Date   : Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:00:57 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: More Eurobeebness

Philip Pemberton wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
>> It happened again :-) I found a local chap off-loading all of his 
>> Eurobeeb stock to free up space in his garage, so came home with a 
>> car-load. Three 19" 3U chassis this time around (only one with a PSU), 
>> several additional backplanes, and over 60 boards.
> 
> Wow. Nicely done, Jules!

Yeah, I'm trying to tell myself that - the lounge looks like a bomb site right 
now ;-)

>> About 20 of those boards are probably beyond repair - battery leakage 
>> and rust have both killed them off, but that still leaves a lot of 
>> good boards of various types.
> 
> "Nothing is beyond repair, given enough time". Well, unless the boards 
> are four- or six-layer things, in which case they generally are 
> irreparable.
> 
> I've repaired damage caused by battery leakage - usually it's a case of 
> attacking the corrosion with a fibreglass pen to remove the crap, 
> vinegar to neutralise the acid, fix any open tracks with a Roadrunner 
> pen, then do some final cleanup with IPA. It takes a while but I've done 
> it...

Yep, I hear ya - a couple of candidates for cleanup have already been 
"vinegared" this afternoon. Generally the batteries are on the CPU boards 
(some of the additional memory boards have battery back-up too), and I've got 
more CPU boards than I have other goodies (such as floppy controllers), so 
it's no big deal if half of them are toast anyway.

> If you end up scrapping the boards you deem "beyond repair", let me know 
> - I'd love to at least have a go at fixing them.

I had wondered about asking you that :-) If there's a home for them I 
certainly won't chuck them out - I don't ever do that (well, except to PCs)

There aren't really any *seriously* hard to get chips except on some of the 
specialist boards like the ADC ones - but I suspect some of them will need 
reasonably scarce things like 2KB SRAMs etc. to really get them going.

Not sure on the PAL situation yet, either. Hopefully CU didn't blow security 
fuses on them. Not many of the boards use PALs anyway, thankfully.

>> Nicest find amongst the pile was a CU 68008 CPU board - I'm hoping 
>> that the person I got all this lot from has a copy of CU's flavour of 
>> OS-9 to run on it.
> 
> 68008? Wasn't that a variant of the 68000 that only had an 8-bit 
> external data bus?

Yep. Cheaper than a proper 68K I suppose, but it was a good way of getting 
OS-9 (and hence a Unix-a-like system) in reach of mere mortals.

I suppose in a (vague) way, it could be termed another 68xxx copro for the 
beeb (along with Cumana, Torch, and Casper) - I doubt it'd need much glue 
logic to hook one up to a beeb. CU's bus is of course the Acorn System bus 
anyway, which is doubtless (without checking) rather close to the Tube on the 
beeb...

>> I've got a pile of docs - probably covers about 95% of the boards that 
>> CU made, so will get scanning this week...
> 
> Like I've said before, if you're after hosting, I've got a dedicated 
> server with a 10MBit pipe and about 10GB of spare HDD that's doing 
> pretty much bugger all...

Well I've got unlimited bandwidth & space over on classicmp.org now, so I'm 
definitely sorted out on that front. Just a case of breaking out the scanner 
and slogging through these Cube docs! I've been frantically taking photos + 
imaging ROMs these last few days prior to uploading - I've got about 90% of 
the Torch and RML stuff covered now, and about 40% of the Acorn stuff. It's 
slow going.

cheers

Jules