BUDDENBERGRA@USC-ISI.ARPA (Rex Buddenberg) (10/09/85)
Some experiences with the Ciarcia SB180 computer board. The SB180 board has some gotchas attached. It is a solid machine, but not without some rough edges. Here is what a couple of us have found: Reset. A cold boot doesn't always. The system is supposed to come up in monitor if no disk is present in A: (or no drives attached). System is supposed to reboot CPM if the disc is loaded. In both cases, it often takes several resets to get action. Discs. Read the manual carefully. Few drives come correctly configured out of the box. If you put an 8" drive on the system (eg as C:), you gotta turn it on every time you use the machine. If you don't (or turn it off without shutting down the rest of the system), you get this Gawd-awful buzz in the 5" drives. Configuration. I hooked up a couple Qume 542's and found that you want to pull ALL the shunts except the drive select strap. Regarding 8" drives, a Qume DT8 came up OK after fiddling around with the settings for a bit. A Tandon half height has yet to decide to cooperate. Kermit. And modem programs. Haven't yet figured out the I/O. The CP4 'generic' Kermit will not talk to the modem for some reason. Yes, I tried all the port settings. If someone gets a Kermit front end for this thing, let me know... ASCI ports. You get a terminal and a modem port. The basic bits come right out of the 64180 and only the 1488/1489 RS-232 drivers are between your terminal and the CPU. Which is just enough. My printer is wired as a DTE, but the modem is a DCE. So to avoid fooling around with null modems and such, try this. Get a 26 pin crimp-on connector to attach the ribbon to the board. Get your length of ribbon cable and crimp the connector to it in the middle. Then wire each end to the DB-25s however you need them. I got one female DTE and one male DCE so both peripherals plug in correctly. Z-DOS. You have to sort thru all the stuff on the masters and figger out that you don't need the 4 directory programs supplied -- 1 will do nicely. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of help in setting up a usable working disc configuration. Take out too much and you get warmed over CPM. Put in too much and you have disc-bloat. Not obvious where to discriminate. But I guess this is a bit like inheriting your million and not knowing where to spend it all. There is no readily apparent way to get from CPM to the monitor. The reverse is obvious. Summary. This board did not come up quite as slickly as my AMPRO Little Board, which has become my workhorse for general stuff. But it is in the same league. b -------