@@adriansdigitalbasement2 The only thing better than a long episode is a super long episode. I guess we're all innocent victims of the circumstances. :)
Nice video, Adrian :) That laptop drive is fine!! The adapter power pins were shorted on the metal back of the drive because someone forgot to insulate the adapter properly!! I had the same issue before with HDD adapters.
We installed LS120s in lieu of floppies for a while in our machines. It was short lived but they were good for backups. The laser on the ls120 is with the heads and is a tiny little thing. It is used to read servo index data from the disk. This allows more precise positioning of the heads and thus higher density data. The hole in the eject button is an emergency eject hole. These can suffer from the click of death.
As soon as he said that, I thought I recalled the LS120 drives using a laser for tracking, not directly for read/write. I remember a lot (well, relatively, a lot) of Compaq machines having LS120 drives in place of the floppy as a standard feature (and was bootable) around the AMD K6-II era. Specifically those beige-y models that were kind bulbous and had some front ports behind a frosted plastic door at the bottom center of the case front. Before they went to the white design with the changeable translucent color panels.
@@slightlyevolved they made quite a few OEM deals to try and make up lost ground against Zip. IBM desktops also had them for a while too. AIUI they also stumped up the work necessary to get BIOS support as a condition of the OEM deal. Of course, it wasn’t enough! The computer manufacturers took the excellent deal on drives while they were being offered but had absolutely no investment in keeping the platform.
I have a original-iMac-era external ls120 drive (USB), for bridging to the brave new world with no floppies. I've used it only a handful of times at most.
LS-120 - Laser Servo. The bottom side of the LS disk contains an optical pattern which is read by the lower head laser in order to position the head accurately enough to achieve the number of tracks required.
Lovely to see Rees pop up in this one! One of my favourite channels. It's very generous of you to mention other channels Adrian, not many other channels take the time to do that. It really helps get the word out to the new guys.
Rees' channel is where I found out about the PC-Sprint. That's why I like the retro community. For the most part, they're all really chill (i.e. Adiran Black).
I had that larger LS 120 drive back in the day. It's been 20 years, but do remember it having a unique sound, and if memory serves me, yours sounded about right. I bought that drive new and just loved it. I remember booting off regular floppies, and that was the magic over the zip drive, that and it fit right into the tower looking like nothing more than a regular floppy drive. The fact I could store 120mb on a floppy sized disc and run regular floppy discs, was the reason I got it. Of course, it didn't stay in favor once compact flash came along, and it's been long forgotten. It did bring back fond memories of it though. It was nothing more than a fad, but one I am glad I had!!!
I bought a gateway PC a few years ago, had no clue about LS120 then. I thought someone had just added a fancy floppy drive with a soft touch eject button, low and behold it was an LS120! It also had a Travan tape drive for backing up your HDD.
@@0326Hambone yeah, if I were still into computers like I was 20-25 years ago, I'd cherish having an LS120 again for nostalgic reasons. I remember it was much faster and actually quieter than a regular floppy drive, and I liked their little gold logo on the drive door. To me, it was miraculous that they could take a little floppy drive type disc, and stuff 120mb onto it! I can't remember by how much, but it also increased the capacity of a regular floppy disc. Then the real game changer came along with the CDR! How could it get any better, a burnable CD!!!
@@0326Hambone I rebuilt practically every brand of PC ever made from around the first generation Pentium 1 up to about P4, including laptop and desktop machines, and Gateway was one of the better built brands. Sony Vaio's were also well built, and Dells were mediocre, but there were some brands that were just junk, can we say Compaq Presario. One thing about branded machines though, most were difficult to work on due to case styling, and cramming everything into the smallest space possible! In all those years though, the Mac was highest quality computer I ever rebuilt. The components in them were far superior, but I just didn't like the Mac os and software. Mostly stuck with IBM compatible due to their availability and diversity. It really got interesting when I started delving into laptops. Man, I used to have five PCs updating at a time in my living room, at least it kept my house warm in the winter...lol. Ahhh, the good old dial up days, 56k all the way!
We all love the long videos! Who doesn’t want as much Adrian’s Digital Basement as humanly possible?! It is always a blast watching you go through these mail call episodes, and your amazing repair videos on the main channel are just such a delightful treat every week! Random question… Has anyone else also been really enjoying watching Usagi Electric’s Data General, and now his massive PDP-11 shenanigans? If anyone here hasn’t checked out Usagi Electric’s channel, I would highly recommend that you all do! I’m just a fan of Usagi Electric, and just know that those who love Adrian’s videos may also really enjoy his channel/videos as well!
Hi Adrian, the sound of the working LS-120 is normal (the "tschuka tschuka tschuk" sound when inserting a disc may be a calibration to seek for track 0, the hissing noise is the voice coil tracking mechanism). When inserting normal disks you will hear a "clok" sound now and then when the mechanism recalibrates the head position (as you have no defined steps as with a stepper motor in a regular floppy drive, no position encoder and no tracking helper on a regular floppy disk it needs these recalibrations). And yes, the drives work with a laser for tracking (it is mentioned in the Wikipedia article). Take a close look at the discs, you can see the optical guide pattern on the disc surface. I own several of these drives and also an LS-240 which is able to write 32MB to a regular 1,44MB disc which is quite impressing. It is achieved by what you call "shingled recording" on modern high capacity hard drives. As there is only a single area the whole disc must be written at once. It's a shame that Panasonic didn't implement the whole feature into the firmware, so reading of these 32MB discs also requires a driver which does no longer work on "modern" OS... Regards, Torsten P. S. As YT refuses to respond to your answer I will add the additional info here: Yeah, this 32MB feature was a bit late and the LS-240 was not wide spread. BTW, for the LS-120 there existed an SCSI adapter. Somewhere I have a few of these. They were quite critical, there seemed to be dependencies on the drive's firmware revision. I bought these because I thought that could be useful as external drive for computers with SCSI (like) interface like the Atari. I think my adapters could have been these: web.archive.org/web/19991118150231/www.winstation.com/ssdspec.html. Not sure because currently the stuff is stowed away. There's not much info on the internet about these, it seems that Mitsubishi and Winstation Systems developed this and sold them as SLS-120 drives, so the seller possibly ripped the drives and controllers apart. Which explains the dependencies between SCSI adapter and drive firmware because it wasn't a universal IDE to SCSI adapter...
Thanks for the info. That is so cool about 32mb on a 1.44mb floppy -- I saw that mentioned in the WIkipedia article. Would have been wild if this had taken off and been more popular. I guess they were just a bit late to the party.
I loved it when you showed your home theater room, I sent you the Vic 20 motherboard missing the voltage regulator over a year ago. I'm glad it's being displayed and it was a lot of fun to say "OMG there is the board I sent him." It even has my name on the can still. Oh and BTW it does work you tested it in the mail call.
83C196LD - found on some Intel product timeline : "the low-priced 83C196LC and 83C196LD controllers for low-cost ABS systems" So maybe not defective, just unused. Many automotive ECUs have chips bonded onto a ceramic substrate, then a conformal coating is applied to keep the elements away. Also about the blue LEDs - the very first silicon carbide LEDs had a pleasing somewhat dim light, not quite as monochromatic as the later, brighter gallium nitride thin film based ones which is the technique still used for those. Those first ones were really expensive... yeah. And sometimes hard to get even at that price.
Hello Adrian, Noels Retro Lab already well answered your question about ROM and test harness in video called "Black Screen VIC-20 Repair (And Start Sequence Exploration)" at 12:00.
One major challenge of linear recording of magnetic media is making the R/W heads keep exact alignment with the tracks. There are several solutions to this. One may be to just make the tolerances big enough and the tracks wide enough so a certain misalignment won't matter. This solution is used on regular floppy disks. Of course this approach doesn't work if you want to increase the track density. This is why there is another solution of giving the media prerecorded tracks of magnetic information that will tell the R/W heads how to move to compensate for a misalignment. This approach is used on ZIP disks and, funny enough, tapes which use linear recording (e.g. LTO), which is, by the way, the reason those media must not be bulk-erased if you want to reuse them. The third solution would be to physically mark the media and read that marking optically, e.g. with a laser, like it is done with LS-120.
Thanks, it ook me forever to install the wall mounts -- I'll keep going to putting more up there as I print more. It's just handy to have them out and on display for easy access when I need them.
This video is the video that keeps on giving. I think the last time I saw wire wrap was in a Sanyo radio/cassette player from the '70s. Wire wrap was used for the inter-connects between the PCBs in it.
Hi Adrian, Laser is for alignment also LS120 have very high density so they read write slower. Normal floppy can't hold the capacity since they don't have the density. Use them since they come out on the market, I love it reading normally floppy really fast.
I would like to add that the magnetic read head can be made very narrow and still read a disk. A smaller head can read "bigger" tracks without any issue. The write head has an issue because no matter how small you make it you'll have a magnetic domain larger than the head. To write a bit the drive would pass current through the head, but at a level too low to make a magnet mark on the disk. If you turned on a laser while the low current was passing through the write head the added heat would lower the magnetic strength needed to make a bit. Basically you'd have small magnetic energy over a larger area but only the small part you hit with the laser would allow the magnetic field on the media to flip.
@@therealjammit ooh, are you saying LS120 uses the Curie point to control write area kinda like MiniDisc? I had been under the impression it’s only for traditional head positioning. But indeed MD holds a similar amount of data as LS120. Albeit it reads with the laser instead of with the magnetic head.
The 83C196 was used in early ABS braking and traction control systems. There was also the 87C196, and the 88C196, the last of which had flash embedded. They were sold to many of the large auto manufacturers for use in their vehicles. I used to test them for failure analysis. I've even wire-bonded them to ceramic packages for testing purposes, as many of them were installed directly onto controller boards and wire-bonded to them. I actually was given a 6-inch wafer of these devices in a presentation frame when I left Intel, it's on the wall above my desk right now, in fact. If you could get higher magnification, it should actually have the device name written along one of the sides, if memory serves. Bit of a trip down memory lane for me, too :)
Adrian, do you recall where you got that cassette t-shirt? Looked online briefly but didn't see the same one for sale. Thanks! Edit - kept looking and found it - looks like it is/was from Old Navy.
The power pins from the adapter seemed to be shorted against the metal case when the power cable was getting hot. Maybe you'll figure this out later in the video but I wanted to comment before I forgot. I'm still at 12:37.
Are you using an HDMI switch with your RetroTINK? (RetroTINK 5x Pro -> HDMI Switch -> Capture Card) I've been streaming recently and noticed I had a ton of trouble with the video signal until I removed the switch from the setup. Before I took the switch out of the picture I had things like video drop-outs, the No Signal (or Bad Signal) error you got, any time I'd switch my display from DisplayPort to HDMI it'd cut out... yeah it was a problem. Once I hooked the RetroTINK directly to my Elgato HD60 I haven't had those problems at all. Don't know if that's exactly your issue but it might help if you're in a similar situation. It's a little more work but I'll do what I have to do for fewer tech headaches. Edit: Never mind, you're getting normal video from it, but just a black screen. That's really freakin' weird. I wonder if Mike (retrotink2 on Twitter) would have any idea why it's doing that.
Are you sure that the short wasn't simply caused by the solder joints of the adapter's power connector shorting against the metal case of the drive? At least that's how it looked to me...
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I had a nasty experience with a 3.5 IDE > 2.5 IDE adaptor once. For what ever reason it had +5 on a pin it shouldn't have. When connected to the 2.5 disk drive a fair bit of current flowed and burnt a track on the drive's PCB. Fortunately I was able to repair it and read the customer's data off it. It would have been pretty bad to go cap in hand and tell them I had lost all their data. You'll notice this drive has +5V only on the label, no +12V. Only speculating but perhaps the adaptor routed +12V to somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 That's a shame, the pinout is totally different from a CD-ROM 50-pin unfortunately. And I think that your adapter may have been regular 50-pin optical drive pinout. You can see the real pinout in the "Slimline LS120 SuperDrive Floppy drive" thread on Vogons, it's the same as regular IDE but with some unused pins at the end. Eledip made some adapters that fit slimline LS-120 drives and they work really nicely. LS-120 drives are rarely working to begin with, I have a few that read floppies but can't read superdisks anymore, along with some that just chew up disks. Great drives when they work though, since they use a voice coil to move the heads instead of a stepper motor, they're very fast and I can sometimes read data off bad disks that regular floppies can't read anymore.
@@retrozmachine1189 yeah, that'd be my bet, I've had adapters of that ilk in the past where the power connector was installed backwards so when you plugged it in you put 12V on the 5V rail.
Your Elephant Memory Systems t-shirt gave me flashbacks to working at the PC Lab in college, the school book store sold Elephant floppies and we changed their tag line to "Elephants always forget" since the disks seemed to fail all the time.
I installed LS120 drives in Avid video editing systems. It was great because the EDL’s we’re getting bigger to fit on a normal floppy but USB sticks weren’t around or supported.
BTW Adrian, we work a lot with state of the art prototype PCBs and we make needle bed adapters for electronic production and we use wire wrap for the needles all the time (easier to service and replace the needles for the production technician). It’s not really an antiquated technique
Hehe! It's ok -- it works in some sockets but usually pushes them beyond their limit (if it fits in) which can make it impossible to put a regular IC back in. The round pins can be purchased very cheaply from AliExpress or similar.
A hint for sourcing the round pins: Search for "IC headers", which seems to be the name, complementing "IC sockets" where they are supposed to fit into.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Hey Adrian, a heads up. I'm pretty sure I soldered the two diodes the wrong way on the PC-Sprint I sent you. Also, the "Turbo" jumper is the left two pins. If you're going to be in VCF West in Mountain View, California, I'll have a PC-Sprint with the correct diode direction and round pins made for you. Sorry about that.
The reason LS-120 SuperDisk floptical drives use a laser is that the read/write head in the SuperDisk drive is much smaller then standard 1.44MB floppy drive and the laser helps locate the head much more precisely then possible on a normal floppy drive. It this precision that allows it to store 83x the amount of data vs a standard 1.44MB floppy. The successor model to this, the LS-240 offered a additional feature, beyond doubling the capacity, in that it could format a standard high-density floppy disk to 32MB. The downside of this was that such floppies could only be read on LS-240 drives, not standard floppy drives, and that each time you changed any data on the disk, you had to rewrite the whole disk contents much like early CD-RW media.
I remember in the early 200o's being all set to replace the 3.5" floppies on all my computers (I had about tower machines for various purposes, it was a bit early for VM's!) when USB flach drives came out and prices dropped as capacities rose, and I was hearing vrarying reports about reliability do I didn't conttinue with that "upgrade". Instead I fitted DVD burners to a couple of machines for archive purposes and just used USB flash drives for if I needed to take files elsewhere which also meant I didn't need a portable LS-120 drive too. I think for your sanity you need to modify the retrotink to have a power switch on the front.... :)
The I/O were correct on the paper. It's done in pairs on the web page. Ex. Pin 1 and 2 are the first open/close, Pin 3 and 4 are the second box (open/close) and pin 5 and 6 are the third box (open/close). It was correct.
The conventional white LEDs used for illumination are usually UV LEDs with a phosphor coating. This is more efficient and gives a better colour-rendering index (CRI) than trying to make white light using RGB LEDs. Blue LEDs just drive me up the wall how they are so overused, and always at nuclear brightness. Fun fact: if you've noticed street lights that are suddenly purple instead of white, that is not an attempt at civic mood lighting. There is a manufacturer of LEDs that had problems getting the phosphor coating to bond properly to the LEDs. Eventually it may delaminate, allowing the direct illumination to escape. We see this as purple because a portion of the LED output is in the visible range. This problem is occurring all over North America. The warranty is being honoured, but as you can imagine it is taking time to produce new units and then replace the affected ones.
With the LS-120 drive at the start, I'd be willing to bet that the power connector on that adapter board is backwards (certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen that sort of thing)... I'd expect the "laptop" version of the drive to run on 5V only (label should tell you) so if that's the case, check to see which of the outer pins on the adapter board power connector ISN'T connected (might want to buzz it out)
The VIC-20 you used for testing is almost exactly what I had in the early 1980s. The case and brass badge are the same but the insides are different. The motherboard I had was from an earlier design with a large heatsink over the power regulator and cartridge slot so it gets pretty warm. And 2 prong power plug into the computer. I remember blowing the video part and was able to fix it using a small piece of tin foil. Hey, I was like 11 at the time so didn't know any better. lol. Thank you for showing it.
I think the interface on the small drive is a standard interface for laptop/server cdrom drives. They were originally combined power/ide and later updated to sata but kept a similar interface. I would think the adaptor provided it was wired correctly should have worked so I suspect the drive died in a dead short and took the adaptor with it.
Yes! I remember contemplating if I should spend £10 for a single blue LED from Maplin Electronics in the UK - I did! I also messed around with HiFi gear, remember I fitted LEDs to knobs on my Sony amp and CD player that didn't have any 😂
The technology involves reading and writing data magnetically, while optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disk being sensed by an infrared LED and sensor (a form of visual servo). The magnetic head touches the recording surface, as it does in a normal floppy drive. The optical servo tracks allow for an increase in the tracking precision of the magnetic head.
When it comes to speeding up the PC and XT class PCs it was possible to change the refresh DMA channel's clock by changing the settings in the PIT channel for it. Depending on how good the DRAM was it was possible to eek maybe 5% more out of a given set of hardware just by reducing the amount of refresh activity. Toss in a V20 and a faster oscillator and things could move along quite nicely.
When you plug that adapter into the drive, do the solder points behind the power connector contact the back of the case? Maybe put a piece of electrical tape on the back of the drive to make sure it doesn't short out.
The working LS120 sounds like my old Fujitsu MO drive that takes optical disks. It worked well on Windows 98 ( when I remembered to eject via explorer ). It did need to be drive 0 on a second IDE adapter with no other drive on that adapter as another issue that may have been due to the IDE standard back then. The D-Sub connectors ( According to the guy at Radio Shack back in '85) is DB-number if it is up to 2 lines of connectors, like DB-15 for com ports and D sub 15 for EGA/VGA.
59:00 be careful with that: while the Retrotink's port is definitively a SCART, some other converters have a JP-21, which is based on the SCART but is not compatible (trying to feed a JP-21 signal through a SCART port does literally nothing, but trying to feed a SCART signal, unless it's a composite signal disguised as SCART, through a JP-21 port will fry the machine).
When you tried to power the LS120 drive with the adaptor, looks like it was shorting out the power connector on the rear of the drive, those adaptors are iffy like that... You even spotted the blown trace on the adaptor - the drive was likely still ok!
Well, yes. My first name is William, but I go by my middle name, Todd. Sorry about the duplicate wire wrap tool. Last time I heard you mention wire wrapping, you said you'd like to have one. I didn't know you had gotten some since. The VIC-20 diag cartridge does operate much like the C64 diag in that it does need some ROM functionality to work. There IS actually a VIC-20 Dead Test as well (I think two, as someone enhanced the first one). It's on the VIC-20 Penultimate+ cartridge, but, of course, you can download it and burn an EPROM if you have a cartridge PCB to stick it in to.
Thanks again Todd for the cart! I'm surprised about a dead test as it just seems like it's impossible for the Cart to exist in the top of address space needed to boot the system without ROMs. Not without some extra wires running to the cartridge. It only has A0-A13 (missing the top two lines) and the IO select lines only map into the various ranges the cartridge is supposed to exist in. I think Commodore did it this way to simplify the design inside the cartridge... myoldcomputer.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/vic20_Cartridge_port.png
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I've never researched how it works. It may not be a true Dead Test like the C64 version. On the Penultimate+ cartridge, if I remember correctly, you hold down the cartridge's reset switch while booting the VIC to get into Dead Test mode. It then runs through its memory tests and ROM checksums. Again, if memory serves, on some passes it uses its own built-in character generator and on others it uses the VIC's onboard chargen ROM. I don't know if it bypasses the BASIC or KERNAL ROMs or if it requires those to run. I'd have to do a lot more research to understand it better. Maybe I'll do a video on it sometime.
I tried connecting my old laptop LS-120 drive to my desktop with a similar adapter that converted the compact laptop connector to USB, but my motherboard USB controller faulted when I plugged it in. Didn't want to blow up my motherboard USB so I never tried it again. I have a stack of circa 2000 backups on SuperDisk that I'd love to access. Unfortunately all of my 1990s backups are on formats that died after 2000 - SuperDisk, ExaByte, DAT, SCSI, etc.
I don't think the VIC-20 allows cartridges to be boot ROMs like the C64 does with its Ultimax mode. In fact, the VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Manual (the copies of it I could find online anyway) doesn't even tell you how to make a normal auto-booting ROM like the diagnostic ROM - it tells you that it *is* possible, and that there's some magic byte string to do it, but doesn't tell you what that is or how to do it. Very odd; feels a bit intentional. I don't remember if you've seen that diagnostic display on the VIC-20, but you have seen it on the PET - the VIC-20 diagnostic is based on that one. Also I think LS-120 drives only use the laser for tracking, and it wouldn't be visible on the head? This I don't know for sure.
Yeah I think early VIC-20 carts didn't even auto start! You just ended up in BASIC and you had to use a SYS command to start the game. And yes on the LS-120, a few other comments also mentioned it was only for the alignment of the head and not for reading the magnetic media at all. So it's definitely not a "flopical" as I call it a few times.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Ooh that's interesting. Reminds me of one time when I had to figure out how to get dumps of a cart game that was on multiple ROM banks (Broderbund's A.E.) working and I just loaded it from disk somehow instead; don't remember how now though
A standard 3.5 floppy drive doesn't actively follow the magnetic track on the disk (or at least, the format is designed so that it doesn't need to). The drive doesn't have to physically sense where each track is. Instead, the drive just guesses where each track was written, based on where the track is supposed to have been written. Provided both the writing and reading drives are adjusted fairly similarly, you should be able to interchange disks between the drives. Allowing generous tolerances on track width and spacing improves the chances of any two drives being adjusted similarly enough. However these tolerances mean that the magnetic media on the disk is used fairly inefficiently. An obvious way to increase floppy disk performance would be to add mechanism to allow the track to be sensed by the drive. If the drives don't need to guess where the tracks are, you don't have to allow large tolerances to cope with drives being slightly maladjusted. Tighter tolerances means smaller tracks and smaller spaces between the tracks. The first attempt to do this was the floptical drive, which was developed by Insite technology. The disks had a series of microscopic grooves manufactured into the disk surface. The drive used a laser to sense these grooves, and used them to align the head with the track precisely. Iomega, Imation and Maxell were all investors in Insite Technology, and Insite eventually licensed the technology to each of them, resulting in the LS-120, ZIP drive and a variety of other similar formats.
I remember being warned that writing normal floppies with an LS120 drive might not be readable on a normal floppy, same as high density vs double density, head too small. So we were told to use them only for reading floppies on the iMacs.
With the Amiga, the LS120 could be booted if the floppy was in the drive before it was switched on. Then that was treated as a normal hard disk. But then the eject didn't work. In principle as a hard disk with a removable disk and not as a floppy. PC floppies could also be read and written, but not Amiga floppies.
Poor Adrian, that Retrotink has had it in for him for such a long time too. Much calmer than I would be. It's so annoying when you're given 'bum steer'.
Magneto-opitcal is laser guided, but reads/writes using a magnetic head. I don't recall if the Superdisk also used a laser to soften the sibstrate during read/write, but that was one of two "floptical" drive modes described in the 90's press.
Regarding the LS 120 Failure, I´ve managed to fry one of my childhood drives with these type of power supply. The problem is, that the Molex connector on these is just soft plastic, so after some ussage the corners/keying wears down and it becomes pretty easy to plug it in backwards. Simple solution is to cut it off, and to replace it with another plug with a Hard plastic shell.
These power BJTs are widely used in linear voltage regulators on late Socket 3 boards to drop down from 5 to 3.whatsoever Volts for powering the CPU. They dissipate lots of energy and got as hot as Beelzebub's armpit in a few moments after powering on. These transistors also worked extremely well as fuses in case you plug in your 486 CPU 90° rotated. :)))
I was an early adopter of the first gen floptical drives in the early 1990's. Mine was a 21MB floptical made by Insite which had a SCSI interface. Used to use this with an ICD LINK adapter on my Atari ST. A vaguely remember the floptical media being a translucent light brown colour though. You could definitely tell it apart from regular magnetic media used on standard floppies. That drive could also read 1.44 meg disks as well, which was useful.
I remember the first time I saw a blue LED. We had just taken delivery of a brand new server at work and for some reason they had blue LEDs in the power supply. When I plugged it in, there was a blue flash from the back and, being an electronics sort of person, I unplugged it quick-smart!. It wasn't until I had a close look that I saw the blue LEDs and decided everything was normal. Didn't see blue LEDs in later model power supplies - maybe they had complaints.
20:33 I’d love to see more retrocomputing UA-camrs tackle the 3.5” Fujitsu MO disk drives that went all the way up to 2.3GB before DVD-RW functionally replaced that format. I know MO disks had more staying power in Japan, while the West went with 100MB Iomega Zip disks, but MO disks are so cool and hardly anyone does videos on them. External models commonly use USB 2.0, so it’s not like they’re stuck in antiquated SCSI, IDE, and Parallel ports like a lot of other disk drives of that era.
Those blue LEDs were £10 each when they first came out, here in the UK (at Maplin's). The next year they dropped to £2. As for Radio Shack (Tandy here) I think they'd already closed up shop here before those were availavle. I'd guess the price would have ended in a 9 though, regardless. I think EVERY price in Tandy ended in a 9!
I was an Iomega guy myself but the Super Disk always was appealing because they could read standard 1.44 MB disks. The appeal went away when the Zip 250 and Zip 750 drives came out.
I am pleased I use an LCD TV for my retro stuff no adapter is needed! The TV has VGA, SCART (with RGB), Composite, and Component. The VGA even works with 15kHz.
When I got my first PC, the ZIP drive was already dying, but CD burners were still far too expensive. So, there I was with a 200 MHz CPU and the floppy still my main way of data transfer. If things were any larger, it was LapLink time, and the PC getting a car ride.
I had an Accurite Travel 120 SuperDisk drive that used a PC-Card to connect to a laptop, I used it with a portable talking computer called a VoiceNote, it was part of the BrailleNote family of products. Anyway, that LS-120 floppy drive was quite noisy and the noises your drive made sounded quite normal to me, that doesn't mean the drive is functional, but it very well could be. I've only ever used the one LS-120 floppy drive, but I do think it's normal for them to be noisy, even when reading standard 1.44 MB floppy disks.
My experience ordering adapters along these lines (for instance scsi sca breakouts and such) is that the qc does not look super great at the cheap sketchy end of the market these days and I would definitely not plug them into anything without a check for unexpected continuity and a good look for bridged or nearly bridged soldering first :D
Blue LEDs were KIND of a big deal - For the discovery of a bright blue LED engineer Shuji Nakamura and physicists Hiroshi Amano and Isamu Akasaki were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014.
PCB's got a great deal easier to make when laser printers came along. As soon as you oculd print on any sort of transparency, you had and easy way to make a mask for setting photoresist on the PCB, allowing you to etch PCBs relatively easily. (Prior to that, you had to manually scribe the lines into painted-on resist. I've done that, and would have greatly preferred the laser printer method.)
I think most people misunderstands the meaning of "lifetime warranty". It doesn't mean YOUR lifetime, but the one of the thing in object. Meaning, as soon the thing's life expires... so does the warranty. Of course the law forces a minimum of real warranty of two years (at least in Europe), but afterwards, it's lifetime warranty baby, as soon the first ends, the second expires.
I would seek a different power supply than the "US-CAN". I worked for a local computer retailer from 2003-2016, and these power supplies were notorious for dying and sending line AC voltage though to the DC side. We were importing computer cases by the pallet for our base white-box build and have a very high failure rate.
I bought one of those exact radio sack Blue LEDs in this video. I had an Acer CD burner with red and green LEDs and replaced the green one with blue. When I would burn CDs, the LEDs would alternate back and forth like police lights. Appropriate since this was in the "Napster Bad!" era.
Hey Adrian, I was really pleased to watch your older video, just the other day, where you came to England and bought the Acorn BBC computers. I don't have one, It's an ambition. I'm really curious to know how you power your PAL machines over there in the States or Canada. Also, I discovered you can emulate these machines on the Raspberry Pi. The R-Pi Imager software has an option for installing "RISC-OS Open", the recreated OS of the later Acorn Archimedes series of computers. It appears there is another distribution, too, called "RISC-OS Direct". It's just the same but more fully featured with extras (which you would have to manually load yourself with the other 'distro'). One of those extra packages is the BBC-BASIC of the Acorn BBC Micro - supposedly one of, if not the best, versions of BASIC ever released. I guess that's another way of sharing the experience. Anyway, there's so much 'Apple' stuff out there that it is a nice change to see the British machines being represented online.
The LS120 pinout is completely different compared to a CD-ROM drive and using a CD-ROM adapter shorts the power pins, you need a special LS120 adapter as described on vogons to adapt a laptop LS120 drive
Man oh man, taking me back to the floptical drive. I sure wish I'd have kept all that old 90s pc (80s too) stuff, even the early 2000s, before sata became the standard I loved all the old drives. MFM, RLL, IDE. I still have an IDE to SATA adapter I use for my old old drives.. Ha I remember I had a 540mb IDE drive ( I think that's as big as you could do in IDE I forget if it was the tracks or cylinders whatever) man this takes me back!!
I had several zip drives, as i actually liked the capacity. Never had an issue, and never had the click of death. But i also had an LS-120. But never used it for much other than 3.5 standard floppies. I still have it somewhere, but i don't know where.
I'd say the heads in that LS-120 drive aren't quite normal, looks like they have two to three times as many cores/coils! I wonder if the power-connector on that adaptor was installed backwards? That's all I can think of aside from it simply being incompatible. I know I've been burned by the 'same form-factor/connector but different pin-out' issue before! What's that huge blue PCB on your wall? Looks bigger than my industrial Nematron board! I appreciate your shirt, as I've got a few boxes of 5-1/4 disks with that same logo! Bunch of Commodore-related ones.
Hello Mr. Adrian! Question: Given all of the issues we continuously see with your RetroTink, would you recommend that device? It costs a pretty penny, and I'm reluctant to purchase one given the amount of times it's glitched on you while you're shooting your videos.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
Raise your hand if you checked the video length the moment Adrian said, "...it's going to be a micro episode..." around the 0:15 mark! 🙋♂
HAHA! Yeah it's the problem when shooting when you have no idea what you're about to open. It's a mystery every time!
🙋♂️
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 The only thing better than a long episode is a super long episode. I guess we're all innocent victims of the circumstances. :)
The small hole in the middle of the eject button on the LS-120 is for a paperclip to eject a disk when there's loss of power.
Right, there was no need to molest that retro device.
Nice video, Adrian :)
That laptop drive is fine!! The adapter power pins were shorted on the metal back of the drive because someone forgot to insulate the adapter properly!! I had the same issue before with HDD adapters.
Well it's not fine any more... 😉
We installed LS120s in lieu of floppies for a while in our machines. It was short lived but they were good for backups. The laser on the ls120 is with the heads and is a tiny little thing. It is used to read servo index data from the disk. This allows more precise positioning of the heads and thus higher density data. The hole in the eject button is an emergency eject hole. These can suffer from the click of death.
As soon as he said that, I thought I recalled the LS120 drives using a laser for tracking, not directly for read/write.
I remember a lot (well, relatively, a lot) of Compaq machines having LS120 drives in place of the floppy as a standard feature (and was bootable) around the AMD K6-II era. Specifically those beige-y models that were kind bulbous and had some front ports behind a frosted plastic door at the bottom center of the case front. Before they went to the white design with the changeable translucent color panels.
@@slightlyevolved they made quite a few OEM deals to try and make up lost ground against Zip. IBM desktops also had them for a while too. AIUI they also stumped up the work necessary to get BIOS support as a condition of the OEM deal. Of course, it wasn’t enough! The computer manufacturers took the excellent deal on drives while they were being offered but had absolutely no investment in keeping the platform.
I have a original-iMac-era external ls120 drive (USB), for bridging to the brave new world with no floppies. I've used it only a handful of times at most.
LS-120 - Laser Servo. The bottom side of the LS disk contains an optical pattern which is read by the lower head laser in order to position the head accurately enough to achieve the number of tracks required.
Lovely to see Rees pop up in this one! One of my favourite channels. It's very generous of you to mention other channels Adrian, not many other channels take the time to do that. It really helps get the word out to the new guys.
Rees' channel is where I found out about the PC-Sprint. That's why I like the retro community. For the most part, they're all really chill (i.e. Adiran Black).
I love that all you guys watch each other's channels and comment and include in your video's.
@@macrohard007 I always do my best to share the love. I just don't see a downside to it.
@@CurtisOvard hey Curtis! 😁
Hey! Another one of my favorite channels on UA-cam!
I had that larger LS 120 drive back in the day. It's been 20 years, but do remember it having a unique sound, and if memory serves me, yours sounded about right. I bought that drive new and just loved it. I remember booting off regular floppies, and that was the magic over the zip drive, that and it fit right into the tower looking like nothing more than a regular floppy drive. The fact I could store 120mb on a floppy sized disc and run regular floppy discs, was the reason I got it. Of course, it didn't stay in favor once compact flash came along, and it's been long forgotten. It did bring back fond memories of it though. It was nothing more than a fad, but one I am glad I had!!!
I bought a gateway PC a few years ago, had no clue about LS120 then. I thought someone had just added a fancy floppy drive with a soft touch eject button, low and behold it was an LS120! It also had a Travan tape drive for backing up your HDD.
@@0326Hambone yeah, if I were still into computers like I was 20-25 years ago, I'd cherish having an LS120 again for nostalgic reasons. I remember it was much faster and actually quieter than a regular floppy drive, and I liked their little gold logo on the drive door. To me, it was miraculous that they could take a little floppy drive type disc, and stuff 120mb onto it! I can't remember by how much, but it also increased the capacity of a regular floppy disc. Then the real game changer came along with the CDR! How could it get any better, a burnable CD!!!
@@0326Hambone I rebuilt practically every brand of PC ever made from around the first generation Pentium 1 up to about P4, including laptop and desktop machines, and Gateway was one of the better built brands. Sony Vaio's were also well built, and Dells were mediocre, but there were some brands that were just junk, can we say Compaq Presario. One thing about branded machines though, most were difficult to work on due to case styling, and cramming everything into the smallest space possible! In all those years though, the Mac was highest quality computer I ever rebuilt. The components in them were far superior, but I just didn't like the Mac os and software. Mostly stuck with IBM compatible due to their availability and diversity. It really got interesting when I started delving into laptops. Man, I used to have five PCs updating at a time in my living room, at least it kept my house warm in the winter...lol. Ahhh, the good old dial up days, 56k all the way!
Watching Adrian delve down the proverbial troubleshooting paradoxical rabbit hole with the disks was genuinely life changing 😅
Hi Adrian. On that wire-wrap too, pull on the end; there’s likely a little wire stripper hidden inside the barrel. 😊
I love how much attention you pay to everything that is sent to you and that you even try most of the stuff out directly (if feasable) 👍
Heh yeah results in these super long videos with a ton of talking :-)
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I dont think we mind :) Your videos are just of great quality even your mailcalls.
We all love the long videos! Who doesn’t want as much Adrian’s Digital Basement as humanly possible?! It is always a blast watching you go through these mail call episodes, and your amazing repair videos on the main channel are just such a delightful treat every week!
Random question… Has anyone else also been really enjoying watching Usagi Electric’s Data General, and now his massive PDP-11 shenanigans? If anyone here hasn’t checked out Usagi Electric’s channel, I would highly recommend that you all do! I’m just a fan of Usagi Electric, and just know that those who love Adrian’s videos may also really enjoy his channel/videos as well!
Hi Adrian,
the sound of the working LS-120 is normal (the "tschuka tschuka tschuk" sound when inserting a disc may be a calibration to seek for track 0, the hissing noise is the voice coil tracking mechanism). When inserting normal disks you will hear a "clok" sound now and then when the mechanism recalibrates the head position (as you have no defined steps as with a stepper motor in a regular floppy drive, no position encoder and no tracking helper on a regular floppy disk it needs these recalibrations).
And yes, the drives work with a laser for tracking (it is mentioned in the Wikipedia article). Take a close look at the discs, you can see the optical guide pattern on the disc surface.
I own several of these drives and also an LS-240 which is able to write 32MB to a regular 1,44MB disc which is quite impressing. It is achieved by what you call "shingled recording" on modern high capacity hard drives. As there is only a single area the whole disc must be written at once.
It's a shame that Panasonic didn't implement the whole feature into the firmware, so reading of these 32MB discs also requires a driver which does no longer work on "modern" OS...
Regards,
Torsten
P. S. As YT refuses to respond to your answer I will add the additional info here:
Yeah, this 32MB feature was a bit late and the LS-240 was not wide spread. BTW, for the LS-120 there existed an SCSI adapter. Somewhere I have a few of these. They were quite critical, there seemed to be dependencies on the drive's firmware revision. I bought these because I thought that could be useful as external drive for computers with SCSI (like) interface like the Atari. I think my adapters could have been these: web.archive.org/web/19991118150231/www.winstation.com/ssdspec.html. Not sure because currently the stuff is stowed away.
There's not much info on the internet about these, it seems that Mitsubishi and Winstation Systems developed this and sold them as SLS-120 drives, so the seller possibly ripped the drives and controllers apart. Which explains the dependencies between SCSI adapter and drive firmware because it wasn't a universal IDE to SCSI adapter...
Thanks for the info. That is so cool about 32mb on a 1.44mb floppy -- I saw that mentioned in the WIkipedia article. Would have been wild if this had taken off and been more popular. I guess they were just a bit late to the party.
I like the casual format - it makes length unimportant as it a great informative videos.
I loved it when you showed your home theater room, I sent you the Vic 20 motherboard missing the voltage regulator over a year ago. I'm glad it's being displayed and it was a lot of fun to say "OMG there is the board I sent him." It even has my name on the can still. Oh and BTW it does work you tested it in the mail call.
83C196LD - found on some Intel product timeline :
"the low-priced 83C196LC and 83C196LD controllers for low-cost ABS systems"
So maybe not defective, just unused. Many automotive ECUs have chips bonded onto a ceramic substrate, then a conformal coating is applied to keep the elements away.
Also about the blue LEDs - the very first silicon carbide LEDs had a pleasing somewhat dim light, not quite as monochromatic as the later, brighter gallium nitride thin film based ones which is the technique still used for those. Those first ones were really expensive... yeah. And sometimes hard to get even at that price.
I used to glue those chips into ceramic packages for wire bonding. They would often still have a piece of the substrate attached :)
Hello Adrian, Noels Retro Lab already well answered your question about ROM and test harness in video called "Black Screen VIC-20 Repair (And Start Sequence Exploration)" at 12:00.
One major challenge of linear recording of magnetic media is making the R/W heads keep exact alignment with the tracks. There are several solutions to this. One may be to just make the tolerances big enough and the tracks wide enough so a certain misalignment won't matter. This solution is used on regular floppy disks. Of course this approach doesn't work if you want to increase the track density. This is why there is another solution of giving the media prerecorded tracks of magnetic information that will tell the R/W heads how to move to compensate for a misalignment. This approach is used on ZIP disks and, funny enough, tapes which use linear recording (e.g. LTO), which is, by the way, the reason those media must not be bulk-erased if you want to reuse them. The third solution would be to physically mark the media and read that marking optically, e.g. with a laser, like it is done with LS-120.
Love the computer wall in the movie room!
Thanks, it ook me forever to install the wall mounts -- I'll keep going to putting more up there as I print more. It's just handy to have them out and on display for easy access when I need them.
This video is the video that keeps on giving. I think the last time I saw wire wrap was in a Sanyo radio/cassette player from the '70s. Wire wrap was used for the inter-connects between the PCBs in it.
Hi Adrian, Laser is for alignment also LS120 have very high density so they read write slower. Normal floppy can't hold the capacity since they don't have the density. Use them since they come out on the market, I love it reading normally floppy really fast.
I would like to add that the magnetic read head can be made very narrow and still read a disk. A smaller head can read "bigger" tracks without any issue. The write head has an issue because no matter how small you make it you'll have a magnetic domain larger than the head. To write a bit the drive would pass current through the head, but at a level too low to make a magnet mark on the disk. If you turned on a laser while the low current was passing through the write head the added heat would lower the magnetic strength needed to make a bit. Basically you'd have small magnetic energy over a larger area but only the small part you hit with the laser would allow the magnetic field on the media to flip.
Fun fact: LS in LS120 stands for Laser Servo
@@therealjammit ooh, are you saying LS120 uses the Curie point to control write area kinda like MiniDisc? I had been under the impression it’s only for traditional head positioning. But indeed MD holds a similar amount of data as LS120. Albeit it reads with the laser instead of with the magnetic head.
@@kaitlyn__L Yes. The Curie point. I honestly couldn't remember that term. Same as MiniDisc.
Heya!
I’ve got to say I much prefer this format when you not only unbox but actually take the time to play with the items you receive.
Nice work!
The laser is used for synchronization, not actually for reading and writing on the LS-120 drives.
The 83C196 was used in early ABS braking and traction control systems. There was also the 87C196, and the 88C196, the last of which had flash embedded. They were sold to many of the large auto manufacturers for use in their vehicles. I used to test them for failure analysis. I've even wire-bonded them to ceramic packages for testing purposes, as many of them were installed directly onto controller boards and wire-bonded to them.
I actually was given a 6-inch wafer of these devices in a presentation frame when I left Intel, it's on the wall above my desk right now, in fact. If you could get higher magnification, it should actually have the device name written along one of the sides, if memory serves.
Bit of a trip down memory lane for me, too :)
Adrian, do you recall where you got that cassette t-shirt? Looked online briefly but didn't see the same one for sale. Thanks!
Edit - kept looking and found it - looks like it is/was from Old Navy.
The power pins from the adapter seemed to be shorted against the metal case when the power cable was getting hot. Maybe you'll figure this out later in the video but I wanted to comment before I forgot. I'm still at 12:37.
That PC-Sprint is neat. I hope you do experiment with it - a 5150 running with a 10MHz NEC V20 would have blown minds back then!
Are you using an HDMI switch with your RetroTINK? (RetroTINK 5x Pro -> HDMI Switch -> Capture Card)
I've been streaming recently and noticed I had a ton of trouble with the video signal until I removed the switch from the setup.
Before I took the switch out of the picture I had things like video drop-outs, the No Signal (or Bad Signal) error you got, any time I'd switch my display from DisplayPort to HDMI it'd cut out... yeah it was a problem.
Once I hooked the RetroTINK directly to my Elgato HD60 I haven't had those problems at all. Don't know if that's exactly your issue but it might help if you're in a similar situation. It's a little more work but I'll do what I have to do for fewer tech headaches.
Edit: Never mind, you're getting normal video from it, but just a black screen. That's really freakin' weird. I wonder if Mike (retrotink2 on Twitter) would have any idea why it's doing that.
I have days like this. It good to see it happens to the best of us.
Loved my LS120. Worked great in my computer, and so much easier than CD or floppies for large simple backups and moving data.
The Acorn Electron does have RGB and does use the same cable!
Are you sure that the short wasn't simply caused by the solder joints of the adapter's power connector shorting against the metal case of the drive? At least that's how it looked to me...
Don't think -- the drive itself had a really bad burned smell and traces going to the SMD high density connector looked burned.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I had a nasty experience with a 3.5 IDE > 2.5 IDE adaptor once. For what ever reason it had +5 on a pin it shouldn't have. When connected to the 2.5 disk drive a fair bit of current flowed and burnt a track on the drive's PCB. Fortunately I was able to repair it and read the customer's data off it. It would have been pretty bad to go cap in hand and tell them I had lost all their data.
You'll notice this drive has +5V only on the label, no +12V. Only speculating but perhaps the adaptor routed +12V to somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 That's a shame, the pinout is totally different from a CD-ROM 50-pin unfortunately. And I think that your adapter may have been regular 50-pin optical drive pinout. You can see the real pinout in the "Slimline LS120 SuperDrive Floppy drive" thread on Vogons, it's the same as regular IDE but with some unused pins at the end. Eledip made some adapters that fit slimline LS-120 drives and they work really nicely.
LS-120 drives are rarely working to begin with, I have a few that read floppies but can't read superdisks anymore, along with some that just chew up disks. Great drives when they work though, since they use a voice coil to move the heads instead of a stepper motor, they're very fast and I can sometimes read data off bad disks that regular floppies can't read anymore.
@@retrozmachine1189 yeah, that'd be my bet, I've had adapters of that ilk in the past where the power connector was installed backwards so when you plugged it in you put 12V on the 5V rail.
I that happen with an IDE adapter the pins shorted to the case. Learned to put a lot of electrical tape between them.
Your Elephant Memory Systems t-shirt gave me flashbacks to working at the PC Lab in college, the school book store sold Elephant floppies and we changed their tag line to "Elephants always forget" since the disks seemed to fail all the time.
I installed LS120 drives in Avid video editing systems. It was great because the EDL’s we’re getting bigger to fit on a normal floppy but USB sticks weren’t around or supported.
BTW Adrian, we work a lot with state of the art prototype PCBs and we make needle bed adapters for electronic production and we use wire wrap for the needles all the time (easier to service and replace the needles for the production technician). It’s not really an antiquated technique
Awesome! You got the PC-Sprint. Sorry about the square pins. Now I know to use round pins. See, learning more from you. Thank you!
Hehe! It's ok -- it works in some sockets but usually pushes them beyond their limit (if it fits in) which can make it impossible to put a regular IC back in. The round pins can be purchased very cheaply from AliExpress or similar.
A hint for sourcing the round pins: Search for "IC headers", which seems to be the name, complementing "IC sockets" where they are supposed to fit into.
@@tw11tube thank you. I tried to look for some on eBay and couldn't figure out what to type in.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Hey Adrian, a heads up. I'm pretty sure I soldered the two diodes the wrong way on the PC-Sprint I sent you. Also, the "Turbo" jumper is the left two pins. If you're going to be in VCF West in Mountain View, California, I'll have a PC-Sprint with the correct diode direction and round pins made for you. Sorry about that.
Vic was my first comp, it still holds a special place in my heart...in fact I just recently got one and purchased Shamus cart off of ebay :)
The Acorn Electron does have the same RGB output as the BBC Micro.
The reason LS-120 SuperDisk floptical drives use a laser is that the read/write head in the SuperDisk drive is much smaller then standard 1.44MB floppy drive and the laser helps locate the head much more precisely then possible on a normal floppy drive. It this precision that allows it to store 83x the amount of data vs a standard 1.44MB floppy. The successor model to this, the LS-240 offered a additional feature, beyond doubling the capacity, in that it could format a standard high-density floppy disk to 32MB. The downside of this was that such floppies could only be read on LS-240 drives, not standard floppy drives, and that each time you changed any data on the disk, you had to rewrite the whole disk contents much like early CD-RW media.
I remember in the early 200o's being all set to replace the 3.5" floppies on all my computers (I had about tower machines for various purposes, it was a bit early for VM's!) when USB flach drives came out and prices dropped as capacities rose, and I was hearing vrarying reports about reliability do I didn't conttinue with that "upgrade". Instead I fitted DVD burners to a couple of machines for archive purposes and just used USB flash drives for if I needed to take files elsewhere which also meant I didn't need a portable LS-120 drive too.
I think for your sanity you need to modify the retrotink to have a power switch on the front.... :)
The I/O were correct on the paper. It's done in pairs on the web page. Ex. Pin 1 and 2 are the first open/close, Pin 3 and 4 are the second box (open/close) and pin 5 and 6 are the third box (open/close). It was correct.
The conventional white LEDs used for illumination are usually UV LEDs with a phosphor coating. This is more efficient and gives a better colour-rendering index (CRI) than trying to make white light using RGB LEDs. Blue LEDs just drive me up the wall how they are so overused, and always at nuclear brightness.
Fun fact: if you've noticed street lights that are suddenly purple instead of white, that is not an attempt at civic mood lighting. There is a manufacturer of LEDs that had problems getting the phosphor coating to bond properly to the LEDs. Eventually it may delaminate, allowing the direct illumination to escape. We see this as purple because a portion of the LED output is in the visible range. This problem is occurring all over North America. The warranty is being honoured, but as you can imagine it is taking time to produce new units and then replace the affected ones.
I put misc components in baggies in a filing cabinet, using the normal hanging files. Works well enough. I keep an inventory in Partkeepr.
With the LS-120 drive at the start, I'd be willing to bet that the power connector on that adapter board is backwards (certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen that sort of thing)... I'd expect the "laptop" version of the drive to run on 5V only (label should tell you) so if that's the case, check to see which of the outer pins on the adapter board power connector ISN'T connected (might want to buzz it out)
The VIC-20 you used for testing is almost exactly what I had in the early 1980s. The case and brass badge are the same but the insides are different. The motherboard I had was from an earlier design with a large heatsink over the power regulator and cartridge slot so it gets pretty warm. And 2 prong power plug into the computer. I remember blowing the video part and was able to fix it using a small piece of tin foil. Hey, I was like 11 at the time so didn't know any better. lol. Thank you for showing it.
I think the interface on the small drive is a standard interface for laptop/server cdrom drives. They were originally combined power/ide and later updated to sata but kept a similar interface. I would think the adaptor provided it was wired correctly should have worked so I suspect the drive died in a dead short and took the adaptor with it.
That was my thought. Dead LS-120 killed the adapter.
Yes! I remember contemplating if I should spend £10 for a single blue LED from Maplin Electronics in the UK - I did!
I also messed around with HiFi gear, remember I fitted LEDs to knobs on my Sony amp and CD player that didn't have any 😂
The technology involves reading and writing data magnetically, while optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disk being sensed by an infrared LED and sensor (a form of visual servo). The magnetic head touches the recording surface, as it does in a normal floppy drive. The optical servo tracks allow for an increase in the tracking precision of the magnetic head.
When it comes to speeding up the PC and XT class PCs it was possible to change the refresh DMA channel's clock by changing the settings in the PIT channel for it. Depending on how good the DRAM was it was possible to eek maybe 5% more out of a given set of hardware just by reducing the amount of refresh activity. Toss in a V20 and a faster oscillator and things could move along quite nicely.
Those wire wrap tools are awesome. I use them all the time to wire prototype PCBs at work
When you plug that adapter into the drive, do the solder points behind the power connector contact the back of the case? Maybe put a piece of electrical tape on the back of the drive to make sure it doesn't short out.
The working LS120 sounds like my old Fujitsu MO drive that takes optical disks. It worked well on Windows 98 ( when I remembered to eject via explorer ). It did need to be drive 0 on a second IDE adapter with no other drive on that adapter as another issue that may have been due to the IDE standard back then. The D-Sub connectors ( According to the guy at Radio Shack back in '85) is DB-number if it is up to 2 lines of connectors, like DB-15 for com ports and D sub 15 for EGA/VGA.
59:00 be careful with that: while the Retrotink's port is definitively a SCART, some other converters have a JP-21, which is based on the SCART but is not compatible (trying to feed a JP-21 signal through a SCART port does literally nothing, but trying to feed a SCART signal, unless it's a composite signal disguised as SCART, through a JP-21 port will fry the machine).
When you tried to power the LS120 drive with the adaptor, looks like it was shorting out the power connector on the rear of the drive, those adaptors are iffy like that... You even spotted the blown trace on the adaptor - the drive was likely still ok!
LS-120 drives use the laser to help position the read/write heads, and then the heads are basically the same as a "normal" floppy drive.
Well, yes. My first name is William, but I go by my middle name, Todd. Sorry about the duplicate wire wrap tool. Last time I heard you mention wire wrapping, you said you'd like to have one. I didn't know you had gotten some since. The VIC-20 diag cartridge does operate much like the C64 diag in that it does need some ROM functionality to work. There IS actually a VIC-20 Dead Test as well (I think two, as someone enhanced the first one). It's on the VIC-20 Penultimate+ cartridge, but, of course, you can download it and burn an EPROM if you have a cartridge PCB to stick it in to.
Thanks again Todd for the cart! I'm surprised about a dead test as it just seems like it's impossible for the Cart to exist in the top of address space needed to boot the system without ROMs. Not without some extra wires running to the cartridge. It only has A0-A13 (missing the top two lines) and the IO select lines only map into the various ranges the cartridge is supposed to exist in. I think Commodore did it this way to simplify the design inside the cartridge... myoldcomputer.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/vic20_Cartridge_port.png
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I've never researched how it works. It may not be a true Dead Test like the C64 version. On the Penultimate+ cartridge, if I remember correctly, you hold down the cartridge's reset switch while booting the VIC to get into Dead Test mode. It then runs through its memory tests and ROM checksums. Again, if memory serves, on some passes it uses its own built-in character generator and on others it uses the VIC's onboard chargen ROM. I don't know if it bypasses the BASIC or KERNAL ROMs or if it requires those to run. I'd have to do a lot more research to understand it better. Maybe I'll do a video on it sometime.
The reason i keep 1084's around is sometimes you just can't trust other display methods.. but the 1084s or 1702 always works.
I tried connecting my old laptop LS-120 drive to my desktop with a similar adapter that converted the compact laptop connector to USB, but my motherboard USB controller faulted when I plugged it in. Didn't want to blow up my motherboard USB so I never tried it again. I have a stack of circa 2000 backups on SuperDisk that I'd love to access. Unfortunately all of my 1990s backups are on formats that died after 2000 - SuperDisk, ExaByte, DAT, SCSI, etc.
Well, bummer! I sure thought that IDE adapter was the correct one.
I don't think the VIC-20 allows cartridges to be boot ROMs like the C64 does with its Ultimax mode. In fact, the VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Manual (the copies of it I could find online anyway) doesn't even tell you how to make a normal auto-booting ROM like the diagnostic ROM - it tells you that it *is* possible, and that there's some magic byte string to do it, but doesn't tell you what that is or how to do it. Very odd; feels a bit intentional. I don't remember if you've seen that diagnostic display on the VIC-20, but you have seen it on the PET - the VIC-20 diagnostic is based on that one.
Also I think LS-120 drives only use the laser for tracking, and it wouldn't be visible on the head? This I don't know for sure.
Yeah I think early VIC-20 carts didn't even auto start! You just ended up in BASIC and you had to use a SYS command to start the game.
And yes on the LS-120, a few other comments also mentioned it was only for the alignment of the head and not for reading the magnetic media at all. So it's definitely not a "flopical" as I call it a few times.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Ooh that's interesting. Reminds me of one time when I had to figure out how to get dumps of a cart game that was on multiple ROM banks (Broderbund's A.E.) working and I just loaded it from disk somehow instead; don't remember how now though
Hello from Barboursville VA as well! -Dave
A standard 3.5 floppy drive doesn't actively follow the magnetic track on the disk (or at least, the format is designed so that it doesn't need to). The drive doesn't have to physically sense where each track is. Instead, the drive just guesses where each track was written, based on where the track is supposed to have been written. Provided both the writing and reading drives are adjusted fairly similarly, you should be able to interchange disks between the drives. Allowing generous tolerances on track width and spacing improves the chances of any two drives being adjusted similarly enough. However these tolerances mean that the magnetic media on the disk is used fairly inefficiently.
An obvious way to increase floppy disk performance would be to add mechanism to allow the track to be sensed by the drive. If the drives don't need to guess where the tracks are, you don't have to allow large tolerances to cope with drives being slightly maladjusted. Tighter tolerances means smaller tracks and smaller spaces between the tracks. The first attempt to do this was the floptical drive, which was developed by Insite technology. The disks had a series of microscopic grooves manufactured into the disk surface. The drive used a laser to sense these grooves, and used them to align the head with the track precisely.
Iomega, Imation and Maxell were all investors in Insite Technology, and Insite eventually licensed the technology to each of them, resulting in the LS-120, ZIP drive and a variety of other similar formats.
Yeah Adrian. The sound you heard when the floppy started spinning on the LS-120 is totally normal. Bizarre, but normal.
Magneto Optical. Very popular in the early 90s. But they were extremely slow. There were lots of these for SCSI on the Mac.
Magneto-Optical drives are a different beast to the LS-120, they were more like CD tech than Floppy tech.
I remember being warned that writing normal floppies with an LS120 drive might not be readable on a normal floppy, same as high density vs double density, head too small. So we were told to use them only for reading floppies on the iMacs.
With the Amiga, the LS120 could be booted if the floppy was in the drive before it was switched on. Then that was treated as a normal hard disk. But then the eject didn't work. In principle as a hard disk with a removable disk and not as a floppy. PC floppies could also be read and written, but not Amiga floppies.
The Acorn Electron and BBC Micro B can use the same scart cable
Poor Adrian, that Retrotink has had it in for him for such a long time too. Much calmer than I would be. It's so annoying when you're given 'bum steer'.
0:16 -It's a MEGA-micro episode!
Dang that wall of computers is so cool!
Magneto-opitcal is laser guided, but reads/writes using a magnetic head. I don't recall if the Superdisk also used a laser to soften the sibstrate during read/write, but that was one of two "floptical" drive modes described in the 90's press.
I noticed that the drive adapter had a label that it was made in Greenville, SC, my home town!
Regarding the LS 120 Failure, I´ve managed to fry one of my childhood drives with these type of power supply. The problem is, that the Molex connector on these is just soft plastic, so after some ussage the corners/keying wears down and it becomes pretty easy to plug it in backwards. Simple solution is to cut it off, and to replace it with another plug with a Hard plastic shell.
These power BJTs are widely used in linear voltage regulators on late Socket 3 boards to drop down from 5 to 3.whatsoever Volts for powering the CPU. They dissipate lots of energy and got as hot as Beelzebub's armpit in a few moments after powering on.
These transistors also worked extremely well as fuses in case you plug in your 486 CPU 90° rotated. :)))
I was an early adopter of the first gen floptical drives in the early 1990's. Mine was a 21MB floptical made by Insite which had a SCSI interface. Used to use this with an ICD LINK adapter on my Atari ST. A vaguely remember the floptical media being a translucent light brown colour though. You could definitely tell it apart from regular magnetic media used on standard floppies. That drive could also read 1.44 meg disks as well, which was useful.
I remember the first time I saw a blue LED. We had just taken delivery of a brand new server at work and for some reason they had blue LEDs in the power supply. When I plugged it in, there was a blue flash from the back and, being an electronics sort of person, I unplugged it quick-smart!. It wasn't until I had a close look that I saw the blue LEDs and decided everything was normal. Didn't see blue LEDs in later model power supplies - maybe they had complaints.
20:33 I’d love to see more retrocomputing UA-camrs tackle the 3.5” Fujitsu MO disk drives that went all the way up to 2.3GB before DVD-RW functionally replaced that format. I know MO disks had more staying power in Japan, while the West went with 100MB Iomega Zip disks, but MO disks are so cool and hardly anyone does videos on them. External models commonly use USB 2.0, so it’s not like they’re stuck in antiquated SCSI, IDE, and Parallel ports like a lot of other disk drives of that era.
Those blue LEDs were £10 each when they first came out, here in the UK (at Maplin's). The next year they dropped to £2. As for Radio Shack (Tandy here) I think they'd already closed up shop here before those were availavle. I'd guess the price would have ended in a 9 though, regardless. I think EVERY price in Tandy ended in a 9!
I was an Iomega guy myself but the Super Disk always was appealing because they could read standard 1.44 MB disks. The appeal went away when the Zip 250 and Zip 750 drives came out.
I am pleased I use an LCD TV for my retro stuff no adapter is needed! The TV has VGA, SCART (with RGB), Composite, and Component. The VGA even works with 15kHz.
My Blackmagic ATEM Mini sometimes does the black screen thing, too. I have to power cycle it to get the screen to show properly.
When I got my first PC, the ZIP drive was already dying, but CD burners were still far too expensive. So, there I was with a 200 MHz CPU and the floppy still my main way of data transfer. If things were any larger, it was LapLink time, and the PC getting a car ride.
I had an Accurite Travel 120 SuperDisk drive that used a PC-Card to connect to a laptop, I used it with a portable talking computer called a VoiceNote, it was part of the BrailleNote family of products. Anyway, that LS-120 floppy drive was quite noisy and the noises your drive made sounded quite normal to me, that doesn't mean the drive is functional, but it very well could be. I've only ever used the one LS-120 floppy drive, but I do think it's normal for them to be noisy, even when reading standard 1.44 MB floppy disks.
My experience ordering adapters along these lines (for instance scsi sca breakouts and such) is that the qc does not look super great at the cheap sketchy end of the market these days and I would definitely not plug them into anything without a check for unexpected continuity and a good look for bridged or nearly bridged soldering first :D
Blue LEDs were KIND of a big deal - For the discovery of a bright blue LED engineer Shuji Nakamura and physicists Hiroshi Amano and Isamu Akasaki were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014.
PCB's got a great deal easier to make when laser printers came along. As soon as you oculd print on any sort of transparency, you had and easy way to make a mask for setting photoresist on the PCB, allowing you to etch PCBs relatively easily. (Prior to that, you had to manually scribe the lines into painted-on resist. I've done that, and would have greatly preferred the laser printer method.)
I think most people misunderstands the meaning of "lifetime warranty". It doesn't mean YOUR lifetime, but the one of the thing in object. Meaning, as soon the thing's life expires... so does the warranty.
Of course the law forces a minimum of real warranty of two years (at least in Europe), but afterwards, it's lifetime warranty baby, as soon the first ends, the second expires.
I would seek a different power supply than the "US-CAN". I worked for a local computer retailer from 2003-2016, and these power supplies were notorious for dying and sending line AC voltage though to the DC side. We were importing computer cases by the pallet for our base white-box build and have a very high failure rate.
I worked at RadioShack for the better part of a decade and the sound of those parts rattling around in the plastic packages is surprisingly nostalgic.
I bought one of those exact radio sack Blue LEDs in this video. I had an Acer CD burner with red and green LEDs and replaced the green one with blue. When I would burn CDs, the LEDs would alternate back and forth like police lights. Appropriate since this was in the "Napster Bad!" era.
WOW! The last time I did any wire wrapping was in '91(?), in my electronics class in college.
15:50 that adapter hooked up to the back wasn’t electricallly isolated from the LS120 drive, which caused the short. Too late now!
Hey Adrian, I was really pleased to watch your older video, just the other day, where you came to England and bought the Acorn BBC computers. I don't have one, It's an ambition. I'm really curious to know how you power your PAL machines over there in the States or Canada. Also, I discovered you can emulate these machines on the Raspberry Pi. The R-Pi Imager software has an option for installing "RISC-OS Open", the recreated OS of the later Acorn Archimedes series of computers. It appears there is another distribution, too, called "RISC-OS Direct". It's just the same but more fully featured with extras (which you would have to manually load yourself with the other 'distro'). One of those extra packages is the BBC-BASIC of the Acorn BBC Micro - supposedly one of, if not the best, versions of BASIC ever released. I guess that's another way of sharing the experience. Anyway, there's so much 'Apple' stuff out there that it is a nice change to see the British machines being represented online.
I wonder when you connected the IDE converter to the LS-120 laptop drive if the power connector shorted to the back of the drive.
The LS120 pinout is completely different compared to a CD-ROM drive and using a CD-ROM adapter shorts the power pins, you need a special LS120 adapter as described on vogons to adapt a laptop LS120 drive
Man oh man, taking me back to the floptical drive. I sure wish I'd have kept all that old 90s pc (80s too) stuff, even the early 2000s, before sata became the standard I loved all the old drives. MFM, RLL, IDE. I still have an IDE to SATA adapter I use for my old old drives.. Ha I remember I had a 540mb IDE drive ( I think that's as big as you could do in IDE I forget if it was the tracks or cylinders whatever) man this takes me back!!
Adrian with the Andon star you wind the camera down very close to the object and it certainly zooms in a lot more
I had several zip drives, as i actually liked the capacity. Never had an issue, and never had the click of death.
But i also had an LS-120. But never used it for much other than 3.5 standard floppies. I still have it somewhere, but i don't know where.
I'd say the heads in that LS-120 drive aren't quite normal, looks like they have two to three times as many cores/coils!
I wonder if the power-connector on that adaptor was installed backwards? That's all I can think of aside from it simply being incompatible. I know I've been burned by the 'same form-factor/connector but different pin-out' issue before!
What's that huge blue PCB on your wall? Looks bigger than my industrial Nematron board!
I appreciate your shirt, as I've got a few boxes of 5-1/4 disks with that same logo! Bunch of Commodore-related ones.
For the battery holder that doesn't have a diode, you may also be able to use a LIR2032 cell
Adrian ! Test those power supplies with a multimeter before plugging in multiple devices after the first one doesn't work !
Hello Mr. Adrian! Question: Given all of the issues we continuously see with your RetroTink, would you recommend that device? It costs a pretty penny, and I'm reluctant to purchase one given the amount of times it's glitched on you while you're shooting your videos.
I used a lot of LS120, loved them!