Effective Immediately
After 16 years of use, it's time to retire billdeg at degnanco.com.
Henceforth all emails to billdeg at degnanco.com will be deleted. If you wish to contact Bill by email, please use billdeg at buzz1.com
B
I have managed to break one of the wires in the ribbon cable of the DSSI
cabinet kit in my BA213 MicroVAX 3400. It looks like it would be fairly easy
to replace with any 50-way ribbon cable with a male connector and multiple
female connectors. The only problem is the connector to the front panel, the
ribbon is split into two at the external connector and goes into two
separate halves of the back of the connector. Is it possible to open up the
back of the connector without damaging it?
The alternative would be either to find a replacement cable (anyone have
one?) or try to repair the broken wire
Regards
Rob
Over the last year or so, I've been researching the history of the Commodore SuperPET.
I've just pushed a couple of things that I've been working on out to my website, and I thought people here might find them interesting.
First is a narrative about how the SuperPET came to be, and how work on academic software at the University of Waterloo culminated in a collaboration with Commodore. Much of the information stems from new research which I conducted in the UW Archives this past summer.
It also traces the origin and fate of the MICROWAT, a precursor hardware design that had a great deal of influence on the SuperPET. The whole thing can be found here: How the SuperPET came to be
Second, I've written a timeline that documents significant events in the birth, life and decline of the SuperPET. That's here: The Commodore SuperPET: a timeline
Third, one of the more interesting -- and mostly undocumented -- features of the SuperPET was its built-in ability to be a client to a remote fileserver; this relied on an RPC-like facility called HOSTCM that used the serial line as a transport. I have reverse engineered the protocol, and written a program that acts as a HOSTCM fileserver for the SuperPET. It runs on a variety of modern machines, including Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Linux.
Among other things, this means that you can use a SuperPET without an attached diskette drive, and that you can move disk images, files and programs between the SuperPET and modern machines without specialized hardware. You can find the program here: HOSTCM and the protocol documentation here: The HOSTCM protocol
Finally, I've written a couple of utilities that are useful for manipulating archived Commodore disk images for use with my HOSTCM implementation. That can be found here: Utilities for HOSTCM
Oh, and there are some good pictures, too.
If anyone has comments or questions, please let me know.
Cheers,
Rob Ferguson
