Tulipcomputer

Project Tulipcomputer
Restaureren van een oude tulip compact 1 8088 clone, inclusief dot matrix printer.
Status	Initializing
Contact	thomas
Last Update	2023-12-14

After recapping and repairing 12V psu due to blow rail caused by shorted tantalums, everything works (except for the HDD, but i haven't given up)]]

Update: 14-12-23

I managed to get really close to booting the old beast from a 3.5 inch floppy, reformatted to 720k. But the ancient floppy controller chip on the motherboard just doesn't support 80 track floppies, so it was a no-go. I did however manage to revive the miniscribe 3425 hard drive. I added a ton of additional low-esr decoupling capacitance right at the drive head stepper motor controller, to give it some extra oomph, and let it run warm on its side. As it warmed up i slowly fed maybe about 0.3 to 0.5 mL of sewing machine oil into the outside stepper bearing with a syringe and needle, and that seemed to do the business. The seek error went away. This was quite a lot of oil. I think perhaps some of it may have made it to the second inner bearing. Surprisingly, it now boots reliably. Next task: get the data off before it crashes.