Chris999
Hot Rolled
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2005
- Location
- Vancouver B.C.
Howdy,
I need some help with a late 80's Sodick A280 I'm trying to get running for a friend. We got the operation manuals and a bunch of diskettes but no electrical diagram.
I can't get the PC to boot up. The manuals say to put the system disk and a user disk into the drives and on power up it should load the operating system.
The previous owner left a note that says: must do Qstartup () or errors will occur. Didn't say where to enter that, but I've tried at the initial prompt and with the load function key.
When I hit the source button the control power comes on, one of the floppy drives flashes briefly and there's two long beeps and a short beep from the PC.
The screen shows "how many files (0-15)?" at the top and function key arrangement at the bottom that say load, print save run etc... (I didn't note exactly what they say)
If I hit run, (F5 I think) it displays NEC N-88 BASIC Version 2.0 and some other text (copyright statement), the last line is "641688 bytes free" and that's all it does. No floppy activity, no command prompt, just hangs and I have to cycle the power.
If I enter Qstartup () after the "how many files" prompt it will occasionally clear the screen and look like its going into a startup routine but the floppy drives don't come on.
I've tried the system disk in either drive to no avail.
I looked at the files on the system disk on a PC, the largest one is "N88BASIC.LIB" there's two batch files, APT and Ramdisk as well as a bunch of EXE files.
If I type in any of the exe file names or the .bat files either at the initial prompt or using the LOAD function key and hit enter it just displays the "6xxxxx bytes free" as the last line and hangs.
Anyway, either I'm missing something simple or there's a PC issue, faulty floppy drive maybe?
From Old computers.com it appears the PC had BASIC as part of the BIOS to run the floppy drives.
It was purchased from a company a few blocks away so It didn't see a rough trip or sit around and it was running shortly before we got it.
Sodick wants $500 to register the machine with them before they will sell you parts or allow you the privilege of talking to them...
Any guidance would be appreciated. Help me PM, you're my only hope.....
Thanks, Chris
I need some help with a late 80's Sodick A280 I'm trying to get running for a friend. We got the operation manuals and a bunch of diskettes but no electrical diagram.
I can't get the PC to boot up. The manuals say to put the system disk and a user disk into the drives and on power up it should load the operating system.
The previous owner left a note that says: must do Qstartup () or errors will occur. Didn't say where to enter that, but I've tried at the initial prompt and with the load function key.
When I hit the source button the control power comes on, one of the floppy drives flashes briefly and there's two long beeps and a short beep from the PC.
The screen shows "how many files (0-15)?" at the top and function key arrangement at the bottom that say load, print save run etc... (I didn't note exactly what they say)
If I hit run, (F5 I think) it displays NEC N-88 BASIC Version 2.0 and some other text (copyright statement), the last line is "641688 bytes free" and that's all it does. No floppy activity, no command prompt, just hangs and I have to cycle the power.
If I enter Qstartup () after the "how many files" prompt it will occasionally clear the screen and look like its going into a startup routine but the floppy drives don't come on.
I've tried the system disk in either drive to no avail.
I looked at the files on the system disk on a PC, the largest one is "N88BASIC.LIB" there's two batch files, APT and Ramdisk as well as a bunch of EXE files.
If I type in any of the exe file names or the .bat files either at the initial prompt or using the LOAD function key and hit enter it just displays the "6xxxxx bytes free" as the last line and hangs.
Anyway, either I'm missing something simple or there's a PC issue, faulty floppy drive maybe?
From Old computers.com it appears the PC had BASIC as part of the BIOS to run the floppy drives.
It was purchased from a company a few blocks away so It didn't see a rough trip or sit around and it was running shortly before we got it.
Sodick wants $500 to register the machine with them before they will sell you parts or allow you the privilege of talking to them...
Any guidance would be appreciated. Help me PM, you're my only hope.....
Thanks, Chris