Annie arrives at a house with multiple ground-level entrances.
She rings one of the doorbells and waits. Nobody answers. She checks
that it is the right door – yes, this is grandpa Karl's
apartment. She rings again. A window on in?
one of the adjacent houses opens and she hears Isabelle quietly calling
her:
Annie, we're over here.
She walks over.
Which door?
Number 15, I'll let you in.
Lucas and Karl are also inside.
Karl says: We needed a little more space.
This place has been vacant forever, might
as well use it.
Annie slides her shoes off and leans her bag against the wall. Then,
they go into the living room where cables and computer parts are all over
the floor. Lucas sits in front of the rack between two opened boxes.
The rack's side panels had been removed, revealing the devices
mounted inside and the cables connecting them. Lucas is pushing a circuit
board into a half-assembled metal box that hangs out the front. Karl goes
over to a stool next to the rack, carefully avoiding stepping on things,
and sits down.
Annie sits down next to Lucas and watches as he carefully
synonym for careful? inserts another
board. Karl is reading from a binder of documentation and tells him to
set some tiny switches on its front edge.
While grabbing the next board, Lucas says:
Annie, can you take these and prepare the DIP
switches?
He pushes the box over to her. It contains four circuit boards, all
identical.
Uhm, okay.
She takes one of the boards out and looks at it. It's full of
electronic components on both sides and one of the edges holds a tiny red
box with an even tinier row of switches on it.
Above is a bad description. Need naive description
of DIP switches from someone who doesn't know.
So what do I set them to?
Karl tells her a combination and she tries to push the switches up or
down as needed with her finger nails.
Lucas says Here, use this. and hands
her a pen.
Using it to flip the switches, she sets the combination Karl says, then
hands the board over to Lucas and grabs the next one.
Karl takes the racks's power cable and plugs it in. Isabelle gets the terminal from a corner of the room and lifts it onto the rack. Meanwhile, Annie and Lucas start collecting the cables and loose parts from the floor. Isabelle plugs the terminal into power and Karl connects a cable between it and one of the devices in the front of the rack. They all gather around and Karl powers it on. He follows the same procedure that Annie and Isabelle performed in the library: Key switch at the top of the rack to RST, power up the hard drive, hold LOAD and key switch to RUN. Then, he pulls a floppy disk out of the documentation binder and inserts it into the computer. He enters some commands, the drive clicks a few times, and the terminal displays a menu.
[ SYSTEM DIAGNOSTICS v3.15 ] ---------------------------- 1. Quick Test 2. Run All Tests 3. CPU Test 4. Memory Test 5. FPU Test 6. DMA Test 7. Serial Test 8. FDD Test 9. HDD Test 10. MTD Test 11. Load Module... Choice: █
Lucas asks:
Odds of this working first try?
Karl says: We will see...
He types a number and presses enter.
Choice: 2
Initializing...
Loading CPU Test...
Registers: Pass Branching: Pass
ALU: Pass Long Words: Pass
All Instrct:Pass Stress Test:Pass
Result: PASSED
Loading Memory Test...
Memory map:
00000000-
Result: FAIL
Loading FPU Test...
NC2K OpROM init
FP Arithmetic Test
SIMD Test
Result: FAIL
Copyright © 2023-2025 Jan Danielzick (aka. BodgeMaster) – All rights reserved.