While having recently finished Dungeon Master - a deeply satisfying personal accomplishment - I’ve been pulling back from intense gaming for a few days. I am playing a new game, which I’ll talk about more later, but suffice to say it's nice to work on the machines sometimes. I feel like half the time my experiments fail. But even when they do, I feel I walk away with a better understanding of the machines which is always a rewarding feeling.
I moved my pristine stock A1000 to a rack for the moment and brought the Phoenix back out again. As some of you may recall, I got really far with it before finally getting frustrated by - of all things - the floppy drive. I customized the original floppy’s bracket to accept a “brand new” floppy drive with an (ug-ly!) 3D printed eject button. I had to make this swap because the original FDD that came with the 1000 back in 1986 is simply way too vertically thick to fit above the Phoenix motherboard with populated KS ROMs. The new drive gave me an obscene amount of room.
But I keep having this recurring issue with the floppy that has prevented me from putting the top case on and making the machine a daily driver.
Originally I had difficulty putting the disk in. I could see by looking directly into the FDD disk bay that my original holes were out of alignment ever so slightly. As such the left side was slightly drooping down. So I pulled the bracket out, and the drive from the bracket, and used a grinder to relocate the holes a few millimeters.
Now the drive appears to be perfectly aligned! Yes!
After putting it all back together, I can put a floppy disk in the drive and it goes in smoothly and easily ejects. Everything appears perfect.
However. . .
Once I put on the front plastic cover for the FDD - the front part of the 1000’s case - and fire up the power, I can put the disk in just fine but the drive just sits there. For some reason it won’t seek the disk. In fact I can even still hear the repeating sound “clunk. clunk. clunk.” So something isn’t engaging for some reason. But as soon as I pull the front cover off, voila! The disk spins right up and everything works perfectly. Something about that front cover is preventing the disk from being recognized under normal circumstances. Total head scratcher.
If I could figure that out (I’m going to try again tonight) the machine will be good enough to use regularly. The only aesthetic bits that really remain are the eject button and soldering up a new LED for the FDD.
I went ahead and started sanding the giant chicklet.
I have the correct paint for it and just need to waggle the button loose so I can paint it up. Hopefully I don’t break it when I try to remove it! That would suck.
So close to glory.