Tatung Computer Forum

Hello all - I'm new here- long time BBC Micro fan but I acquired a BNIB Einstein the year before last. I only had the boot disk with it and a handful of blank CF2 disks so it sat under cover for a while before I could do anything with it.

I got hold of an Openflops drive from Simulant as a way of getting software to/from the machine - the ultimate plan being to install both the Openflops and the original drive internally- booting off the Openflops and keeping the 3" drive "for best"!


I made a cable up with two edge connectors and the Openflops worked in either connector.

The original drive only worked in the first connector and wouldn’t work at all if the Openflops was connected.

I’ve moved the jumpers in both drives to 0 and 2 respectively (and swapped this around) to no avail.
I’ve also moved the second jumper on the TEAC drive to what I presume is “slave” and back to no avail.

As a last resort I’ve cut the second connector off my home-made cable so it now just feeds the Gotek as disk 0 and I’ve used the original Tatung cable in the external drive socket - No luck- when trying to access the TEAC drive it says “No sector 1”. I’ve tried formatting the drive but I get the same result.

I even tried adding the twist descibed here https://re-enthused.com/hardware/adding ... is-cocall/
but all that did was make the Openflops drive respond to every drive number selected.

I know the Openflops can mimic two drives and so I wonder if that is part of the issue?

It would be great to have the two drives working in the Tatung so any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance

Andrew

Well it's all working now - I had an extra jumper set (Thanks Jonah at Simulant) and, it seems, one of the cables was not plugged in far enough

The Openflops drive is interesting as it can emulate two drives at once- This seems particularly useful on the TC01 as the disk system always has to be loaded at the start. If I can work out how to do it then drive0 can have an image of the disk system and drive 1 can have the various other disks on it -It's a little inconvenient at the moment having to scroll back through all the images to find the system disk if I'd loaded another image before shutdown. It's working well - first game was a blast of chuckie egg - that thumping tune blasting out of the central speaker brought back memories.

I hope to contribute more to this site - wondering what other additions there are for it -I'm running the RGB feed through an 8220 clone vga adaptor I bought for £18 off Amazon.

The openflops is a lovely device