Getting this thing on my bench, I started pulling this apart, I immediately noticed the telephone cable and the sign talking about being approved to use in telecommunication systems

We have a modem card! This is super cool, Apricot expansion cards used their own interface, and so not many cards exist any more, finding this is super cool and I can't wait to play around with it

Disconnecting the power supply and powering on to test the voltages... caused all my lights to turn off, OK, the PSU needs work

Looking deeper and yeah, blown Rifa capacitors, suuuuuper common, I de-solderded these and carefully restested, now more tripping breakers, but it did make a high pitched noise rhythmic chirping noise and all the voltages looked weird and were jumping on and off; if there are other bad caps it may very well be making the switch mode PSU act up, so I took and inventory of all the capacitors and placed an order, which was gonna take a few days

Moving on to other areas of the computer I can test, the drives.

These are early Sony 3.5 inch floppies and I am *scared* of them, they are very early, so are electrically and dimensionally non-standard, are usually in a system where the case is moulded to the shape of the drive, and they are *VERY* prone to breaking

Specifically they are prone to the grease turning to paste, making the eject mechanism not work quite right, and pushing the drive partially out but not fully retracting the heads, allowing unwitting user to pull the driver out and do anything from significantly damage or rip off the heads

This was the case for both of my Apricot Portables, so far the only Apricot I have had with a working drive is my F1, and this machine has 2 of them  thankfully since ACT/Apricot used the same drives in all of their machines, I can use my F1 to test

I first made sure to very gently clean the heads which thankfully were still in place and were visually OK, and placing a cardboard floppy drive protector in there, the mechanism worked perfectly, whew

Placing each drive in my F1 with a bootable disk... the F1 booted riiiight up first try, for both drive, HOLY CRAP, we have 2 working drives in a dual drive machine

I better continue this threat for #aprilcot

Full capacitor replacement later, I did a power on of the PSU and and the high pitched rhythmic clicking noise returned - ANNOYING

After checking and ruling out basically all of the active components, I was stumped, until prompted to try it under load, not wanting to hook the main board up just yet, I sourced some high power resistors, and bingo, clicking gone and voltage all normal

I had heard legends of PSUs that need to be under load, just managed to avoid them until now

Reassembling the machine and powering everything on, it works! And now on to boot disks...

There is a huge repository of apricot disk images, including boot disks https://actapricot.org/disks/aprididx.htm

The problem is, reading any information on the internet (at the time) on how to get a boot disk, was that due to non-standard disk geometry, you need to copy your chosen disk to a IBM compatible DOS PC, and then use an executable called apridisk https://actapricot.org/support/apridisk/apridisk.htm to write out the image

After several days of trying and failing at getting data on to my one working compatible DOS pc, I looked deeper at the double sided Apricot disks, and discovered... they were standard 720k geometry?

It turns out, the disk image IS STANDARD, the high level filesystem was not, and so was the Apridisk.exe utility, which read and writes it's own file format, which just so happens to be that's the format all the files on actapricot.org are in

If I could convert the file format to be the standard RAW file format used by Greaseweazle, I could use that to write a boot disk directly from my PC and not bother with a whole other DOS PC

On a hunch, I spun up DOSBox, mounting a directory containing my boot disk image and Apridisk.exe, and a blank 720k disk image, running Apridisk to write out to that disk image, and then writing that file to disk with a Greaseweazle...

It worked! I blogged about this in more depth here https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/creating-bootable-apricot-disks-with-a-modern-pc-and-greaseweazle.1256679/#post-1495033

And then non other than John Elliot, author of the QDAE Apricot emulator commented that his dskconv tool will do all the conversion without needing DOSBox