On to error 70

It turned out that finding a replacement for the COPS chip in the Lisa was not as difficult as I'd anticipated, although I also think I was just startlingly lucky in my timing. The person I bought the Lisa from originally actually volunteered one to me, and I bought a replacement for the uncovered EPROM from him at the same time. The COPS chip arrived today and I wasted no time putting it into place. Here we go, much better.

Here's the whole I/O board, with the new disk EPROM and new COPS chip.

Eager with anticipation, I plugged the Lisa in. Before, as soon as I plugged it in, the Lisa powered up and gave me the COPS error 52. This time, when I plugged it in, I got this:

FanTASTic! This is actually exactly what I wanted to see. The COPS chip controls the keyboard, the mouse, and the software for the power circuit. The fact that that Lisa was powering on unprompted before was a direct symptom of having a faulty (or, in this case, missing) COPS chip. So, I hit the power button, and...no more error 52.

Now I have a memory error in memory board 1, but I'm past the COPS error. Not only that, but the mouse works.

I moved it over and clicked on "Continue", which, despite the error, was an allowable option.

I put the boot disk I have into the drive, which it appeared to accept with the usual noises. The Lisa gave reading the disk a go for a little while.

And then just spat the disk back out. I'm not sure it is expected to work, who knows what condition the disk is in or whether it is even a suitable boot disk. It claims to be a Mac 512 boot disk, after all.

The RAM error I'm getting indicates that the most likely problem is that one (or more) of these chips is bad.

Ouch. Worse, these chips are not socketed, they are soldered right to the board. Not so easy to replace.

There is, it appears, a trick to determining which RAM chip is bad, as reported on Tezza's Classic Computers blog, which involves taking the Lisa into service mode and looking at one of the memory locations. Getting the Lisa into service mode involves pressing Apple-S at an appropriate moment. However, this leads to the next problem I have: the keyboard doesn't work. It's not that it entirely doesn't work, it's just that, as far as I can tell, only one key does anything. This is the "key" that does something: the stem where W was supposed to be.

And what it does is this: it teleports the mouse cursor about a quarter of the way down the screen. But there's no way to enter service mode with the keyboard in the state that it is in. It could be that replacing the pads will help, or it could be that this keyboard just needs to be replaced in its entirety. That's not a cheap proposition, but it is, at least at the time I'm writing this, a possible one. They do exist for sale, they just cost a lot.

Here's a movie of the Lisa starting up, and demonstrating the weird cursor teleport behavior. It's a bit hard to see anything on the screen because it is overexposed, but you can see the mouse cursor jumping down as I hit the "W" key.

So... not there yet, and it's probably going to cost me a bit to get there, but progress is being made.

Timex-Sinclair 1000

Although I alluded to this earlier, I haven't gone into detail about one of my other relatively recent acquisitions, a Timex-Sinclair 1000. I got it in the original packaging, although the box is kind of beat up.

Revolutionary technology made this computer possible, and the power is within my reach.

The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was marketed as a cheap ($99.95) computer that was accessible to everyone. It's a tiny little thing, with a membrane keyboard and 2K of memory.

The 2K of memory it has built-in can be expanded with the help of a 16K memory pack that you plug into the back. I have this, and actually, it's pretty much standard equipment with these (though of course buying one took the price well beyond the $99.95 price point).

It has no disk drive. The only way data gets in and out of this machine is through a cassette recorder. Here are the tapes I got with it.

But the thing that has stymied me until now from even trying the machine out is that the only way it can display (without doing internal modifications) is through a TV. That was fine back in its day, but now I'd much rather have had a regular composite out. The problem with the signal it sends out is that it is tuned to channel 2 or 3, and so I need a way to find that signal and turn it back into something viewable.

I thought I had a solution with the Power Mac G3 and a set-top DVD recorder. Now that I have the rest of it set up, I tried plugging in the Timex-Sinclair for the first time. First, I set up the DVD recorder to send its output (for now, just the composite video out, though I might later move to S-video instead) into the Wings card at the back of the Power Mac G3. I converted the Timex-Sinclair's RCA output to a coaxial cable and sent it in the antenna input on the DVD recorder.

I verified that the Power Mac G3 was getting the signal from the DVD recorder by successfully bringing up an image of the DVD menu.

But, alas, when I tuned the TV to channel 3 (which the Timex-Sinclair was set to) and connected the power to the computer, the best I could get was this noise—and most of the time the screen was just blank.

I don't yet know what this means. It might be that my Timex-Sinclair 1000 actually doesn't work, which would be sad. But I'm more inclined right now to believe that the video signal just isn't strong enough to make it through. I still need to test it on a real television (and, in fact, maybe preferably a vintage television) to see if it might work without the signal gating that the DVD recorder and the Wings card are both probably doing. I was kind of hoping I'd be able at least to get to the main prompt, but as far as I can see (and the operative word is "see"), I haven't. So it goes. I'll keep trying.

Workstation card and a netbooted //e

With the AppleTalk server in place, it was time to put the Workstation card in the Apple //e. In order to get the necessary pieces, I'd gotten one that was new in box, shrink-wrap mostly intact.

Here are the unboxing pictures, in case it ever becomes important to know just what order everything was packed in. There is something very cool about opening something like this new from the box. Perhaps doing this makes it less collectable, but I didn't get the thing so it could sit on my shelf and then be re-sold.

The big advantage of getting it new in box like this, apart from the fact that it is cool to open the box, is that it has this all-important connector. I have another Workstation Card, but it lacks this connector, and so is not very useful. If I'm ever going to use that other card (which I can in principle use with my other //e, although that will require doing an enhancement upgrade on it, since I am now pretty confident that it is un-enhanced), I'm going to need to fashion my own connector. But now at least I have one to model it after, should I choose to make one.

The card itself was so clean and nice. I don't think the pictures here really do it justice.

Into the platinum //e it went. I wanted it in slot 7 so that it would be checked first, before the disk drives, but it requires one of the long openings in the back, the nearest of which is behind slot 3. So things got a little bit crowded back there, but for the moment everything fits.

And into the back of the Power Mac G3, running LocalTalk bridge under Mac OS 9. Appletalk set to printer port.

All systems go.

And then there it was. Now that the server is working, I just need to get some content on there, and I'll be set. Starting up the //e is actually very fast this way, not really appreciably slower than starting off a disk.

Power Mac G3 and netatalk

Small update: I installed Mac OS 9.2 on the Power Mac G3, and ran the system diagnostics on it, which all passed.

I connected it to the ethernet and tried to use the internet for a while. The internet was slow back in the days of the Power Mac G3, and it wasn't all the internet's fault. Internet Explorer choked pretty hard on the modern web, but iCab and Classilla both work reasonably well.

I installed the Vine VNC server on it, which enabled me to (go home and) successfully screen share into the Power Mac G3 (here, I'm sharing my iMac's screen, which is sharing the Power Mac G3's screen, but it was also possible to just connect to it directly from home).

I then set up A2SERVER on my modern iMac (which was quite easy), added another share volume for Mac files (by editing /usr/local/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default) and enabled DHCAST128 authentication so I could connect to the share volume on the modern iMac. And I moved a copy of DarkSide over to it, and set it and the Vine VNC server up as a startup items, so that when the machine rebooted it would be protected from screen burn and would allow me to share into it.

Although it mostly worked, and I was able to mount the AppleShare volume, I found that the VNC server was a little bit unreliable. If the Mac got at all busy (particularly if copying over the AppleTalk network), the connection would freeze. Generally it was no problem to re-establish the connection, but I had to do that over and over. Eventually, it was set up.

Then I tried something dorky. I copied over the Apple II emulator Stop The Madness to the Power Mac G3. [Trivia note: Back in 1994, I wrote an accompanying program for STM called SaveTM that allowed disk images to be saved (since STM didn't do that). There were two versions; paradoxically, the newer version of SaveTM (SaveTM 1.02) only works with the older version of STM (0.851r), while the older SaveTM (SaveTM 1.00) works with the newer version of STM (0.881r). SaveTM long ago disappeared from the internet, but the new links in this paragraph do lead to the program now.]

I thought it would make a funny screen shot to be running the Apple II emulator on the Power Mac G3. However, when I launched the program, the G3 froze, and I haven't been able to communicate with it since. I'm hoping the screen won't be completely burned in when I get back to the office next. Oh well. There were some downsides to the days of MacOS 9.

Now that A2SERVER is set up, the next thing I'll try is to connect the IIgs and try to netboot it (I tried to netboot Sweet16 running on the modern iMac, but it couldn't see the AppleTalk network), then I'll see if I can do the same thing for the platinum //e. And I don't think I'll try to emulate any more Apples II on the Power Mac G3.

Power Mac G3 on its feet

For some reason, I was not motivated to take pictures of this, but I've now cleaned up the Power Macintosh G3 machine, pictured here "before," and brought it both up to the office and back to life.

It was really very dirty. I completely disassembled it (and, again, was reminded of how much I really like the "outrigger" cases), washed off all the plastic, scrubbed out the scuff marks, blew out the many dust bunnies, and then put it back together. I also took the opportunity to put in the Wings personality card, which adds more A/V options. I'm pretty sure I also have a USB card that I can add to this machine, somewhere.

It took a bit of fiddling to get the monitor displaying properly, but I ultimately succeeded in installing MacOS 8.5 on the machine. I think, however, that I will move the machine up to MacOS 9.2 at the next opportunity. The machine seems to work just fine, though. Probably the next thing I'll do is try to run a full system diagnostic on it.

Once I get the system software up and running, I plan on running this machine mostly remotely, with the assistance of the Vine VNC server (though I may need to get it a dedicated IP address for this purpose), and setting it up to be a LocalTalk-EtherTalk bridge to allow communication (and netbooting) for the IIgs and platinum //e. And then we'll see what happens. I have a number of things I'd like to get the Wings card involved with, including serving as a display for my Timex Sinclair 1000, which I have yet even to power on for lack of a usable display (it needs to be run into something with a TV tuner, so I'll probably send it into a set-top DVD burner I have, which should be able to then send S-video to the Wings card). I'm not sure if the video signal will be too degraded by that point or not, though. I'd also like to hook up the audio in/out to the TS1000 for use as a "cassette recorder." And when the Bell & Howell's power situation gets resolved, I have a fairly elaborate plan to connect that up here as well. There's still a fair amount of tinkering left to do here I think. But there's some progress at least. Though maybe not enough to be worthy of posting this.

Error 52 and mystery of the missing COPS chip

So, the Lisa starts up with an I/O board error, number 52. According to my list of errors, this is an "I/O COPS error" which might have as its solution a replacement of the COPS chip.

There are a couple of other possible problems that could cause this I think. It could be due to a problem with the keyboard or the mouse. I just recently got an appropriate mouse and plugged it in, but that didn't change anything. Still got error 52. I'm hoping that if the keyboard were at fault I'd get error 53 instead, but the keyboard for this Lisa is in relatively bad shape.

So, I decided I'd take out the I/O board again and see what I could see. Here is the COPS chip, nothing looked particularly wrong, except maybe that it was kind of out of focus. But I figured just for the heck of it, I'd pull it out and reseat it.

So, out it came, and—well, that's not right. One of its pins had not been in the socket, but had been bent up underneath. This problem wasn't really visible when the chip was seated, but it was pretty obvious when the chip came out.

I carefully bent the pin back to straight and put it back in its socket, this time with all pins reporting for duty. The pin I bent back is still bowed out a little bit but is in the socket.

Lisa then reassembled, I plugged it in again to try it out.

Well, ok, that didn't help. Though I'm not sure that I trust that COP421 chip anymore, it's possible that it needs to be replaced. One other thing I observe is that the upper right corner of the screen says "H"—this is strange, it is supposed to say "H/88" (or possibly "H/A8") where the second number reports the floppy drive ROM version. But there's nothing. Which suggests to me that this chip might also be a problem.

This is an EPROM, and so should have its window covered. There should have been a sticker over it. Here's a picture of Mike Maginnis' chip (cropped and hosted here), from his lovely album of the innards of one of his Mac XLs. Mine should have looked like that, and there is a risk that UV light might have gotten through the window and erased or partially erased that EPROM.

This is the ROM for the 400k disk drive, and is the ROM that should be reporting the "88" after the "H", but as seen above, I'm getting just "H". So, it isn't crazy to think that this might be the source of a problem as well. One thing I've been advised to do but haven't done yet is to clean the gold fingers on the I/O board, but I've taken it out and put it in several times now, so I kind of doubt that this would solve the problem by itself. I think what I'll need to do is start by replacing both the COP421 chip and the Drive ROM. I'm not sure how easy it will be to get a COP421 chip, but the drive ROM is pretty easy and cheap to buy. So, that's I guess where I'll go next.

Followup, shortly after the initial posting: you know, there's another problem. I'm pretty sure that's quite simply not the right chip in the COPS socket. It's the right size, but I do not think it is even a COPS chip. There's a frighteningly detailed analysis of the Lisa COP421 on visual6502.org, where they refer to the chip as being "a difficult chip to replace" and being "a National Semiconductor COP421 from the 'COPS' family, customized for Apple." The correct chip should be Apple 341-0064A, but this one says MM58167AN on it, which appears to be a clock chip. I've concluded that what I in fact have here is an Apple /// clock chip. Here is a picture from one of vintagemicro's auctions [hosted here] for an official Apple /// clock upgrade, and it's that very same chip that is included in the upgrade kit.

I can't say what happened here, but I suspect that the COP421 chip failed and somebody attempted to replace it at some point with another chip that fits. I think the likelihood that the COP421 chip and this clock chip are functionally identical is about zero. So, there really is a serious problem with the COPS chip, and it might well be a serious problem for me, since I don't know that I'm going to be able to replace this thing except by finding another Lisa I/O board. The hunt begins.