exidysorcerer.net

Well done John. Welcome to the world of running a forum.
Is there any chance of moving the website to HTTPS?
Malwarebytes chucks a wobbly about insecure logins each time I come here.

Thanks Ric.

Welcome and thanks for joining the exidy sorcerer forums.

Yes - I have setup SSL under Apache before. I will also need a SSL certificate. Will take this on when I get some spare time

Regards,
John Halk
Melbourne Australia

Hi Ric,

SSL is now configured on our webserver.

Regards,
John Halk

ric wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 10:30 am Well done John. Welcome to the world of running a forum.
Is there any chance of moving the website to HTTPS?
Malwarebytes chucks a wobbly about insecure logins each time I come here.

I'm tossing up using this as my avatar here, rather than my regular "beer & beanie" one.

ric wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 4:43 am I'm tossing up using this as my avatar here, rather than my regular "beer & beanie" one.
dd-logo200.png

Go with the Dreamdisk one

Hei,

I'm Julian, originally from the U.K.

A Sorcerer II was my family's first bought home computer in January 1979.
Actually it's this exact one with the Micropolis hard-sectored drives: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det ... rcerer-II/
Together with our S-100 Expansion Box https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det ... sion-Unit/
both of which I donated to the museum in my Dad's name back in 2014.

Last year I did a bit of Internet sleuthing on the history of Exidy: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nh1POn ... drive_link

Glad to find this new forum!

My story: In 1981 I worked at New Dimensions in Computing, the East Lansing store which sold Exidy Sorcerers, Atari 400s and 800s, and Vector Graphic S100 CP/M machines. That's where I got my Sorcerer board. The boss had a customer's Sorcerer with S100 box in for repair but he had no S100 cards to test it with. I suggested he use one from the Vector Graphic and he plugged one in and turned it on. POOF! Turns out there was some difference in the power circuit. The Sorcerer was dead and he had to replace the main board. I felt terrible but he didn't blame me. Instead he gave me the dead board after he removed the cart connector and the PIO connector. Not knowing enough then about electronics to troubleshoot it, I just unsoldered every chip and soldered in sockets and bought new chips and got it working. It cost over $200, still much cheaper than a new one. I couldn't afford an Exidy keyboard and case, so I bought a surplus keyboard and built a small circuit to change Exidy's 5x16 matrix to 8x8 plus shift. I disassembled the Exidy monitor ROM on my Atari 800 to find the keyboard routine, then patched the keycodes, burned an EEPROM, and it worked. I also modded the RAM to 56K. The plan was to build a CP/M machine out of it for my friend but I never got around to writing a BIOS for it or finding a disk interface.

Now it's alive again with a tape simulator and I'm building a software library for it. I'm still in Michigan and have a friend here who often displays his Sorcerer II at VCFMW. Anyone else nearby?

A great story.
Dirk