4 Mar
2023
4 Mar
'23
9:44 p.m.
Thank you Warner. Just takes time and staring at the thing for awhile.
I now have a full POS 3.2 install and Pro/Toolkit. Looks like it is M+
3.2 all right, over the next month I'll start poking around and see if I
can tease out the drivers and such for a better Gen. I want Split I/D
support. And if I do a snapshot of this real RD53 to Gesswin's emulator
and use that as my main disk I can try things, trash the system, then
revert to a snapshot in no time.
First though I need to get Pro/Decnet working. POS 3.2 does installs
differently than 2.0: It has the ability to have multiple "users" (nice)
and as a part of that you don't "Install" apps from disk anymore.
Instead you install them to a "System Library", then install them for
that user using the normal "Install" but from "Library" instead of
disk.
Weird, but makes sense: The library install puts in everything that's
privledged, and the menu install allows you to copy the additional files
for specific users. I wonder if you can install the libraries on a
DECNET mounted volume, that would be a *great* way to allow centralized
software distribution, update, patching, and cut down on local disk
space needs.
In the early 1980's. *sigh* DEC totally blew it, didn't they.
CZ
On 3/5/2023 12:07 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
This is very cool! Glad to see you got it working...
On Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 9:06 PM Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:
Ok, after banging my head against the wall for awhile this evening it
looks like I have two flashfloppy drives working on my Pro/380. Well
enough to boot from and install 3.2 options.
The keys are these:
1) Use a flat 34 pin ribbon cable with three plugs in a straight
line. I
tried using one with the traditional flip, got frustrated at the extra
complexity, and reterminated it as straight through all the way.
2) Set one drive to unit 0 (J2 installed) and the second to unit 1 (J3
installed)
Yea, that's how the two floppy setups on the DEC Rainbow were done.
Flipped cables only were a IBM-PC thing at first, though others started
using them later to emulate the PC... The few CP/M machines I've played
with were more like the Rainbow than the IBM-PC, but there were so
many CP/M machines I might have missed it...
3) This is the kicker: RX50's are Shugart drives. You have to go into
the configuration and set the drives to Shugart. IBMPC doesn't work
properly with the disk ready and disk swap signal, I stumbled on this
when I found that flipping the disk image while it was seeking produced
a brief access. Hah.
Yes. Pin 34 is READY, not CHANGE, and it has to come ready for the
controller to like the drive. I managed to get the GoTek working with
this config, but I did this for a single drive on my Rainbow. Since I
have the MFM emulator, I've only dabbled with the GoTek.
4) I set the ff.cfg also to read only to avoid stepping on the
images by
accident.
So far it seems to be working, saw both drives in the file manager (I
had built a minimum system with the floppies I had) and now I'm
reformatting the RD53 drive and doing a full install. Should be as
simple as turning the knob and hitting resume.
Nice!
Thanks to Bjoren for letting me know it kind of worked for him years
ago
which gave me the knowledge that it could work. One issue I can see is
that since both "drives" use the same head, stupid software could
assume
that since drive 0 was seeked to track 30 then drive 1 should be at
track 30 and thus no need to change tracks. So far I haven't seen this
happen, but we shall see.
I've not seen this assumption in practice. Part of the reason is that,
I was told years ago, was because many DEC Engineers had two separate
drives instead of the RX-50 in their systems, so errors like this would be
caught and fixed. I never encountered any when I ran my DEC Rainbow
with two TEAC FD-55F drives in either MS-DOS or CP/M. That doesn't
mean they don't exist, but it's been more of hypothetical than a common
thing. I'd love to see if you stumbled over this...
Warner