MPC tech in Toronto, Canada ?

Anyone know someone in the Toronto Canada area?

Backstory if anyone cares:

Some of you may have seen a few threads I've had where I've been trying to get my MPC2KXL running a card reader I bought a few years back.. This has been a project that's gone on for nearly two years on and off.

Today I tried to wire up the card reader and somewhere along the line, my machine started saying "Insert MPC2000XL Disc" and all the lights are lit up. I've seen a few threads indicating that this means the flash ROM is borked. I was going to try download the OS to floppy, but then I realized I need to get a working floppy drive, get another computer that can write to a floppy, and find a floppy.

So I just got frustrated, my dining table is full of stuff I've bought to try and get this working (cables, connectors, multimeter, soldering iron, blank CDs, SCSI drives), and my allergies are killing me from scouring bins of junked parts in electronics surplus places. I finally hit the wall and am thinking about just finding someone to set this up for me so that I can actually do something with this thing.

I'd looking for the crying Smilie but I can't find it. Fits.

thanks,
terry

good luck... it asking to insert the 2000xl disk is not a good sign... that sucks..

@MPCNugget - Could you post a picture of the wiring job you did?

Mr_Debauche: thanks for the words of support, I need it.

Richie, I had to put back the wires, because I then started to connect a floppy drive to flash the ROM, but this is what I did:




When I did this, the PASD light on the card reader would stay on (I didn't have a card in there yet).

You can't tell too clearly, but the drive is jumpered to master.

Thanks for the support !
terry

@MPCNugget at least you have a good Adtron card reader, they're quite expensive to find.

I see that you're using jumper pins there, do you happen still have the original 4 pin floppy connector cable?

@Richie - I am using jumper pins... is there a possibility the wires aren't large enough ?

I don't have the original cable that connects to the header on the circuit board - that's really the beginnings of my difficulty, as for the life of my I could not find anything that would fit that header.

I've now rigged something up where I took a standard 4-pin floppy power connector, and cut and sanded it down so that it would fit. I could wire that to the Molex connector on the card reader.

Also, since my MPC is saying "Insert MPC2KL disk", I've read that I may need to flash the EEPROM (?) on the MPC. To do this, I understand I need to format a floppy and then put the MPC2KXL.BIN on that disk. I tried doing this, but it didn't seem to do anything. Does the disk need to be formatted in a particular manner, and is it OK if the disk is a HD/1.44 MB disk ?

THanks !