Hi ChickenMan,
Thankyou very much for your welcome to the forum, and for your advice about repairing the 16k. I will try that. I have a few operating manuals, but no servicing manuals or schematics, so I will look at the Repository with great interest.
I have four in total. Here is what I know about the other Microbees at the moment:
Number 2 is the one that is working. It is not labelled but it has the expansion socket and it comes up with Colour Basic 5.22e, 1983. I don't know how much memory it has. Is there a way to interrogate that from the command prompt? Of course I will get some clues when I open it up. There's a backup battery floating under the baseboard in a plastic bag, so I need to get in there and clean it up! This unit only draws about 0.5 A at 9-12 V.
I also have a twin disk unit, which may work with the unit above.
Number 3 is a B-ETI Serial Terminal. I have found this morning that it does seem to work, but seems to be sensitive to supply voltage, and only seems to boot up when I change that (between about 10 and 12 V DC). This might just be a capacitor issue. I'm not sure how much use a maximum 4800 baud terminal would be these days - it's seems so much easier to use a program on a PC. Maybe this unit could be reprogrammed as a Microbee?
Number 4 is very old. It has a metal chassis with a T0-3 voltage regulator on the bottom, and a thin black one-piece plastic cover over the top. I see no indication of the model. Like number 1, it draws about 1 A at 9-12 V DC, but it does not boot up. It also has three AA cells soldered together as a backup battery, and they have not leaked. They must be at least 20 years old, and they look new!
I have 4 monochrome Microbee screens. The two rounder ones, which look newer, both seem to work, but one gives 16 V DC on its power socket and the other gives 0.2 V DC, so both need to be investigated. The other screens two are more square in shape, and look older. I haven't tested those yet.
Cheers,
Lew.
Thankyou very much for your welcome to the forum, and for your advice about repairing the 16k. I will try that. I have a few operating manuals, but no servicing manuals or schematics, so I will look at the Repository with great interest.
I have four in total. Here is what I know about the other Microbees at the moment:
Number 2 is the one that is working. It is not labelled but it has the expansion socket and it comes up with Colour Basic 5.22e, 1983. I don't know how much memory it has. Is there a way to interrogate that from the command prompt? Of course I will get some clues when I open it up. There's a backup battery floating under the baseboard in a plastic bag, so I need to get in there and clean it up! This unit only draws about 0.5 A at 9-12 V.
I also have a twin disk unit, which may work with the unit above.
Number 3 is a B-ETI Serial Terminal. I have found this morning that it does seem to work, but seems to be sensitive to supply voltage, and only seems to boot up when I change that (between about 10 and 12 V DC). This might just be a capacitor issue. I'm not sure how much use a maximum 4800 baud terminal would be these days - it's seems so much easier to use a program on a PC. Maybe this unit could be reprogrammed as a Microbee?
Number 4 is very old. It has a metal chassis with a T0-3 voltage regulator on the bottom, and a thin black one-piece plastic cover over the top. I see no indication of the model. Like number 1, it draws about 1 A at 9-12 V DC, but it does not boot up. It also has three AA cells soldered together as a backup battery, and they have not leaked. They must be at least 20 years old, and they look new!
I have 4 monochrome Microbee screens. The two rounder ones, which look newer, both seem to work, but one gives 16 V DC on its power socket and the other gives 0.2 V DC, so both need to be investigated. The other screens two are more square in shape, and look older. I haven't tested those yet.
Cheers,
Lew.