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It sounds to me like improving the probe-to-pin connectivity may be the main factor here. Since your controller swap yielded the same behaviour you saw earlier, I'm inclined to suspect that the controller is OK overall and that the problem lies elsewhere. To my mind, really conclusively...

That's interesting ... what are you triggering on here? It looks like there's some serial line traffic and some attempt to decode it; does the bytestream have any resemblance to what ROM source code says? The traffic does look somewhat dubious to me. Would love to delve deeper but the workday...

IIRC I've observed a hot Darlington array on a drive that wouldn't start turning on its own. After an attempt or two at "push-starting" the spindle (like the "prodding" you were doing, it sounds like), it would spin, but it seems like a stuck spindle just means a lot of current through the array...

This doesn't help the project of trying to make arbitrary code for debugging, but is there anyone around you with a Widget that you could approach for a temporary Lizzy swap? At a minimum, it can eliminate the IC as a potential problem point, though I believe it's probably a long shot. With...

Some Widgets have the Z8 with the "piggyback" ROM --- a ROM IC that rests atop the microcontroller. You can see a picture of it here. It sounds like you have the other kind of Z8, the one with the mask ROM. There is a chance that the mask ROM on your Widget is corrupted, but I suspect this is...

Good luck --- it sounds like you are as much a scholar of Widget as the rest of us, perhaps even moreso. At this point you are forging ahead into terrain that virtually nobody has visited for 40 years. The commented COP code will be useful to share if you are inclined. There is much more...

Anyway, they show these definitions: 0000| 0000 0050 NODSK .EQU 80 ;DISK NOT ATTACHED 0000| 0000 0051 DSKBSY .EQU 81 ;DISK NOT READY 0000| 0000 0052 BADRSP .EQU 82 ;UNEXPECTED...

Hi grbrady220, Widgets are fairly rare, so many repairs often encounter unique problems. I haven't heard of a syndrome quite like yours, but that in itself is not unusual. The numeric errors you see can be interpreted in a few ways, but I always like to reach for the Lisa Boot ROM source code...

It's been a long time since I've attempted an adjustment, so I'm afraid I can't offer much help right now. I don't know for sure, but I would expect that the coarse servoing that seeks the head between tracks only depends on the optical sensor --- if that's right, the signal from the heads...

I'm afraid not --- sorry about that! Do you have an environment where you could build NeoWidEx? It may be possible to hack in the functionality you need, short of actually implementing these exercises.

In the abstract it's perfectly fine to power on a Lisa without a mouse and keyboard. For a first power-up I would do a careful inspection behind the back, top, and front panels. The Lisa has a highly modular design: you can remove the logic boards, the power supply, and the disk cage in the...

I don't have time to write very much right now, but what you have is a Lisa 2/10 (you can tell from the battery-less I/O board and the three ports on the motherboard). A parallel port expansion card is fitted. It would be nice to see what's behind the front bezel --- I'd be curious to see if...

Yes, there was certainly one in our Mac Classic when we got it new. Although the Classic's hard drive was (and remains) a 50 MB device by GCC, so I suppose whoever installed that could have put in the dummy disk.

I'm not an EE, but I think the signal you're feeding the transformer isn't really a DC signal: it's jumping up and down, so it's closer to AC for the purposes of this discussion. The transformer is a coil, so it has an impedance to AC --- it doesn't behave like a direct short would.

I'm pretty sure the character bitmap isn't loaded into the RAM: the character stored in ROM (along with the lower bits of the current scanline) index into the ROM and the pixels go straight from there to the screen through the display hardware. So good-looking characters don't tell us much about...

The OP says it's already a IIfx motherboard. Lucky break! I'm totally being "that guy" but I wince at even the original Mac II's 68020 being considered "16 bit" --- 32-bit address and data buses, 32-bit registers, 32-bit ALU... you can quibble about the 68000, but there's not really much that's...

Congrats! Enjoy LOS and consider joining the conversation over on lisalist2.com as well.

No, there is no need to mount anything onto any desktop. Your Widget is now completely empty. Just boot from the first Office System disk image in the same way you booted from the BLU disk image. Then follow the instructions on the screen to install the Office System to your Widget.

This could mean a lot of things. On a normal startup, the Widget's activity light will blink a little bit and you will hear a squeak-squeak-SQUEAK-squeek as the Widget recalibrates the heads. What should happen next is the Widget starts its surface scan, where it blinks steadily for minute or...

If your SE/30 has a working floppy drive, I would get Disk Copy 4.2 installed onto it and then use that to burn Lisa Office System .dc42 disk images onto floppy disks. Do you have a convenient way to get disk images onto your SE/30?