northstart stuff

Hopefully there will be at least one boot disk among the "blank" floppies that you have, as getting the OS into a horizon without a boot disk can be difficult (not not impossible). I have images for several NorthStar OS's on my site. To transfer the images to physical disks, you need my NST program (also available on the site) which transfers them serially to the Horizon where a small client will write them to the hard-sector disks (hence the problem if you don't already have a system booting). First thing you need to do is determine for certain if you have the single density or double density controller. I have photos of both on my site - I would guess that you have the DD controller since you have a Horizon DD manual, and by the other software mentioned. If you can find a bootable version of NorthStar DOS, then you can transfer my client to it (NST can "type" the client in to the NS Mxxxx monitor). Then run the client and you can use NST on the PC to read/write disk from/to image files (I have quite a few NS images available - and would welcome new ones). For people who don't have a bootable disk, I have created "in memory" images for both the single and double density system which contains both the OS and the NST client. The tough part is getting it "in memory" on a Horizon, which has no front panel. If have have a ROM board, easiest thing to do is to deselect RAM at 0000 and put in a ROM monitor. I used the older "loads at 2000" versions of N* OS for the in-memory system, so you have 8K at 0000. You will also need to change the power-on vector jumpers on the CPU board to activate your ROM. (There is also 4K of "free" space from F000-FFFF is that works out better for you). More info on my site - give me a shout if you need help (I know lots about N* systems!) 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