Hello. I'm new here and recently got an Apple II+.
I also picked up a Floppy Emu by Big Mess Of Wires. The device was working great, until this morning. Now it just sits there at track 00, trying to read, but never advancing.
Any ideas?
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Have you tried a different SD card?
I do have a card just like the one from BMoW. It's 4GB and formatted FAT 32, but the same thing happens. The Track sits at 00.
Do you have a regular floppy drive you can try on that controller or a different controller you can try with the FloppyEmu?
Yeah. It looks like it could be the Disk Controller Card. Same thing happens. Disk just spins when booted. Can the Floppy Emu burn out a Disk Controller Card? If so. how?
Thanks for the help.
At any point (with FE or Disk II) did you have the ribbon cable connector backwards or not aligned properly on the Disk II Controller header? If so, then you could have damaged something. In the case of the controller and Disk II drive, it's usually just 1 or 2 easily replaced 74LS logic ICs. Don't know if the FE has any kind of protection built in for cases like this.
Well I know I had everything connected properly. It was working yesturday and this morning. Then I tried to get Wizardry to work and was fooling around with that. Now it's now working. So I wondering when the Floppy Emu Drive is running (blinking Green) and then shut off, would that create a fault that could damage the Disk Controller Card? Something along those lines, while using the Floppy Emu could I have damaged the card?
Unless it was plugged in wrong I don't see how a FloppyEmu would burn out your controller card. Chances are it is a 30+ year old card, right? Maybe it just failed. It's probably fixable. Most of the chips other than the two PROMs are not that hard to find.
It's very possible that it's just an old card that gave up the ghost today. I was just checking to make sure I didn't kill her. ;)
But yeah. It looks like I need a new Disk Controller Card. I'll let you know how it goes.
It's very possible that it's just an old card that gave up the ghost today. I was just checking to make sure I didn't kill her. ;)
But yeah. It looks like I need a new Disk Controller Card. I'll let you know how it goes.
Luckily that's the absolute most common Apple II card out there. Easy to find. Always bunches of them on eBay and usually you can find one not terribly expensive. When I needed replacement PROMs for an original Disk II Controller Card I was able to find one of the newer cards with the DB19 style connector real cheap because someone had ripped the cable right off the board. That wouldn't be fun to fix... But, all the chips on the card were good, so it was an excellent sounrce of spare chips. I think including postage I got it for under $20.
Buying another card is an easy solution, but it isn't hard to swap out the chips. There have been a few threads about troubleshooting floppy controllers here in the past few months.
When you have the real drive connected to the controller, do you hear the typical "BRRRRRT!" sound when switching on the machine? Or is this gone and the disk just sits and spins?
If this sound was gone, then it is almost guaranteed to be a defect 9334 IC on the disk controller (assuming there is no mainboard failure, nor a defect disk drive).
Unfortunately the 9334, while not unobtanium is one of the more expensive and harder to find chips on a Disk II Controller Card. Most of the electronics parts places like Mouser, Jameco and JDR Microdevices don't seem to have any. But you can find them on eBay. Usually still cheaper than buying another whole card. Although buying another card may still be a better value overall if you count getting spares of the unobtanium PROM chips as well as the other several 74LS chips.
The owner of BMOW is very responsive. I also recently bought a Floppy Emu, it didn't work, and the issue ended up being my controller card. The owner was able to help me narrow down issue to chip B2 - a 74LS05 on my controller card, I replaced this chip and it works!
I had another second controller card where all the TI chips had black oxide on the chip legs because of the silver content. I was able to revive this card by cleaning the chip legs - thankfully everything is in sockets. Do you have any visible corrosion / oxide layer on the chip legs of your controller card?
If you want to visualize what the controller is receiving, here's a program that at least shows you a cross section of the data coming from the "disk", whether it be a Disk II or FloppyEmu. It's a fairly limited tool, but it's a sufficiently short program that anyone can type it in by hand if your disk drive isn't working. Be sure to proofread line 10, those numbers need to be exactly right.
This program prints a table of all 128 possible byte values that the controller can receive, including both legal and illegal patterns. In that table it prints a count of how many instances there were of each value. (minimum 0, maximum 255)
capture109.png
The picture below is what it should look like with FloppyEmu attached, but no disk loaded. (eg: after pressing "next" to eject the disk) FloppyEmu sends nothing but $FF bytes, so all the numbers are 0 except the one corresponding to FF in the lower-right corner:
capture111.png
Then, after loading disk image
DOS33 MASTER.DOfrom the Utilities folder on FloppyEmu, the program prints this table of byte counts. Track 0 of the DOS 3.3 System Master should have exactly this distribution of nibble values:capture112.png
If the program just hangs then it suggests the controller isn't receiving any signal at all.
For a valid disk, there shouldn't be any nonzero values in the top row nor lefthand column. (Unless it's a physical Disk II with the door open.)
Hi there,
Another option that would not only solve your issue but also add capability would be to purchase the Yellowstone Universal disk controller from BigMessOWires.com (same place you got your FloppyEMU) - it can act as a regular Disk II controller but it can also act as a Liron card adding Smartport ability so that you can use 32mb disk images like Total Replay (over 300 Apple II games on one disk image).
https://www.bigmessowires.com/yellowstone/
Hope this helps!
FYI - The 9334 can be replaced with a 74LS259.
Thanks for that reminder... Jameco has those in stock... $0.89
https://www.jameco.com/z/74LS259-Major-Brands-IC-74LS259-8-Bit-Addressable-Latch_47327.html
Although you'll pay way more for shipping than the part! And I'm not sure if they have a minimum order or not. I usually order a bunch of extra stuff so the shipping is worth it...
Jameco has all of the chips used on the Disk II controller card except for the 74LS323, and of course the PROMs. Having spares is a good thing. You can get the 74LS323 off eBay. That's the other harder to find but not quite unobtanium part.
So this looked like a cool little program I could type in for the fun of it. At first I had line 30 at PR# 3. There's nothing in 3, but I wanted to try it anyways. This did lock up my computer, so I got to type it in again. o.O Then I tried to run it, using PR# 6. The slot that has my Disk Controller Card. Nothing came up, just a blank screen with Apple II at the top. Then the light starts to blink on the Floppy Emu, and a command prompt comes up on the screen. I type in CATALOG, and it's my disk. The Floppy Emu is working again!
I have no idea why the disks are working now. I should probably try typing this program in again and get it to work. And I don't know why it came up as a blank screen at first. It was doing something.
Thanks for the help. I don't know how "fixed" it is now. I did splurge and get a Yellowstone card though. The Floppy Emu is pretty amazing. I might as well pair it up with what it's made with.
Thanks again :)
If you're going to splurge on a drive card that's for sure a great option. The Yellowstone is so nice if you have other "real" drives around. I've also used it with a Fujinet.
Well. I tried to boot it, just to make sure. And after I turned it off, it fails to boot again. So there's something going on with that card.
S.Elliott wrote:
If the program just hangs then it suggests the controller isn't receiving any signal at all.
I did notice that when I do PR#6 from the prompt Floppy Emu goes from Idel to Read. Also on boot, it goes to Read. So I'm thinking the cards are talking to each other.
It will be interesting to see if everything works when you get your new Yellowstone card. Hopefully it's just the Disk II card and problem solved. Just a few weeks back I had an issue where my Apple IIe was not booting to my FloppyEMU or seeing any of my slots actually. It would just go straight to a prompt. Thanks to lots of helpful input here from several of the same people commenting here I was able to fix it by replacing the 74LS245 chip on my motherboard. I must have had a static incident when I was playing around in there moving jumpers and cards (though I don't remember anything happening) or it just was it's time to fail.
I hope so too. I also checked out your post.
Looking at the first answer: https://www.applefritter.com/comment/101241#comment-101241
I tried this myself to see what it would look like at C600L. And since I have a regular controller card in there, everything checks out. All the code is right, so maybe it is just the Controller Card.
It's a good sign anyway. Similarly I had a non-working super serial card, but it would list it's ROM contents fine to the monitor; replacing the 6551 fixed that particular card.
It looks like it was the Disk Controller card. I hooked everything up to the Yellowstone, popped it in, and she works. You have to PR#6 after booting, to get the card to boot, I'm on an Apple II+, and even IN#6 to get certin things like Wizardry to run, but no problems at all. *knock on wood*
The Yellowstone and Floppy Emu work well together. You don't need the Yellowstone to get the Floppy Emu to work, but my own Disk Controller card gave up the ghost. It's sweet that it all worked out.
- Thanks for all the help
A Yellowstone and A FloppyEMU are a great combo to have at your disposal. Enjoy :)
The FloppyEMU and Yellowstone are 2 of the best upgrades you can get for the AppleII - enjoy!
That's great news - glad to hear it
For anyone else that lands here like I did with the same problem, in my case I saw this behavior because my Disk Interface card was using the DOS 3.2 PROMS (5/6 instead of 5A/6A) and I was trying to load a DOS 3.3 image. I was able to find some 13 sector images on archive.org (e.g., https://archive.org/details/System_Master_Diskette_DOS_3.2) and they worked great with Floppy EMU and my disk controller!
In the end, I may do the same thing as the original poster because most of the software out there is 16 sector based, but at least I'm up and running now!
Those 13 sector PROMs are pretty rare and highly sought after by some people. If that's an original early controller card I'd keep it as-is and buy another 16 sector card.