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Mits Alarm ( load error -5 40010000)

Petergun

Aluminum
Joined
Mar 27, 2007
Location
Belgrade, MT USA
Some one in the shop shut off the power to our Mits FX 10. I discovered no power today when i came to use it. I got nothing on the screen when i powered it up. So I attempted to reload the files as i always have before when needed.
I loaded floppy disk 1 in the drive and moved lever to system load and powered up. I got the correct screen that asked for the input button to be pressed. after doing that screen showed that it was loading now. At that point it came up with an alarm. LOAD ERROR -5 40010000 I can not find any reference to this alarm in any thing i have. I have 2 sets of the software. I loaded disk 1 from the 2nd set and got the same alarm. Hope some one out there can help me with this.
Thanks
 
I would point the finger at the drive itself. Seems unlikely 2 sets of software disks going bad...

Any chance you have another Mits to try and read the disks ?!
 
You could go with the emulator from Mits, but I've heard of people getting good results with these (https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M4...FP92AHTA741&psc=1&refRID=XXKSKJAV7FP92AHTA741). It may be worth a try, though I can't guarantee it'll work. There's "Flash Floppy" firmware out there that can be used with this to allow it to emulate different drives, so it might work out.

The issue is getting that software off the old floppies and onto a USB stick. If you go with the emulator from Mits (it is pricey, and hard to justify on such an old machine) I believe we were able to take your old floppies and throw them on a USB stick. I never had the opportunity to install one of them emulators, so I'm not 100% sure about the process, so don't quote me on that. What I can say is that they work very well and every customer I'd been to that had one found it to be a great upgrade.

That said, depending on the condition of your machine, it might be worth it to jump to an FA-10. They're very reasonable price wise now. I'd seen a lot of FX machines become money pits. Parts are hard to come by, and what you can find won't be cheap.
 
That $30 drive from amazon will not load your system software. Your options are to look for a used floppy drive on Ebay (make sure its from a Mits EDM) or spend the cash on an emulator.

I actually have a spare working drive I might part with feel free to contact me thru PM.
 
That $30 drive from amazon will not load your system software. Your options are to look for a used floppy drive on Ebay (make sure its from a Mits EDM) or spend the cash on an emulator.

I actually have a spare working drive I might part with feel free to contact me thru PM.

I'd have to dig around, but I remember reading somewhere a while back that using "Flash Floppy" (GitHub - keirf/FlashFloppy: Floppy drive emulator for Gotek hardware) someone was able to emulate the system load settings on an FX. It'd take some playing, but I'm fairly certain it's possible. But yeah, the Mits emulator is a sure thing.

The easiest thing is to swap in a new drive, especially if you've got one. I do think that if he's going to run the machine for much longer, an emulator is a great upgrade for reliability, though.
 
I installed a retrofit floppy emulator in my FX-20 after some of the disks started flaking out. I don't have a support contract so I figured that I was going to have a lot of trouble sourcing replacements if the disks became unreadable. Seemed like good preventative maintenance.

I fitted an HxC SDcard based floppy emulator. My machine loads everything from the emulated floppies: system software, language pack, parameters, E-packs, and G-code.

I did have a lot of trouble figuring out how to dump images of the original disks and what format they were in. The major confounding factor is that all of the disks spin at 360 RPM instead of the standard 300 RPM for IBM PC compatible floppies. I ended up buying a Kryoflux floppy controller to read the images -- the few PCs I could find with floppy controllers left in them couldn't make heads nor tails of the Mits floppies. The Kryoflux will work with any standard PC floppy drive and can handle reading and writing 360 RPM disks even if the drive is spinning them at 300 RPM.

The control in the FX series machine uses two different formats of disks interchangeably, "CP/M" and "DOS".

All of the system software, the language pack, and the alarm disk are in "DOS" format, which is MFM, double-sided/double-density, 1024 byte sectors, 8 sectors/track, and uses 77 tracks for a raw image size of 1310720 bytes. I think this is the same layout as the Japanese 1.2 MB standard, so if you could get your hands on a "3Mode" floppy drive and controller you might be able to dump these without a Kryoflux.

The E-packs and my pitch error disk are in "CP/M" format, which is MFM, double-sided/double-density, 256 byte sectors, 26 sectors/track, and uses 77 tracks for a raw image size of 1064960 bytes. There is no single CP/M filesystem standard, but I was able to figure out a set of parameters for the open-source "cpmtools" package to access the filesystem that the FX series control creates:

Code:
diskdef meldas
  seclen 256
  tracks 154
  sectrk 26
  blocksize 4096
  maxdir 128
  skew 0
  boottrk 4
  os 3
end

You probably won't need to touch the filesystem. I had to because my E-pack disks had intermittent read errors and I wanted to make sure that the data I pulled off of them was good.

If you have a Kryoflux you can dump your disks using its command-line `dtc` tool:
Code:
# creating an image (stream + decoded) of a DOS format disk (system disk, language disk, alarm disk):
dtc -fsystemdisk1 -i0a -n8 -z3 -s0 -e76 -v360 -tc4 -dd1 -fsystemdisk1_decoded -i4

# creating an image (stream + decoded) of a CP/M format disk (E-pack disk, pitch error/parameter disk, data disk):
dtc -fpitch-error -i0a -z1 -s0 -e76 -v360 -tc4 -dd1 -fpitch-error_decoded -i4

Decoded images can be loaded into the HxC software for conversion to their format by asking it to load a RAW image and using the previously mentioned format parameters for track/sector count and sector size.


It took me a long time to scrape all of this information together, so I figure I'll just dump it all here now. Even if it doesn't help you, Google will index it and maybe it'll save someone else some time.
 
Not that I'm aware of. I just ordered mine from kryoflux.com -- it's a tiny board, so the international shipping is still reasonable.

One more note that I forgot in the previous info dump post: the HxC emulator has a bunch of different modes for the floppy interface. The default mode isn't compatible with the Mits control. I just cycled through the modes using the menu on the device itself until I found one that worked, which ended up being the "Akai 950 HD" mode. It's easy to overlook this menu/setting.
 








 
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