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Acorn Electron

PostPosted: Tue Jul 09, 2013 10:23 pm
by acsi
I recently (well 6 months ago) purchased an Acorn Electron on trade me. It came with an Expansion Plus 1 unit and a Solidisk Technology disk controller and a 5 1/4" drive, some disks and a few tapes. http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=555959314

Initial testing trying to tune it in soon showed that the modulator was on it's last legs (not surprising given the age), so I ordered a SCART lead from eBay (Retro Computer Shack). Luckily the Oric tape leads also work on the Electron so I didn't need these.

Once the lead arrived I was presented with a nice stable picture. Further testing showed the drive wouldn't read the disks but although it looks like the stepper motor on the drive is faulty I could also not get them to work using another drive (although this did read the directory on a couple it got no further).

After testing the tapes (most of which worked) I decided to get out my trusty HXC floppy drive emulator and downloaded a few images to test with.

Image

Image

Image

I haven't used a BBC since High School and never seen an Electron before but I must say I am very impressed with it's compatibility with it's big brother. I more recently got hold of some ROM's and cartridge's for them. And most of the ROM's are compatible with the Electron.

Also interesting is that the disk controller will also control a Winchester hard drive. Now those must be rare but would be fun to see it going.

Re: Acorn Electron

PostPosted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 9:13 am
by tezza
Interesting. Thanks for posting.

I must get myself one of those HxC floppy emulators at some stage. My Amiga 500 internal drive works most times but is definitely dodgy.

Of course it could just need a good clean. I inspected my Trade-Me acquired Amiga games disks last night and the media was in pretty bad shape in nearly all of them. Given some of these had been used in the machine, a shiny new coating of media oxide on the drive heads would be no surprise.