[hrhoward]

Hello,
I have an old Partner III D that has been sitting around for quite some time.

CMOS battery died and would like to know if anyone has the HDD info for BIOS. It has a hard disk emulator card.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Heath

[ZZZZ]

Is the HDD emulator you have the SimDisk card with the eproms on it, or is there another card?

Usually, there isn't a HDD in the cardcage so there won't be one in the CMOS. If there is, you can find the cylinders, heads, sectors numbers on the drive itself or an on-line search of the model.

I'll cross my fingers for you that your Cent5 cardcage is a version B, not a version A.

[hrhoward]

The drawing calls it a
CMOS Hard Disk Emulator
Diversified Technology
No. CRR 804

How do I tell between version A & B?

[ZZZZ]

There should be a tag on the bottom of the cardcage with a serial number and a letter.

The 'A' cardcage uses a different style motherboard arrangement and different acroloop cards than the later versions.

[sportybob]

When the C5 control first came out Check the control serial #,, ### ( no dash) was a control they called a CAT900 system, It used Deversified Technologies 286 slot type mother board with a HDD emulator somtimes called a ROM disk. Milltronics no longer has the ROM board setup software.
An external clue to this control is the 2 fans on the top of the control.

###-A used 286 PC style mother boards, It used the (then new) " SIMDISK card, It was a much improved board from the ROM disk card by DT. It stores the MS DOS and CNC software chips on EEPROMS and used RAM chips for parameter and programming storage. It has the ability to reformat the RAM "B: drive" and software can be updated by changing the 13 EEprom chips. more RAM chips can be added to increase the program storage. -A controls used the same version 1 Acroloop cards as the CAT900 controls. It has one fan on top.

The ###-B controls used 386 and 486 mother boards and used version 2 Acroloop cards.
-B controls can be updated to the new SBC motherboards.
no dash and -A controls can not be updated, the version 1 ACRO LOOP cards are not compatiable.

-C, -D controls added some I/O to the interface.

C1 controls all used 386 /486 and version 2 ACRO LOOP cards. The interface is different and cont compatable with C5 machines. The Interface can be changed to the C5 type.

PM me for more info.

Sportybob

[x69rzx]

Any ideas where to find some RAM for this dinosaur? I have several slots open and could certainly use it!

[sportybob]

Which control do you have? S/N ??
Assuming you have at least a -A control with a Simdisk The RAM chips are MS62256L-70PC ( ebay this: SRAM 32Kx8 MOSEL MS62256L-10PC 28DIP New! 32Kx8 ) If your Simdisk has spare dip already soldered in place you can fill up the spare slots. If you have no DIP on the board I would recommend buying the DIPS and solder them to the board and then install the RAM into the DIPS. Otherwise you will need to solder the chips themselves, OK if you are experienced with soldering IC's. Usually added in blocks of 4 chips (128K)

Before you install new chips, make a back up copy of you parameters. After you install the new chips you will need to reformated the RAM on the simdisk so it will recognize the new ram. Reformatting takes the RAM chips and formates it to "look like" a 720K floppy. You can add up to a total of 24 RAM chips (32K X 24= 768K) 720K usable.

OR: PM me and send me the control and I can update it.

Sportybob

[x69rzx]

I'll have to check the s/n on it, but it is running a 486x, so from your other post I deduce that it's either a B or C. There are DIPS in place, though I am familiar with curcuit level design and soldering if needed. The formatting takes place from within the shell I'm guessing? Thanks for the info!