Tatung Computer Forum

There are a couple of sellers on eBay who sell replacement system discs. However, you can use MOS to check your drive before purchasing a replacement system disc. As both of your discs are not working it might possibly be the drive itself, so worth checking first … Allow the computer to boot into MO...

Hi. A warm welcome to the forum.

You're booting into MOS so that's encouraging.

You need a readable system disc in the drive to boot into DOS.

It looks like your old disc may be corrupted as it can't read the relevant sector. Do you have any other discs you can try?

I've seen the list of the ICs in the TC01 Hardware Manual, but nothing about socketed ICs or the circuit board of the 256 anywhere. Having checked some TC01 circuit board photos, it would seem the only socketed ICs are the MOS, spare ROM socket and the 1770 floppy disc controller. Photos here https:...

If you manage to convert the disc to an DSK image using Greaseweasel but you find it still doesn’t work as expected, then there are a few things you can try to determine the extent of the disc corruption. Using DISCMOD on your Einstein with your DSK copy is much safer in ensuring you don’t inadverte...

Sounds like the drive is either out of alignment or the discs are corrupt (or both!). Or the discs are not 80 track double-sided discs. They may have been originally formatted as 40 or 80 track single sided, perhaps? You could try the other formats to rule this out. Without dedicated equipment, tryi...

It’s great that your Einstein is still operational, Tony. Thanks for the info. I’ve read Mike Smallman’s Speculator booklet again and am starting to understand its operation much more clearly. I see that once you’ve loaded the spectrum game from tape you can save it to disc with a function key. And ...

I understand there are three Einstein floppy discs of Spectrum Programs that are already available to work with the Speculator. Would they work from a Gotek image (in Drive 1 on my system)? I suppose what I'm asking is if the Speculator is happy to co-exist with whatever DOS is initialised. I like t...

A simpler alternative to DISCMOD would be to use the READ command from within MOS. This avoids using the system DOS code from your startup disc and might throw some light on the issue. 1: Ensure your system disc is in your internal floppy set as Drive 0 and your Gotek is set as Drive 1 2: Drop into ...

The error usually means that your disc in the internal drive is recognised as unformatted and doesn’t have accessible system tracks, or that you’ve changed your system disc in the internal drive. You might try running the DISCMOD program from your Drive 1 Gotek. The manual shows you how to examine d...

Very surprising. Can you do a DIR of Drive 0 immediately after you boot from the drive? Does the file information for your internal drive appear as it should? Switching to Gotek Drive 1, issuing a DIR command to view the DSK image, and switching back to Drive 0 shouldn’t interfere with this function...