Brian- Yep it was the belt. Replaced. All's well now. Thanks for your help.
Hey Birt! I find your YouTube videos informative and entertaining. Looking forward to future pubs. George On 2/4/2025 9:10 AM, Brian White wrote:
tpdd is actually exactly the same as fb100 even down to the firmware. The only difference is the solder pads configure the drive to run at 9600 baud while tpdd has switches set to 19200 by default. It also means you can't do the TPDD1 bootstrap procedure with the TPDD1 util disk on a fb100 unless you change the solder blobs the same way as the switches. But you don't need to. You don't need ipl or floppy. ipl is just the first stage of installing floppy from the disk using the drive when you don't yet have floppy installed. Floppy is just a tpdd app like tsdos, but cruder. Since you have tsdos, you don't need floppy. In fact you can't have both at the same time even if you wanted. That baud difference might matter in some cases but not for TS-DOS. tsdos knows about fb100, and Purple Computing and KnitKing rebadges, and autodetects the speed and switches to 9600. It sounds like you did everything right. The drive should have spun for about 2 minutes (about 100 seconds) while formatting, and tsdos shows nothing on screen during that time. One thing that we don't know yet is if the drive has a good belt. They all turned to goo several years ago, so every drive needs a new belt. Has yours been replaced? bkw On Tue, Feb 4, 2025, 8:49 AM George Hunt <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for letting me join the list. I need some help from the resident experts. I have a M102 with installed DIAL-A-ROM with option F (TS-DOS 4.10) selected. CALL 63013,1 OK. Backpack+ in the serial port seems to work OK. I recently acquired a Brother FB100 of unknown provenance which I was told is an (almost) equivalent to TPDD. It came with a DB9F-DB25M cable with level shift, a power wart, a spare belt but nothing else. The FB100 has 4 unlabeled solder pads in place of dip switches. I plugged the M102 and drive together and powered up both. I put a DSDD disk in, selected TR-DOS from the main menu. Selected F4 (Disk) and got a flash of the access light and a couple sec of motor noise and a not unexpected NOT FORMATTED. Did F5 (Frmt) and got INSERT DISK PRESS "Y" TO BEGIN. I did and then nothing. What did I get wrong? Do I need IPL.BA <http://IPL.BA>? Do I need to program the solder pads? What is FLOPPY.CO <http://FLOPPY.CO>? Any hope for this or should I toss it in the "It didn't work out pile"? George
