Looking for copy of Locksmith Version 6.0 disk utilites on 5.25 disk

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The Unitron language card

Once your "regular" language card arrives and if you have no use for the Unitron Language card I'm interested in buying it off of you.

 

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A few steps forward yesterday, now one step back

Hi Thellmer et al,

I've made a few steps forward the last couple days and now I have taken one step back.

Re one of the steps forward, I tested the Epson RX on my XP machine and the same issue occurred with it only printing 57 characters of an 80 character line and then going off line. So I knew now for sure it was the printer that was not working right. It was not an Apple II issue. I went back and looked at the eBay listing and sure enough the sales pitch was a bit ambiguous. It said worked fine the last time he used it years ago and it powers up. Well he didn't say it printed OK as of the listing. I assumed too much in what he said. But then I only paid $39 for an old workhorse of a printer from the good old days.

So I got out my trusty mini flashlight so I could see better and took a look at the works. Carefully and manually sliding the print head, etc. I found the problem. I piece of copper colored metal foil that acts as a platten of sorts for the pins of the print head was bent and moved out of place just a bit.  This was causing the print head to jam at that point ... and that causes the printer to go off line to protect things. Someone must have been in there with a letter opener or something to maybe undo a paper jam and bent that. I flattened it out as best I could and put it back where it belonged. Fired up the RX80 printer, printed out a test page (still on my XP machine), and it walla ... now works fine.  Then I move it back to the Apple II+ location and I printed out some inventory reports from my old software I wrote back in 1982, and it worked great.

But on the step backwards, I decided to put on longer disk drive cables on two of my floppy drives. The cables arrived via USPS yesterday. I needed them for the two that are Disk II drive clones made by a company named Mitac, since they were kind of short. Well I obviously must have put a cable on wrong because as soon as I turned things back on the one drive did not work and in a second or so I smelled the smell of electronic death. I immediately shut off the system. I pulled out the card from Slot 5 and opened and inspected the drive and sure enough I had smoked the 74LS125 chip in one the two Mitac drives on that controller board. Its so easy to put a cable on wrong for these disk drives. Kicked myself for this mistake. I should have inspected that cable swap process much, much more carefully. Oh well, one step backwards ... and live and learn.

The 74LS125 chip is soldered onto the board in the drive. Luckily one can still get them. I ordered a few and some 14 pin dual in-line IC sockets on eBay this morning. So next week when the parts get here I'll have to de-solder that chip, put in the socket and new chip, and fire it up again hoping that fixes the problem, and that no other parts were damaged. From what I read online (and saw a video on YouTube) that this is a not uncommon problem for the Disk II type drives. And they say most of the time just that one chip goes poof and replacing it usually fixes things.  Oh well, live and learn.

Having fun and slowly making progress ... three steps forward yesterday and today and one step back.

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The Unitron language card

Hi Baldrick,

I will likely want to keep it as a spare card. But once I get my machine fully working, I'll think on it. But generally I like to keep parts, cards for any electronics items I own to be used for salvaging of discrete parts off of them, or as a back up use.

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Blown Drive

Yup!  You are now a member of the ooops I misaligned the cable club.  Did one myself last year.  And yes generally the LS125 is the only chip affected.  Interesting yours is soldered in.  Ive only seen them soldered in the plastic cased 5.25" more modern drives with the 19 pin D-shell connector that you can't accidentally mis-align.  Maybe you have a rare one :-)  Good to hear your printer is fixed.  And yes you're probably right regarding at some point in its life someone had a paperjam and a pocketknife.

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Copy of Locksmith 6.1 Rec'd Today - That task now complete.
Hello Thellmer: I rec'd the disks today in the mail. I made working copies and will keep the ones you sent me as backup copies. The copy of Locksmith 6.1 worked perfectly. But on the ProDos issue, neither the Version 1.0.1 disk you sent nor the Version 2.4.2 would boot beyond the splash screen showing the program name and the copyright message at the bottom. At this point I think I'll call an end to this thread as the starting point subject line task has been completed, along with help on sundry other things. ProDOS still does not work on my 64k Apple II+ machine. But I will be starting a new thread on simply that subject, getting ProDOS to work on my machine such that I can then use ADT to transfer downloaded Apple ".dsk" programs via my Windows XP computer to my Apple II+. Thank you again Thellmer for the disks and all your help. See you all on the new thread.

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