zilog system 8000

Mattis Lind mattislind at gmail.com
Fri Jul 20 16:43:57 CDT 2018


I have one model 21 and one model 11. Finch drive and ST506 drive
respectively. Not sure about the status of disks, but I have a spare Finch
drive. I also have three install tapes. One Sadie 3.5 and two ZEUS 3.21.

When time permits I will read those. AJ Palmgren read a tape with a tar
archive I made myself on this machine many years ago.  The ouput I got from
AJ was  Saleae logic analyzer dumps. One per track read. He is using a
quite standard Wangtek 5099 drive where he is able to control the head in
more detail. Some dumps were from tracks which were spot on one of the
tracks on the tape. Others were not a full hit. I had to test all of them.

I created a small program that decoded the MFM data off the tracks. It
processed gigabytes worth of samples. Checked the CRC and wrote it to file
so I could recover the archieve.
http://www.datormuseum.se/computers/others/zilog-s8000/extract-s8000-tapes

Credits goes to AJ Palmgren for reading the tape and to David Gesswein from
whom I stole and modified the MFM decoder.

And as Al wrote:  No it is not at all QIC. The drive has four fixed tracks
and the encoding is MFM.

/Mattis

fredag 20 juli 2018 skrev Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>:

>
>
> On 7/20/18 6:20 AM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
>
> >> We also have some tapes, again, I don't know which ones.
>
> Be VERY careful with those if you find them. They are NOT
> QIC-compatible and the belts WILL be bad.
>
>


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