29 Jul
2014
29 Jul
'14
1:15 a.m.
When I had a horizon, I plugged in a Tarbell controller and made a bin
file to run the boot for the tarbell It was only a few bytes, and if
you wanted to be crude you could enter a boot with ddt and write it out.
then you can transfer from a machine to memory on the horizon and write
it out to the horizon disks.
I also had some sort of serial utility and by a miracle had one
patchable to the Horizon serial ports. It required two serial ports on
the machine, but one on each machine was a transfer port, and the
utility could see the files at the other end, and transfer them like an
early system commander arrangement. I don't recall the name, but I may
have an image of it somewhere and you might be able to fix it.
thanks
jim
On 7/28/2014 8:29 PM, Ian McLaughlin wrote:
Hello All,
I've mentioned before that I'm bringing a NorthStar Horizon back to life.
I've managed to get quite far, with a fully functional 32K machine running (the second
32k board has an unknown problem at the moment).
I've used Dave's NSI utilities to create a CP/M boot disk, which is now working.
CP/M is able to format disks, etc. The problem I'm having now is getting other CP/M
utilities in to the machine. I'm thinking that KERMIT is a good tool to get in,
because once I've got that, I can use serial to transfer anything else I want.
I'm trying to follow the kermit-80 documentation about getting a couple of HEX files
in to the machine then using MLOAD to merge them and create the binary.
The problem I'm having is that the main kermit hex file (CPSKER.HEX) is 70k in size.
I've tried both the bootstrap ASM that comes with kermit, as well as using pip, but as
soon as I hit the buffer size and a disk write happens, I get a buffer overflow and the
transfer breaks.
Does anyone have any ideas? I'm thinking that if I could get the kermit binary (or
even the hex files) on to a CP/M formatted NSI image, I could bootstrap that image over.
Does anyone have a binary for kermit for the Northstar Horizon? Is anyone able to create
an NSI image (double density single sided) that contains this binary, or the two HEX files
in it?
Or is there some magical incantation that I might be missing? I've got a very
limited subset of programs on the CP/M boot disk:
A>dir
A: MOVCPM COM : CONFIG COM : ASM COM : COPY COM
A: FORMAT COM : FILECOPY COM : DDT COM : ED COM
A: LOAD COM : PIP COM : STAT COM : SYSGEN COM
A: SAVEUSER COM : SETCPM COM : SUBMIT COM : XSUB COM
A: DUMP COM : DUMP ASM : MEMR COM : MEMR DOC
A: HORUSER ASM : USER ASM : DISKDEF LIB : READ-ME DOC
A>
Thanks in advance for any assistance!!!
Ian