Toshiba T3200 + Fairy YL-23 IC Tester

19Nov/240

Toshiba T3200 + Fairy YL-23 IC Tester

This beast happened to be in a store-room at work and was about to go into the e-waste bin... rest assured I prevented that from occurring! Thanks to my eagerness, I was then tasked with taking a backup of the HDD. Would it even boot?

Sorry, yes, it was already in pieces on the workbench... I should care more about blog photography, I suppose.

Don't apply power, check the caps first!

I didn't want to send unwieldly voltages into the motherboard, so I pulled the unit apart. The unit was caked in factory 'dust', so this also gave me a good chance to clean it. Thankfully there were actually no problems detected internally.

I had planned to extract the data by extracting the IDE HDD, but it turns out this unit is MFM! I'm going to have to do something trickier.

First boot in 25 years

Although this unit seems to have had a hard life, I was quite sure it hadn't been turned on in ~25 years. Knowing that the capacitors in the power supply were stable, I plugged in the 240v cable and sent it. The fans, display and HDD all came to life!

Look at that glorious screen! I've seen numerous posts where these screens have expired, so I was very happy to see this come to life.

Floppy woes

The floppy disk would seek to track zero and nothing else. As I've done on the PC-98s before, the first bet is to clean the heads with isopropyl. That didn't work, so I then extracted the drive and checked out the drive-speed sensor circuit.

Oh sure, that cap is crap... I touched it with tweezers and it took the pads with it! Fortunately the traces could be beeped out and a ceramic cap was installed instead. With my bodge in place, a DOS 5.0 boot disk loaded!

Backing up the HDD

The HDD was loading fine, so I had to find a way to get the data off the system. Via floppy would be a last-resort as it'd take a few of them. As nostalgic as spanned-volume pkzip'ing is, I'd rather not. Instead, I grabbed my trusty XT-IDE and found a 48mb CF card. I used the default configuration on the card, only setting the CF to 'slave' via the dip-switch.

Sure enough, with the CF as master, the card booted into it's copy of DOS 5.0 and XCOPY was used to transfer the entire HDD contents (all 19.4mb!) onto the CF card. Success!

Games!

The CF was also used to bring games to the system. Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest, Alleycat and... A-Train? Railroad Tycoon?

Everything of the correct vintage worked fine!

Fairy YL-23 EPROM Programmer And Chip Tester

I'd purchased this ages ago via FB Marketplace and hadn't found a need for it yet. Also, being ISA, I'd have to keep my P2 in an accessible location to be making use of this device. What better host than a chunky 286 laptop? Yes, this laptop has ISA slots!

With the card in the slot, I realised I had no idea how to orient the cable! I extracted it again and checked for grounding. Here's a clear example for anyone else:

Back in, with the laptop powered on, no life was shown in the unit. The software was downloaded (two exe files, only YL.EXE is really needed!) and copied over via CF card.