Scor­pio News

I describe my method as I know it works on the MAP80 VFC board, but the Mohamed method should work, with the relevant pin and chip numbers adjusted.

1. Extract the 2797 chip and bend pin 17 out at right angles. Connect this pin to IC13 pin 2. (The faint-hearted might prefer to replace the 2797 in a wire wrap socket, and bend pin 17 of the socket out at right angles before inserting the whole assembly into the PCB!)
2. Connect IC13 pin 2 to pin 1 of 74LS157 (Select pin).
3. Connect L3 pin a (2 MHz clock) to 74LS157 pin 3.
4. Connect L3 pin c (1 MHz clock) to 74LS157 pin 2.
5. Connect L3 pin b (CLK for 2797) to 74LS157 pin 4.
6. Connect 74LS157 pin 15 to 74LS157 pin 8.
7. Connect 74LS157 pin 16 (VCC) and pin 8 (GND) to +5 and 0 volts respectively.

On reset the latch is set up for 5-1/4 drives, but setting bit 5 of the drive port will select the higher clock rates for 8 inch disks.

There remained the analogue adjustments to be made. I had originally thought that I would have to provide two separate sets of presets for the two data rates, but found empirically that both sets of drives would perform correctly with one (compromise) set-up procedure.

1. Press RESET.
2. Connect TP to ground.
3. Connect frequency counter to pin 16.
4. Adjust trimmer VC1 for 200kHz (400kHz for 8″).
5. Connect scope to pin 29.
6. Adjust P3 for a pulse width of 400nS. (leave P2 as before.)

Although these settings appear well away from those recommended in the 2797 manual, the only loss of performance I have noted is in a fast disk copy utility, which reads sectors in physical sequence and writes them in the same order to the destination disk. The source disk is read in to the buffer as quickly as before, but the sector write routine isn’t quite quick enough to pick up the sector address of one sector after writing its predecessor, and has to wait a full revolution of the disk before trying again. It is possible that further experiment might remove this mild nuisance, but at the risk of other problems.

Software

The above compromise settings were arrived at after I had developed a disk verify utility to cope with the two byte track numbers required for the Drivetec, which