TLDR; a lot
So it's been a while since I bought my A440 (upgraded to an A440/1) with a Watford Electronics 25Mhz ARM3 upgrade and Seagate 20GB HDD. It also has one of the A300 keyboards, with the red function keys which I really like, and that also has the clear plastic Function key holder still in tact!
The machine has the Simtech IDE card, with 2 slots as well which is nice. There is also an I/O expansion podule that gives me 1Mhz Bus, User Port, and Analogue.
Some funnies.... I noticed the F12 key is in fact and F4... so.. someone obviously lost this or damaged it and replaced it with a "make do" replacement.. currently sourcing the right key.. (I am a stickler for things being in good condition).
I thought I'd broken the machine, when I realised cables from the CMOS battery had broken free from the battery caddy and consequently, holding down "R" on reboot made her come back to life! Noob error I think.
Already Done
- Added econet to the machine, so I can connect it to my econet pi bridge for easier file transfer between my PC and Arc (I'll come on to that in a second).
- A deep clean of the case and keyboard, note that some of the keys on the keyboard where intermittent, and a thorough clean up resolved those issues.
- Copied all data off the HDD and backed it up, allowing me to blank the machine and "start a fresh".
- Fixed the battery caddy.
- Using the OSSC that I have for my Amiga to connect to modern monitors. This actually works really well, better I'd say than it does for the Amiga!
Things Still To Do
- Look at replacing the HDD with a CF, I'll look to do this in the new year and there are a lot of ways it can be done. I'm thinking of getting a 90 degree IDE adapter and seeing if I can plug the CF adapter and CF more or less straight in to that. Another option I was looking at was getting a mounting bracket for the CF adapter and putting it in the 3.5" bay. This is a work in progress.
- Battery caddy replacement; Chris' acorns page was really useful, and although my repair is good for now, the caddy has some corrosion damage. So I will be swapping this out for a new caddy (on order) and doing that again.
- Fan replacement; wow... this thing is NOISY. I am looking to replace the fan, again researching this forum gave me some ideas. I already have the noctua fan (60mm) replacement and I'm currently trying to decide how I want to do the cabling. I've struggled to find out what the connector was for the fan, originally my place was to source a replacement connector, and build a wire harness I could connect the Noctua fan to. This would save me cutting cables etc... but this has proven difficult... My next plan is to source some of the pins for the connector and simply pop out the pins from the fan wires and fit some new ones.. still a work in progress but getting there! My aim is to make the machine almost silent, and totally restorable to "original condition" if I want to.
- Replacement case screws, a lot of these were missing and after getting the manuals together I've got replacements on order.
Some of the interesting stuff;
Getting Data on and Off
This comes up time and time again on various forums, and with a lot of help from people here and on the Stardot Discord a solution was reached (big shout out to IanS (who has been incredibly patient and helpful in getting this to work) for this one!
What I use;
1. Econet Pi Bridge hat (shout out to KenLowe) and Pi3. I have a case for this, which I got from a forum member (shout out to Ukwebb).
2. Econet cables.
So my process is as follows:
1. Install a good emulator on your PC, I'm using Arculator (latest version).
2. Install the software I want within the emulator, and ensure it's working.
3. Use an archive tool, to compress the installed software and then copy this compressed folder to the econet bridge file server. Why do this and not simply copy the folder? Well, I have found (and to be fair this is likely to be something I simply haven't figured out properly yet) is that files are stored within the hostfs directory within the Arculator directory on the PC like this "file,ffa" ... where "ffa" is the File Type. Arculator is good and understands this, so within the emulator the files are represented correctly, however if you copy this "as is" to the Arc, it will simply put a file on without a type with the name "file,ffa". Renaming the file to "file" and setting the type to "&ffa" restores the file function, but if you have many files to do this is a lengthy process. If you compress the folder, you have to do this for the compressed file only, and once unpacked on the Arc itself, the files that are unpacked maintain their "types". What I am in the process of doing now is creating a series of "zips" that contain backups of my personal "preferred" drive contents and applications. This will make restoration in the future easier and also it simpler to migrate to different media i.e. CF from spinning rust, in the future. Again I have done things this way, because of my understanding, I expect there are easier ways (I've ready that pibridge has a lot of functionality I'm not using and I suspect some of this would make my life even easier).
ADFFS
I'm in the process of playing with this, as it could be a useful tool to use in the future. But I will always be cautious, as there are some gotchas that are mentioned in the documentation, about "damaging machines" if you choose to load "mounted" disks direct i.e. double clicking on icons, rather than "boot from floppy" options. I'm exploring this gradually.
Future Expansion
Really want to understand what I can use the User Port and 1Mhz bus ports for in the future. I'd like to also add a gotek option in the future as well so I can more easily load disk images using USB sticks. I use these already for the BBC Master and Amiga I have, another dedicated to the Arc would be great. This will likely be external.
Retrobriting
The case is a bit yellow, as is the case for a lot of machines of similar age. I'm torn when it comes to Retrobriting. New cases and keyboards are hard to come by and area expensive. The Amiga wasn't so bad to do as replacements (in case I ruined it) were easy to come by and not that expensive. Ideally I'd like a more authentic looking machine, but... at the same time... I'm afraid I'll make it look worse.. blotchy or streaky... so for the moment I think I'll park this one and perhaps revisit another time.
Anyway.. just a bit of notes for people... I'm continuing my journey! Wanted to let people know what I did in case it was useful and perhaps gives people some hints on how they might do things. And this is a bit of a thank you post to all those that helped me.
Cheers
Craig
So it's been a while since I bought my A440 (upgraded to an A440/1) with a Watford Electronics 25Mhz ARM3 upgrade and Seagate 20GB HDD. It also has one of the A300 keyboards, with the red function keys which I really like, and that also has the clear plastic Function key holder still in tact!
The machine has the Simtech IDE card, with 2 slots as well which is nice. There is also an I/O expansion podule that gives me 1Mhz Bus, User Port, and Analogue.
Some funnies.... I noticed the F12 key is in fact and F4... so.. someone obviously lost this or damaged it and replaced it with a "make do" replacement.. currently sourcing the right key.. (I am a stickler for things being in good condition).
I thought I'd broken the machine, when I realised cables from the CMOS battery had broken free from the battery caddy and consequently, holding down "R" on reboot made her come back to life! Noob error I think.
Already Done
- Added econet to the machine, so I can connect it to my econet pi bridge for easier file transfer between my PC and Arc (I'll come on to that in a second).
- A deep clean of the case and keyboard, note that some of the keys on the keyboard where intermittent, and a thorough clean up resolved those issues.
- Copied all data off the HDD and backed it up, allowing me to blank the machine and "start a fresh".
- Fixed the battery caddy.
- Using the OSSC that I have for my Amiga to connect to modern monitors. This actually works really well, better I'd say than it does for the Amiga!
Things Still To Do
- Look at replacing the HDD with a CF, I'll look to do this in the new year and there are a lot of ways it can be done. I'm thinking of getting a 90 degree IDE adapter and seeing if I can plug the CF adapter and CF more or less straight in to that. Another option I was looking at was getting a mounting bracket for the CF adapter and putting it in the 3.5" bay. This is a work in progress.
- Battery caddy replacement; Chris' acorns page was really useful, and although my repair is good for now, the caddy has some corrosion damage. So I will be swapping this out for a new caddy (on order) and doing that again.
- Fan replacement; wow... this thing is NOISY. I am looking to replace the fan, again researching this forum gave me some ideas. I already have the noctua fan (60mm) replacement and I'm currently trying to decide how I want to do the cabling. I've struggled to find out what the connector was for the fan, originally my place was to source a replacement connector, and build a wire harness I could connect the Noctua fan to. This would save me cutting cables etc... but this has proven difficult... My next plan is to source some of the pins for the connector and simply pop out the pins from the fan wires and fit some new ones.. still a work in progress but getting there! My aim is to make the machine almost silent, and totally restorable to "original condition" if I want to.
- Replacement case screws, a lot of these were missing and after getting the manuals together I've got replacements on order.
Some of the interesting stuff;
Getting Data on and Off
This comes up time and time again on various forums, and with a lot of help from people here and on the Stardot Discord a solution was reached (big shout out to IanS (who has been incredibly patient and helpful in getting this to work) for this one!
What I use;
1. Econet Pi Bridge hat (shout out to KenLowe) and Pi3. I have a case for this, which I got from a forum member (shout out to Ukwebb).
2. Econet cables.
So my process is as follows:
1. Install a good emulator on your PC, I'm using Arculator (latest version).
2. Install the software I want within the emulator, and ensure it's working.
3. Use an archive tool, to compress the installed software and then copy this compressed folder to the econet bridge file server. Why do this and not simply copy the folder? Well, I have found (and to be fair this is likely to be something I simply haven't figured out properly yet) is that files are stored within the hostfs directory within the Arculator directory on the PC like this "file,ffa" ... where "ffa" is the File Type. Arculator is good and understands this, so within the emulator the files are represented correctly, however if you copy this "as is" to the Arc, it will simply put a file on without a type with the name "file,ffa". Renaming the file to "file" and setting the type to "&ffa" restores the file function, but if you have many files to do this is a lengthy process. If you compress the folder, you have to do this for the compressed file only, and once unpacked on the Arc itself, the files that are unpacked maintain their "types". What I am in the process of doing now is creating a series of "zips" that contain backups of my personal "preferred" drive contents and applications. This will make restoration in the future easier and also it simpler to migrate to different media i.e. CF from spinning rust, in the future. Again I have done things this way, because of my understanding, I expect there are easier ways (I've ready that pibridge has a lot of functionality I'm not using and I suspect some of this would make my life even easier).
ADFFS
I'm in the process of playing with this, as it could be a useful tool to use in the future. But I will always be cautious, as there are some gotchas that are mentioned in the documentation, about "damaging machines" if you choose to load "mounted" disks direct i.e. double clicking on icons, rather than "boot from floppy" options. I'm exploring this gradually.
Future Expansion
Really want to understand what I can use the User Port and 1Mhz bus ports for in the future. I'd like to also add a gotek option in the future as well so I can more easily load disk images using USB sticks. I use these already for the BBC Master and Amiga I have, another dedicated to the Arc would be great. This will likely be external.
Retrobriting
The case is a bit yellow, as is the case for a lot of machines of similar age. I'm torn when it comes to Retrobriting. New cases and keyboards are hard to come by and area expensive. The Amiga wasn't so bad to do as replacements (in case I ruined it) were easy to come by and not that expensive. Ideally I'd like a more authentic looking machine, but... at the same time... I'm afraid I'll make it look worse.. blotchy or streaky... so for the moment I think I'll park this one and perhaps revisit another time.
Anyway.. just a bit of notes for people... I'm continuing my journey! Wanted to let people know what I did in case it was useful and perhaps gives people some hints on how they might do things. And this is a bit of a thank you post to all those that helped me.
Cheers
Craig
Statistics: Posted by craig_read — Mon Dec 23, 2024 1:17 pm