has been upgraded to a PCW8512 (but with only one floppy drive for now. Stay tuned.) I got lucky; that one was in the US and didn't need any modification to work here. (And, amusingly, although it's setup for US power - and shipped with locAscript instead of locOscript, it's still configured for 50Hz UK and 256 line display!)

But yes, finding PCW's in the US - well, any Amstrad really - is super difficult. So when I saw a PCW9512+ for sale by someone in Florida, I jumped at it.

... unfortunately although the seller was listed in Florida, it came from Cairo! So would it survive the trip? who knows. It was sold as "didn't power on", the internal photos didn't show any evidence that the tube was cracked, so .. maybe I'd get lucky.

Coming from Cairo meant that it would be wired for 240v power, and indeed it was. So, up on the bench it went. And yes, it was very dead. So, I pulled out the boards and started testing the switch mode power supply.

First - start by discharging all the AC side capacitors and EHT side capacitors - and the tube, just in case! - and then start checking components from the AC line input all the way to the big switching coil. If you're lucky, it'll be something stupid like the fuse. If you're unlucky, the coil is open or the switching transistor is dead. (Or in the case of the PCW, a big honking integrated switchmode controller hybrid IC which is unobtanium in 2024.)

Here's what I started on:

This covers the AC input, EMI filtering, switching and AC -> DC rectification. The output of that rectification from 240v AC RMS is around 330v DC peak. So be careful, that stuff will definitely kill you dead!

Basic continuity tests of each of those components in circuit didn't show anything obviously wrong. But since there's a rectifier there, it's not always obvious that something's bad. So it's best to lift the parts out to test. So I did that, and .. oh look. R5001 is very, very dead.

I spoke with Jaz (https://mstdn.social/@coregaze) about it a bit to figure out why it's there. They pointed out it's very likely a damper resistor to stop any ringing that may happen between the filter coil on the left side, the capacitors in the circuit around it and the diodes switching on and off. It likely would get hot in normal use, so the fun question was - did it die because the whole unit was just running for too long in a hot room, or is something else dead / shorted and the power supply was being over-taxed?

In any case I wanted to test the rest of the power supply with that fixed, but I didn't (yet) want to light up the monitor circuitry. If there's a problem with the monitor circuitry - eg a shorted power transistor or hybrid IC - I didn't want to risk further power supply damage. So, back to the circuit diagram I go to see how the monitor side is powered up.

On the power supply side, there is a separate 12v DC supply to the monitor, called B+:

And on the monitor side, there's a few places it branches off of that B+ net:

Ok, so off to the layout diagram!

Now, see the track there with W2? That goes off to the horizontal deflection circuitry and flyback input to feed the tube EHT.  The rest of that W2 track/net is all of the other monitor circuitry. So how's it hook up into the Q5003/VR5002/C5026 net? The actual 12v monitor B+ line?

The answer - a solder blob! Here's how it looks after I was Very Intentional about cleaning around it after desoldering it.

So, with that blob removed, the 12v B+ output from the power supply doesn't feed the B+ input into the monitor, so none of the CRT related hardware is energised!

Well then! Off to test the rest of the power supply circuitry I go!

(Stay tuned for part 2.) 

On "repairing this commodore 1551 drive" and "don't plug in the head cable backwards"

I bought a "dead" 1551 drive a few months ago. It's a european model, only 220v, and they said "it smoked when it was on". Well, i figured it was dead but I figured maybe not dead dead.

So, step one was removing the .. huge ass transformer.

I stripped off the regulators and hooked it up to a pair of bench supplies to feed 5v and 12v with a current limit.

(And yes, by this stage I had done a bunch of debugging already, so i had taken out the ROM, PLA and RAM and socketed the PLA / RAM.)

I unplugged the drive head cable and measured it - the heads measured just fine. So, I left them off whilst I debugged everything else.

Then I fired it up - the drive spun, a bunch of CPU pins were blinking on the oscilloscope, but nothing quite worked. The drive constantly spinning is a sign that even the early boot code isn't running.

So I then wanted to know if the CPU worked. The problem? All the pins kinda looked fine. Except A15.

It looked very sus. Like ok, NMOS has some fun rise times, but the other pins weren't this fun.

I decided to socket everything so I could pull the RAM and address decode gate array out. I thought about the 42 pin drive gate array IC but I figured if that was fried I was in for an unfun time.

The next thing was to figure out how to test that the CPU kinda worked. I figured I could write a little program to toggle the activity LED quickly and see it on my scope. I started with the disassembly here - http://www.cbmhardware.de/show.php?r=7&id=21 - to see how the LED is blinked. The 6510T CPU has an 8 bit IO port (versus the 6 bit IO port on the 6510 CPU).

The program looked roughly like this:

.org $ff00
SEI ; disable interrupts
CLD ; clear flags
LDA #$6F ; IO direction bits
STA $00 ; program IO direction bits
loop:
LDA #$60 ; turn on LED
STA $01 ; program IO port
LDA #$68 ; turn off LED
STA $01 ; program IO port
JMP loop

.org $fffa
.byte $00, $ff, $00, $ff, $00, $ff

This didn't work. So, I got a new CPU. A15 on that CPU was much better.

Then this did work. The LED was blinking at a few hundred kilohertz. Ok, but the original ROM? Nothing. My guess is the ROM is also busted, so I programmed another 27128 EPROM with the right image and inserted it into the drive.

Everything worked! So, time to plug in the head cable OH CRAP I PLUGGED IT IN BACKWARDS. Bang, I blew the head coils. Crap.

Anyway, the rest of the drive seemed fine. Stepper motor, drive motor control. Now, the challenge - it's a mitsumi drive. I went on ebay to find a replacement drive - lots of "untested" 1541's everywhere. But I did find a "tested, guaranteed works" SX-64 drive. However, it's an Alps drive. They're supposed to be more reliable, but .. well, it arrived a few days later.

The main physical difference between the two is the connector. The thing I remember is that the write current is slightly different and some 1541 drives have a jumper to change said current.

Luckily there's a 1541 service manual and it has the Alps drive pinout for the 1541, which is surprisingly exactly what I need for the 1551:

So I followed this guide, verified at each step that it worked, and connected it all up.

And yes, I put superglue in the key hole for the head connector so I didn't plug it in backwards.

And .. well, it works!

Well, kinda. I had the commodore 16 drop into the monitor after HEADER (which formats a blank disk) completed. I've also had some issues with commands hanging and not running on the drive. So, there may be some other issues lurking.

I also want to figure out a suitable mod for the write head current change.

But hey, I guess I do have a working Alps drive in my 1551.

And yes I did tear the head apart to see how it's put together... :-)