11 Oct
2005
11 Oct
'05
2:15 p.m.
Ironically, I have a 5150 with the full-length FDC with
a very long port on it
(something like 40-pin female?) that I assume I could connect drives to... but
I have no idea what the pinout is or where to obtain a cable. I am not the
soldering type (watch me duck as the flying tomatoes come from the peanut gallery)
If I recall correctly, the 37-pin 'D' connector on the back of early XT
controllers is 1:1 with the 34 pin ribbon cable, and you can use a ribbon
cable 'D' connector to make up a nice tidy cable (check position on pin-1).
Btw, I made some changes to ImageDisks Align/Test function this morning which
may be useful to you. I added a real-time display of the following bits from
status register 3 at the top of the screen:
F - Fault
W - write protect
R - Ready
Z - Track 0
D - Two sided
In this case, 'Z' would let you see exactly when the track-0 sensor comes
on and off (as you adjust it's position).
I also added commands to Format and to Write individual tracks "on the fly"
from the test function (there was already a function to
read tracks). So now
you can do pretty much anything the drive is capable of under
manual control.
I should have it posted in a day or two.
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html