• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

AlphaMicro 1200

R

RT109

New Member
Joined
Jan 18, 2021
Messages
5
Hi,

My Alpha1200 is not booting, but the drive seems ok (reads ok on an old adaptec card). Could be the controller, or the mainboard perhaps. It makes it to 'b' just doesn't seem to touch the drive (there's no drive select happening on the scsi bus).

Does anyone have the alpha docs for the 1200? (or the 1000 series?) and/or Does anyone have an AlphaCD they'd be willing to share?

I've also purchased a SCSI2SD board (v6) which apparently talks SCSI-1/SASI and I had planned to create another drive and put a system on it, has anyone experience with Alphamicro + SCSI2SD?

Thanks for any help offered, my AM1200 is almost pristine and would be a shame to loose it.

Regards
Richard
 
It's only borderline related to what this person is experiencing. The AM100 and AM1200 are night and day different devices in pretty much every way imaginable.

Alpha Micro is apparently even more rigid than DEC/Compaq/HP/... is with the VAX, essentially, as I understand it, quite unsupportive of the hobby and vintage field.
 
My recollection was that the 1000-series was Moto 68K based, running CP/M.

The 100 was proprietary (did it use the WD chipset) running AMOS.
 
From Classichasclass's writeups I get the impression that the majority of AM's userbase was in embedded/POS-type systems. Probably they had a CP/M-68k port, but there wouldn't be much point running that over the in-house OS for your order-processing/inventory/etc., on top of the fact that CP/M-68k never caught on the way CP/M-80 did.

Edit: ah, I'd forgotten, but apparently there was also some kind of hack in place to make the 68k operate as a little-endian CPU, for legacy reasons. Dunno how transparent this was to the software, and how many issues that may have caused with CP/M-68k.

Edit: okay, no, the CP/M option was one of the assorted CP/M-on-a-card products everybody was offering in the '80s. Guess it just never took off.
 
Last edited:
The AM-100/T does indeed run its own peculiar form of AMOS (and as far as I can determine, only that).

As far as getting your 1200 resurrected, the issue you'll have is that no 68K Alpha Micro can boot from CD. Your choices are floppy, VHS (not a joke) if it happened to come with an Alpha Micro VHS tape drive, or QIC tape over SCSI. Birdata may sell you an AMOS tape and you should be able to connect a Tandberg QIC tape streamer and boot from that, but that will probably be more money than you'd like to spend.

If 'b' is showing on the display and doesn't disappear, the system is trying to boot but the drive isn't coming up. You can try triggering the self test if you want to check the controller, see http://ampm.floodgap.com/www/1200.htm . But my money's on the drive; Alpha Micro drives of that era are all dead and dying.

They are multi-user systems with an OS inspired by DEC RSTS/E
Click to expand...

I always thought AMOS felt more like TOPS-10. Why do you say RSTS/E, particularly?
 
ClassicHasClass said:
I always thought AMOS felt more like TOPS-10. Why do you say RSTS/E, particularly?
Click to expand...

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/t...motorola-coldfire-68k-based-desktop-pcs/791/3

" I as far as AlphaMicro at the time it was the AM100 system which was S100 and used the WD16 chip set (think of PDP11/03 with a different opcom outpurt. The Amos operating system was a (cough cough) copy of the DEC RSTS/E system. "

reading the early, early docs, that is implied as well, though you could never run RSTS off of a floppy

since the early RSTS developers did their work using TOPS-10 cross-development before it could self-host there are obvious roots to TOPS as well
 
The AM-100 to me always sounded like an end-run around DEC to grab a hunk of the 11/03 market. The WD16 microcode was fairly close to the 11/03; just far enough to avoid the wrath of the lawyers. Not a barn-burner in the performance area, even for the time.

What's interesting is that WD is back in the processor business, sort of, with their own RISC-V core.
 
Thanks for all the help, Disk is fine as is the xebec card. There's no traffic on the SASI/SCSI bus because its not even getting that far. It does make it to 'b' sometimes, but code execution stops on the 68k (hits a STOP) before it attempts to access the drive.

Its slow going without a schematic but so far found two ram chips on the fritz, replaced, found an issue with the -12v that would just go away intermittently, fixed, now getting further, but with a catalog of selftest codes and no docs to look them up. RAM now seems ok (following on the LA seems like that's not an issue anymore).

I seem to remember port 0 (top left from the rear) was the 'boot' port and should output some terse diagnostics, but its not, or that may have been the AM100, anyone remember?

So, still holding out for someone with ANY documentation on the AM1xxx (and/or AlphaCD) so I can figure out where its failing now, and I also seem to recall the dip switches at the rear controlled its boot behaviour, maybe.
 
Ok, the codes I'm seeing at the moment are 3 and 6 intermittently when booting normally, when booting with self-test I'm seeing 5c and 88 intermittently. About 50% of the time it gets to 'b' then hits a STOP without touching the sasi bus. Dip switches are up down up down. There's no floppy/controller.

I'll work some more on it next week. I've already dumped the boot proms to maybe disassemble those and get an idea of what its trying to do. Thanks again for all the help,
Regards
Richard
 
RT109 said:
Hi,

My Alpha1200 is not booting, but the drive seems ok (reads ok on an old adaptec card). Could be the controller, or the mainboard perhaps. It makes it to 'b' just doesn't seem to touch the drive (there's no drive select happening on the scsi bus).

Does anyone have the alpha docs for the 1200? (or the 1000 series?) and/or Does anyone have an AlphaCD they'd be willing to share?

I've also purchased a SCSI2SD board (v6) which apparently talks SCSI-1/SASI and I had planned to create another drive and put a system on it, has anyone experience with Alphamicro + SCSI2SD?

Thanks for any help offered, my AM1200 is almost pristine and would be a shame to loose it.

Regards
Richard
Click to expand...

ok... the status displays before ‘F’ (quantitative memory check), I believe all come from the boot rom (at least on the am100/L, so probably on the am1000/1200/1600 too.

I also purchased a SCSI2SD board (v6) which I had planned to use it as a spare/main drive and for data backup, although all drives on the Alpha Micro need a disk driver for any drive if the Alpha Micro is to recolonize and operate with it.

I believe you might be able to configure the SCSI2SD to function as a fuji 70mb. or maxtor 150mb. drive, but I have not done this and that would seem to waste most of the SD space.

My recollection is, I was going to write a disk driver of 32 logical 65536 512 byte blocks for a 1gb. drive, I remember checking the device driver and os for maximum number of logical surfaces, pretty sure I can do at least 32. (think fuji 400mb.)

I’m still working to fix my am1000, but I’m real slow, (a stroke has goofed up my left hand) if I had a amos/l based machine, I don’t think it wouldn’t take me long to setup a working SCSI2SD and basic docs, I still have all my AM related source code.

If I recall AM1200 diagnostics, you setup a terminal on port 0 for 300 or 1200 baud (can’t remember), hold the reset button down with the power off, then power up, when you release the reset button both terminal and status display should start displaying diagnostics. If garbage shows on the terminal, repeat the power up process in the other baud (300 or 1200) if no diagnostics on terminal, repeat the power up process an try tapping on the terminal’s space bar which may auto-reconize the baud rate.

Good luck and keep me informed on your progress.

Curbie
 
Chuck(G) said:
The AM-100 to me always sounded like an end-run around DEC to grab a hunk of the 11/03 market. The WD16 microcode was fairly close to the 11/03; just far enough to avoid the wrath of the lawyers. Not a barn-burner in the performance area, even for the time.
Click to expand...
The WD16 microcode was one of at least 4 MICROM sets you could get for the 1600 chipset. There was the LSI-11, the Pascal Microengine, the WD16 used by Alpha Micro, and one that I don't know the name of that was used in insanely expensive Western Electric / Bell System modems - 9600 baud with at least 4 subchannels on a transcontinental leased line - sort of an early version of what Micom would go onto do much less expensively (and much more successfully).

Does anyone know of any instruction sets besides those 4?

The actual processor in the 1600 is 8-bit - the MICROMs implemented an emulator for various 16-bit instruction sets.

BTW, the AM-100 abused the S-100 bus to create overheight cards that stuck out of the top of the card guides and wobbled around. Somebody strongarmed the 696 Committee into accepting this form factor as "Compliance H". I used to consult for an airline that used a number of these systems to print out load sheets and flight instructions (apparently nobody told Alpha Micro what was going on with these systems being used to print out things like "Procedure for engine failure at V2" and other life-critical stuff). One of the benefits of consulting for an airline was that I would get stacks of tickets (back when they were on red carbon paper) endorsed "Open/Open; Open/Open" which meant that I could show up at any airport and get a seat on any airline to any destination. Of course, if I abused it they would have been rather upset...
 
curbie said:
Good luck and keep me informed on your progress.

Curbie
Click to expand...

I have progressed this further and fixed yet another duff ram chip, and have now used all my stock of MT1259Z-12's which isn't good. I'll look at finding some more.

Now I'm getting 91 and 15 flashing alternately on the screen. From what I can find 91 means serial port 1 fail, but no idea what 15 means, is it a status code for the fault, or a fault in its own right? Once we get this 91/15 it won't get any further and just loops around. If I start it without holding reset it gets all the way to 'b' but still no drive select on the sasi bus.
 
nah, more bad ram :( and I'm out of spares. I think I'm going to have to sit on this until I can get some more. Thanks everyone for your help, its much appreciated. If in the meantime anyone finds a manual for the 1200 please let me have a copy, i'm very much working in the dark here.
 
With all the talk about CPM on the alpha micro, as VP of Operations for 17 years, with several hundred Alpha Micro's on monthly maintenance contract plus the majority of non-contract maintenance work in south Florida, like the AM1100, I've never seen a running one.

I think the claim was, CPM required a AM334, 4 port expansion board (maybe a AM1013 for the AM100 & AM100/T stuff) which had a Z80 on it, but that same board ran RJE to IBMs so I don’t know if the Z80 was used for RJE.

I viewed AM1100s and CMP on the alpha micro like bigfoot, people claimed they existed, and maybe they did, but I never saw a running one.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top