Inherited Microbee64 - Need Help

[kangarused]

Hi everyone,

My grandpa passed away and my family and I have inherited his old Microbee64, he used to teach students how to use it many years ago and still has the original user manuals.

It also remained his favourite computer and he constantly used it to take notes. So now we have boxes of disks that we want to read to see if there's anything important or sentimental.

The problem is that we can't get it to read the disks, we found a disk labelled master (but it was missing the write protect sticker) and followed the user manual but haven't had any luck getting the cursor to display or being able to reset.

It's possible that it's damaged or perhaps we overwrote the master disk before we knew what we were doing.

I'm located in Perth, Australia and I'm hoping that there's someone local to me on this board who would be able and willing to help take a look at it and see if we can get it working + teach me enough to get going with reading these disks he left us.

If you're in Perth and interested in helping please let me know.

Thanks!

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Here are some photos, you'll notice that it's a bit custom because he wasn't a fan of the original design and decided to modify it 🙃

   

[ChickenMan]

Hi kangarused and welcome to the forum

I assume they are 5.25" floppy disks as I see a part of one in one of the pics?  I suspect the Microbee has problems, when you turn it on, if you press the M key down dolding the Rest key down for 3sec and release, it should present the Microbee Monitor.  Thats assuming the keys are working and for old Microbees thats a known problem. We have a number of members in Perth, I hope one of them can help you out.  If not I can image the disks for you and extract all files but only if the disks are readable in the first place and send the images and disks back. I'm in Victoria.

[MbeeTech]

Hi Kangarused, Welcome to the forum.

Just a quick note, the blue plug that you have put into the monitor's DC out connection should not be connected when you are using the
disk drive attached to the keyboard. Normally in this system the disk drive supplies power to the keyboard via the 50 way flat cable that gets
plugged into the back of the Microbee keyboard. If you supply power to the keyboard via the DIN lead (the one with the blue DC plug, video
connector and 2 cassette interface connectors) there is a possibility of components overheating / failing.

If you want to check the operation of the keyboard on it's own, you can connect it to the monitor with the connections as you have pictured,
and assuming the monitor is outputting 12v into the blue plug, you should get text at the top of the screen ' Microbee Disk Monitor ... '

Things to check if this doesn't work :

A) To power on the monitor, rotate the power knob clockwise (it should just click into place)
B) Do you get any glow on the screen if you wind the brightness and contrast controls are fully clockwise ?
C) Are you getting power out of the monitor to the Microbee keyboard via the DIN cable?
This can be checked if you have a multimeter by removing the top back case of the keyboard (2 screws in the
base of the case hold the top rear case). With the top removed, the DIN lead plugged into the monitor and
keyboard, with the monitor turned on, check for approx +12v around the main filter capacitor on the right
hand side of the main board.
D) if there is no power getting to the keyboard, there is a fuse in the monitor that will need replacing for the DC power output.
E) If you get power o.k., try unplugging the coreboard (the top board which has the main system memory on it) from the
baseboard (with the power off) and plugging it back in - repeat this a few times and then see if you get the
Microbee Disk Monitor message again.
Start with that and see how you go.
Once you have the Disk Monitor message up, we can proceed with other testing from there.

[someone]

Sincere condolences for your grandpa's passing,

You've inherited in someone's opinion one of the best classic colour microbees.
Unusually you've got your monitor on top of the disk drives.
To keep things simple someone would move the monitor off the disk drive case to prevent any potential electromagnetic interference from the monitor affecting the disk drive's operation.

Don't be afraid but fixing classic colour microbees is a nightmare. The fitment of the colour board is the proverbial rat's nest.
Hopefully you won't get to a stage where you'll need to repair it.

[CheshireNoir]

Hi kangarused,
I'm in Perth if you need any help or advice. I'm also in contact with several other Microbee users over here.
Happy to help see if we can get your Grandads data saved, and the Microbee working again.

(This could be the excuse I need to go buy a Greaseweasel, so we can back up the disks directly to PC)

John