Another TC-01 back to life

[simmo1010]

I thought I should say hello after lurking for a while.

I bought a twin drive TC-01 (is that a TC-02?) while visiting family in the UK last year. It had the usual "blank display, no alpha-lock" symptoms, so having waited for it to be shipped back home to New Zealand with some other goodies, it has been sitting on my "to do" pile. I did the Mean Well PSU swap last week just to be safe (probably unnecessary), and tonight traced the no-boot problem to a bad 74LS239 in the clock circuit. Swapped that out and the Einstein is working fine - both floppy drives and all!

I'm now thinking about getting software onto the machine - it didn't come with any disks. I bought a BBC Basic disk and games disk from DataServe Retro, so I have got something to play around with for now. I know the obvious answer is a Gotek, but I'd like to keep the Einstein looking original. Is it still possible to get hold of an einSDein? I did a quick bit of googling and eBay searching, but couldn't find anything.

Cheers,

Ian

[Lardo Boffin]

Hello Ian

Well done on fixing Albert!

SirMorris did release a small batch of einSDeins a few years back but nothing since. They are rarer than a rare thing now.

I wouldn’t expect him to make any more any time soon or possibly ever as he has been very quiet on various forums for the past few years.

I have one (I was lucky - right place / right time) but as it doesn’t play nicely with programming languages don’t use it much. It is however awesome for games.

I use an external gotek. It was intended for a BBC Micro but works with the tatty. Plug it into the external drive port, get power for it from somewhere and disconnect the internal power to drive 0 (as the gotek becomes drive 0). Other than the power to drive 0 no changes to the tatung.

https://www.tatung-forum.co.uk/viewtopi ... &t=55#p489

Lardo

[simmo1010]

Thanks Lardo.

The external GoTek is a very cool setup - and I could probably get all the bits for less than the price of a couple of CF2 blank disks.

One thing did pique my perverse interest in using mouldy old disks to store all my valuable data - I have a lovely set of Cumana twin DSDD 5.25" disk drives for my Beeb. Am I understanding one of the other threads correctly to assume that if I create a DOS80 boot disk (possibly using this http://www.connectingcomputers.xyz/tatu ... insys.html) then I can just plug the Cumana drives into the back of the Einstein and use them as drives 2 and 3? If so, would I need to change the drive id jumpers each time?

Cheers,

Ian.

[retrogamer]

Welcome to the forum.

Great you’ve got everything working!

I use an external gotek as Drive 1. I find this is the easiest way to generate a bootable disk for drive 0 by simply copying the gotek image to the physical disk in drive 0.

This will give you access to any of the DOS versions in existence and the required programs to format and verify a disk in any drive and copy from one drive to another. Otherwise I can’t see how you can easily format your 5.25” disks for use with the TC01. Technically, it’s possible to generate a formatted disk if you have a PC with a 5.25” disk drive and if that’s applicable I can provide further details.

Your current 3” disk in drive 0 will have system tracks if it boots into DOS, so as soon as you’ve formatted a 5.25” disk you’ll be able to save and load to external drives jumpered as 1, 2 or 3.

You should find that your twin drive works fine with any format, but you’ll need something like System 80 to access the higher available capacity.

Richard