14 Aug
2016
14 Aug
'16
5:10 p.m.
Jules:
If you don't mind doing a little hardware / software:
I've been using a module from FTDI that 'talks' TTL level RS232 at
baud rate up to / past? 115Kbaud, and 'talks to' USB thumb drives.
Go to digikey / etc, and look at the 'VDRIVE3' from FTDI.
It does all the grunt work in handling file creation and reading.
Karl Wacker
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jules Richardson" <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
To: <General at classiccmp.org>; "Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic and
Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2016 6:03 PM
Subject: Re: Imaging and Emulating Rainbow
On 08/14/2016 10:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
If it's running MS-DOS, you should be able to
find/write something to do
a raw image
dump out the serial port.
That reminds me, I need to image some Rainbow floppies I have.
I would think someone would have already written this in the MS-DOS
world.
Indeed. I got as far as hacking something to sector-dump chunks of data
from the hard disk to floppy, then sneakernetting that across to a modern
PC for reassembly (~20MB is a little painful, but not too bad, writing to
one disk while reading from another).
My initial intention was to polish the code a bit and add serial support,
but that was immediately followed by the thought of "surely someone else
has done this already?", at which point I'd done what I immediately needed
to do anyway, and so never did anything more with the code.
If anyone knows of an x86 DOS util which does sector dumps over rs232, I'd
be interested to hear about it (particularly if the transfer protocol is
something supported by any old comms program). I do have various '80s-era
PCs with ST506/412-type drives which could benefit from a backup.
cheers
Jules