Looking for software for an Allen Smart Engine Analyzer

[Jack_K]

Does anyone happen to know any old automotive equipment repairers or someone with one of these machines?

I'm on the hunt for the software for an Allen Smart Engine Analyzer (SEA). It's not easy to find such old software. This could be in the form of a working HDD or the installation floppy disks. If you need to keep the drive, I don't need the physical media. If you can get the drive imaged onto a computer and send it to me, I can put it onto the drives I've got.

If anyone knows anyone who might (even the slightest chance) have what I need, I want to know.

Any other parts or information for these machines or the "digital engine analyzer" (DEA) is also of interest to me. I enjoy hearing stories too.

Allen (an American company) sold enough of them in the UK to set up a factory in the UK just for this model. I believe in the UK, they had a blue cabinet below the main unit instead of this stand

Before anyone links me to it, I'm well aware of Bob Courtemanche's site (https://bobcourtemanche.com/allen/index.html). I am often in contact with him since I've got five Allen machines.

 

[jmp49]

Different tack, is the hard disk dead? And is the machine worth the price of a specialist recovery?
I sent one off for forensic rebuild after it died and had valuable data on it and the backup tapes were bad, and they rebuilt it with new heads/motors/circuits inside a clean room. It was expensive, but it was less than the value of the data on it.
I got it back and we extracted the data off it quick and resolved things to stop it happening again.

 

[Jack_K]

Different tack, is the hard disk dead? And is the machine worth the price of a specialist recovery?
I sent one off for forensic rebuild after it died and had valuable data on it and the backup tapes were bad, and they rebuilt it with new heads/motors/circuits inside a clean room. It was expensive, but it was less than the value of the data on it.
I got it back and we extracted the data off it quick and resolved things to stop it happening again.

It's not worth specialist recovery.

The original HDD pictured is an unreliable model which were apparently being replaced when the machines were basically new due to reliability. I did actually get it going for a short time by freeing up the bearings. I then had to leave it for a couple of weeks and it died again. This time I couldn't get them to free up enough. In the process of trying to fix this, I believe I made it worse so I don't think it's possible to fix.

It uses IDE-XT drives commonly known as XTA which are incompatible with the newer IDE. If I had something to read the data, I would've done it when the drive was working. I now have some of the parts required to do so.

I do have another HDD with the software on it which is a much more reliable model. A previous owner had bought it in from the USA, it was working when sent. The machine recognises it but won't boot. The diagnostic diskette finds thousands of errors on the drive. I am going to try and recover the data from this drive. If I'm lucky, the data will work when transferred to another drive. I have some blank drives on their way to me and then I'll experiment with accessing these XTA drives. There are some complexities which mean that even if I can transfer the data, it may not work. There was some special security formatting.

If I can find the floppy disks for the installation it will make it a lot easier although apparently there's a code which needs to be entered. I have found someone with these disks but one or two are corrupt.

 

[500e]

We had a couple of Allen machines older than yours.
Good when working but money pits service slowused to ring US to gee them up.
Their multi gas anyliser was the best bit.
Same as the Repco 4 wheel aligner super tool when working, rep or service was almost weekly visitors, was serviced in France

 

[Jack_K]

We had a couple of Allen machines older than yours.
Good when working but money pits service slowused to ring US to gee them up.
Their multi gas anyliser was the best bit.
Same as the Repco 4 wheel aligner super tool when working, rep or service was almost weekly visitors, was serviced in France

Reliability and repair costs seemed to be big issues with Allen machines. When they are working they seem to be preferred over Sun and especially Bear.

The gas analysers do seem to be quite reliable and work well, probably because of how big they are. I've had a few little issues but I was able to fix them. The Sun ones sold at the same time were unreliable and difficult to repair according to a Sun tech. I have a MAHA exhaust analyser from the early 2000s and it's nowhere near as reliable.

 

[jmp49]

It's not worth specialist recovery.

The original HDD pictured is an unreliable model which were apparently being replaced when the machines were basically new due to reliability. I did actually get it going for a short time by freeing up the bearings. I then had to leave it for a couple of weeks and it died again. This time I couldn't get them to free up enough. In the process of trying to fix this, I believe I made it worse so I don't think it's possible to fix.

It uses IDE-XT drives commonly known as XTA which are incompatible with the newer IDE. If I had something to read the data, I would've done it when the drive was working. I now have some of the parts required to do so.

I do have another HDD with the software on it which is a much more reliable model. A previous owner had bought it in from the USA, it was working when sent. The machine recognises it but won't boot. The diagnostic diskette finds thousands of errors on the drive. I am going to try and recover the data from this drive. If I'm lucky, the data will work when transferred to another drive. I have some blank drives on their way to me and then I'll experiment with accessing these XTA drives. There are some complexities which mean that even if I can transfer the data, it may not work. There was some special security formatting.

If I can find the floppy disks for the installation it will make it a lot easier although apparently there's a code which needs to be entered. I have found someone with these disks but one or two are corrupt.

I started tinkering in the mfm era and double height winchester drives holding 8Mb, but the passing of time has eased the pain of the weirdness of early pc hardware and I'd forgot about those. I'm guessing the main board is a 8088 or similar era xt pc or maybe a 286 if your lucky.
The disk recovery services can recover from bearing/motor faults, but its expensive, too expensive for a hobby project, but hundreds of dollars not thousands. But you have to find one that understands the hardware too, but they are out there because legacy stuff is churning away on antiquitated hardware quietly doing its job long past retirement, until one day it isnt.

Maybe customs x-rayed the drives which can weaken them magnetically, I've had senders wrap them in silver foil and write magnetic media dont xray on the jiffy bags in the past, usually that gets them opened, but they dont arrive bad that way. If you just write magnetic media do not xray, they tend to ignore it and pass them through the machine anyway.

For floppy recovery if you find some and they wont read as is common, I use a hardware interface device called a greaseweasel to recover error'ed floppies. It controls the floppy drive hardware and takes a dump at flux level bypassing the drives normal read and retry loop for a forensic backup, and it can be made to retry poor reads a configurable amount of passes. I use it with a mitsumi floppy specifically with 3 mode in the hardware to access all the different modes but you wont need this for regular ibm floppies unless its japanese pc-98 format or weirder. I've had very good results recovering long lost dead floppies for bespoke stuff with it for formats far far weirder stuff than ibm pc's.

GitHub - keirf/greaseweazle: Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level

Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level - keirf/greaseweazle

github.com

Hope the above helps, I feel your pain.

 

[500e]

Never liked Sun analysers the RR were ok though

 

[Jack_K]

I started tinkering in the mfm era and double height winchester drives holding 8Mb, but the passing of time has eased the pain of the weirdness of early pc hardware and I'd forgot about those. I'm guessing the main board is a 8088 or similar era xt pc or maybe a 286 if your lucky.
The disk recovery services can recover from bearing/motor faults, but its expensive, too expensive for a hobby project, but hundreds of dollars not thousands. But you have to find one that understands the hardware too, but they are out there because legacy stuff is churning away on antiquitated hardware quietly doing its job long past retirement, until one day it isnt.

Maybe customs x-rayed the drives which can weaken them magnetically, I've had senders wrap them in silver foil and write magnetic media dont xray on the jiffy bags in the past, usually that gets them opened, but they dont arrive bad that way. If you just write magnetic media do not xray, they tend to ignore it and pass them through the machine anyway.

For floppy recovery if you find some and they wont read as is common, I use a hardware interface device called a greaseweasel to recover error'ed floppies. It controls the floppy drive hardware and takes a dump at flux level bypassing the drives normal read and retry loop for a forensic backup, and it can be made to retry poor reads a configurable amount of passes. I use it with a mitsumi floppy specifically with 3 mode in the hardware to access all the different modes but you wont need this for regular ibm floppies unless its japanese pc-98 format or weirder. I've had very good results recovering long lost dead floppies for bespoke stuff with it for formats far far weirder stuff than ibm pc's.

GitHub - keirf/greaseweazle: Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level

Tools for accessing a floppy drive at the raw flux level - keirf/greaseweazle

github.com

Hope the above helps, I feel your pain.

It has an 8088, well actually the compatible NEC V20. The shape of the boards is like multibus but appears electrically incompatible. It runs DOS. Unfortunately there's no keyboard so I can't manually run commands. I tried to edit to autoexec but there was also no video so I couldn't tell if my commands worked. The machine must require certain commands to actually display.

I hadn't actually thought about customs and the HDD. I did think about it possibly being an issue if I find any floppies. I saw the box everything was shipped in and I'm unsurprised that the HDD didn't survive. I have the problem of either getting whoever I find with media to try and copy the data or risk sending it to me. Most people with these machines don't know much about computers or electronics so they get scrapped.

I'll have to remember greaseweasel. If I had the corrupt disks I could attempt to recover them.

The funny thing is my job is based around data destruction, not recovery.

I am trying to find a suitable computer to run an ST05X ISA card to interface with the drives. I'm sure I've had a couple but threw them out annoyingly. Pentium II machines may work by disabling the onboard storage controller. They seem a lot cheaper than 286 and 386 systems.

 

[jmp49]

I might be stating the obvious again here but are you sure the video output/display device actually works? stuff of that era has a 15khz clocked analog rgb signal for the low resolution and a lot of monitors cant sync to that low a frequency and will just blank out. If you can find one out of a rack cabinet drawer for craft terminal use, they usually support a really wide range of video resolutions and clocks unless they are really modern units. The neck was cracked on the crt on my machine's display so I grafted in a ex rack unit not wanting to pay the 1200 quid for a special sodick lcd upgrade.

The earlier pc98 (9801uv etc) series made by NEC themselves runs their own NEC V30, so 286 speed almost and a japanese rewrite of dos 5, and have cards that are a multibus like shape with 100 pins in the connector called c-bus with a 16 bit bus and unique to them. I wondered if it was a pc88 or other older nec model from your description because that would open up hardware possibilities but checking they ran a z80 in that era, nothing in between with a NEC v20 cpu which is odd they used a zilog while making a 8086 clone... Shame that would have made sense since pc98 series found their way inside a lot of industrial kit because of japanese cnc machine makers using them.

The greaseweasel will deal with odd copy protected floppies too, because it doesnt care, it just does a flux dump and you can restore that and its a 1:1 complete with odd length tracks and data written outside the fat table areas etc.
Reversing, doing comptuer archeology and getting weird old computers working is kind of a side hobby of mine, so following along quietly hereon in

 

[Jack_K]

I might be stating the obvious again here but are you sure the video output/display device actually works? stuff of that era has a 15khz clocked analog rgb signal for the low resolution and a lot of monitors cant sync to that low a frequency and will just blank out. If you can find one out of a rack cabinet drawer for craft terminal use, they usually support a really wide range of video resolutions and clocks unless they are really modern units. The neck was cracked on the crt on my machine's display so I grafted in a ex rack unit not wanting to pay the 1200 quid for a special sodick lcd upgrade.

The earlier pc98 (9801uv etc) series made by NEC themselves runs their own NEC V30, so 286 speed almost and a japanese rewrite of dos 5, and have cards that are a multibus like shape with 100 pins in the connector called c-bus with a 16 bit bus and unique to them. I wondered if it was a pc88 or other older nec model from your description because that would open up hardware possibilities but checking they ran a z80 in that era, nothing in between with a NEC v20 cpu which is odd they used a zilog while making a 8086 clone... Shame that would have made sense since pc98 series found their way inside a lot of industrial kit because of japanese cnc machine makers using them.

The greaseweasel will deal with odd copy protected floppies too, because it doesnt care, it just does a flux dump and you can restore that and its a 1:1 complete with odd length tracks and data written outside the fat table areas etc.
Reversing, doing comptuer archeology and getting weird old computers working is kind of a side hobby of mine, so following along quietly hereon in

The story gets more complicated for you...

I have two of the SEAs. The first one is an earlier version which uses a memory board instead of a HDD and diskettes. These machines use a light pen as the only input method. I haven't yet got any light pens to work properly. I have to remove the lens and hold them up against the CRT. That machine is full of issues and I gave up on it for now.

When I was chasing parts or information, I ended up with a later SEA with two sets of boards. This one has a HDD and floppy drive instead of the memory board. When these are fitted they also add a remote control panel which almost eliminates the light pen requirement. They also added some other features that I don't need. It also has the newer software so there are some improvements.

Supposedly the fault was in the power supply but I did doubt that since none of my other Allen machines have had PSU issues. It turned out to be The HDD. What I have done is install the memory board from the earlier machine and remove the HDD type boards. The machine is fully working after a few other little issues. It does however mean that I can't use the remote control panel so I am stuck with the light pen issues. The software is also the older version so it isn't designed for European or Australian vehicles. It does work though as for vehicles without an ECU, the vehicle selection makes little difference.

I want to get this machine working with the HDD so I can use it with all it's features and possibly get the first one going.

I need to investigate the light pen situation properly as there should be a solution other than turning up the CRT brightness excessively.

The CRT actually uses a 9 pin connector which is odd since everything else uses edge connectors. I haven't been able to find what type of signal it is since the pinout doesn't match anything I can find. The CRT on the first machine might be faulty now but there's a combination of issues so I'm not sure.

I will post some pictures of the machine's internals later. There's little information online. Eventually I want to make some videos showing them functioning. If they were sold now, they would be marketed as having AI.

 

[jmp49]

Light pens are awkward because they work by detecting the actual electron beam dot of the CRT passing the sensor on the pen and then work out from the timing circuitry where they are pointed, so they use the raster beam position timing very precisely and are tied into the display output hardware. I have a Sega light gun & rifle in my collection which work on the same principle, but I cant actually use any of them as I put all my vintage console stuff out a projector which has no raster dot to detect so I've never really delved deeper into repairing the actual circuitry inside. But if its working with the brightness turned up, then the sensor & timing side at least is working albeit weak, and could just be dirty optics or a component gone bad with age.
But, light pen requring at least a degree of cleanlyness in a automotive workshop. What could possibly go wrong there

Also sounds like you want to get it going because you can and are determined not to be beaten. I've been there in things a few times myself as have I imagine a lot of people on here.
I've got a Souriau automotive tester but its a bit older and lacks a scope function and has a crypton co2 tester connected in, it followed me home one day and I probably have used it five times in 15 years, but its not eating anything when its not in use so why not. Maybe if I ever get my H&F engine dyno commissioned it will have a real use...