I have been looking at my DECmate II recently. I got an Italian version of WPS 1.0 for it and that works fine, except that I don't have an Italian keyboard so finding some of the characters is a bit tricky. :)
The machine came with an RD51 hard disk. I can't many references to MFM disks in DECmate IIs. The disk will sometimes spin up and sometimes remains motionless. I checked all three of the Darlington transistors on the drive board and they seemed fine (I checked them out of circuit). However, unless I have any really persistent problems getting the disk to run, I am not going to bother trying to make it start reliably. My main question though is this. From what I can see the WPS software does not access the hard disk, the manual I have does not mention hard disks. I executed the function for listing files and it said it found nothing, whether that attempted to access the hard disk or not I don't know. Should WPS be able to access the hard disk? Might it have been a later version that used the hard disk? If not, then would one of the other OSs for the DECmate II be able to access the hard disk? I don't have any other OSs for it though, does anyone know where I might find copies? I also have a graphics option board for the machine, which software actually uses this option? Any recommendations for how best to image RX50 diskettes? I want to preserve the diskettes I have. Regards Rob
