exidysorcerer.net

Afternoon all,
Thanks for letting me join.
Although I have a reasonable collection of vintage machines, one grail item has always been an Exidy Sorcerer and as of yesterday afternoon I'm the proud owner of one. And on the initial test of the main machine - IT BOOTS! (Although I dont have a basic cart)
What I do have however is the S100 expansion unit and two MASSIVE 8" Drives (I'll get the make/model later when I get home)
In the expansion unit there is an Acoustic Electronic Developments Memoraed RAM board. I'm guessing this is the 32k -> 56k ram expansion with an extra Rom?
Anyway, I've never owned a Sorcerer before, so apologies in advance for any dumb questions
On the weekend I'll start testing the rest of the kit and start powering stuff up.
Fingers crossed.

Cheers,
Jase/Mr Lurch

Wow what a find. It's great that your boot disks are working. You should make a backup copy of them (onto some "new" 8" disks) if possible.

Are your 8" disks hard sector or soft sector ?

If they are soft sector you should be able to interface a Gotek (with appropriate adapter from 8" to 5.25" cabling) running flashfloppy.

For hard sector drives you can use a virtual hard sector generator like this one (Although it's more setup for 5.25" hard sector drives).

https://deramp.com/vsg.html

Can you upload a photo of the hard disk controller in the S100 expansion ? Would be interesting to see what controller this is.

Regards,
John Halk

I’ll take a look tomorrow, but I do know that they’re Morrow Design drives, so possibly it’s a Disk Jockey.

Ok, yes - its a Morrow Design Dick Jockey 2D/B.

I've been poking at it again today. All PSU's tested ok, so I decided to try and boot the machine.

With the expansion unit on, and then powering the Exidy on, I can see the ram goes from 7FFF to D7FF - so I have to assume the Exidy is "seeing" the Expansion unit and at least the memory card.
With a disk in the drive (The drive marked "A") and plugged into the end of the 50pin cable; I powered on the drive, then the expansion unit, and then finally the Exidy. It seems to boot to the monitor ok.
I then enter GO D800 (there was a note in the box), after a few moments the LED on the Disk Jockey comes on, but the drive doesn't react at all. No LED on the front, the head doesn't move or anything.

Thoughts?

Just a guess but sounds like you’re only connecting the single A 8” drive to the controller.

Since it’s a two 8” drive configuration - the second drive would have the termination resistor “dip” pack installed on the last drive in the chain. So drive may not be spinning up because you only have the first drive connected without any termination resistors.

Although the termination resistor pack could be installed on drive A.

http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%2 ... 20rev4.pdf

Page 41.

Maybe Connect both 8” drives to the floppy controller cable and try it again.

Regards,
John Halk

Reading the manual for the disk jockey it simply says the “A” drive needs to be at the end of the cable and needs to be terminated. Although I can’t find any termination hardware (I’m guessing it’s a jumper buried on the disk drive PCB).

Have you been able to find the manuals for the 8” drive units ?

Nope

Ok - found what I THINK is the manual for the drives.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_m ... 7/mode/2up

And have confirmed that the DS and termination jumpers are correct.