22 Feb
2009
22 Feb
'09
2:10 p.m.
In article <49A1A227.10605 at mail.msu.edu>,
Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> writes:
Or over the optional RS-232 expansion (at a whopping
2400bps). I've
been experimenting with this idea for archiving 405x tapes (and Bob
Rosenbloom has offered to lend me a couple of tapes to play with) but
the major catch is that the 4051 appears to _only_ be programmable in
BASIC -- [...]
I thought an earlier conversation here mentioned that there was a way
of sneaking machine code into a BASIC program? IIRC, the story went
that Tek employees used this to code up some real-time games running
on the 4051. I also found this old message about transferring stuff
to an 8050:
==============
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 18:52:19 +0100 (CET)
From: Christian Corti <cc at corti-net.de>
Subject: Re: Tektronix 4051
Re: <47347D83.9060001 at bitsavers.org>
Id: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0711091842080.8194 at linuxserv.home>
Refs: <47347D83.9060001 at bitsavers.org>
---------
On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Al Kossow wrote:
> We've got a Tektronix 4051 with the optional
Data Comms Interface and tons
> of tape cartridges. As the belts in the Scotch/3M DC300 tapes are worn out
> or torn I need to copy the contents 1:1 to other media. But how?
I have a box of tapes from Jim Willing that I need to
deal with as well.
There was a GPIB version of the drive used in the 405x that I have. The
service manual goes into more detail than the service manual for the
main unit. I also have a couple of the bare drives and had intended to
hook them up to the same sort of interface that I've been using to deal
with other cassette media.
I think that I've already found the solution. I just write a small program
to copy all the files onto a CMB 8050 drive! How? Well.. the previous
owner (a former high school director) had developed some very fancy
extension ROMs for the 4051 with self-written BASIC extensions in machine
language etc (around 1983). There are instructions to read or write one
physical tape block no matter what type the file is into a string of 256
bytes. The functions are called with CALL "TREAD" and CALL "TWRITE".
And
there are functions to deal with the Commodore GPIB disk drives (like DIR,
SAVE etc.). He even designed a RAM module and corresponding functions to
load/store/call machine programs.
I will try to write a backup program maybe next week. There are lots of
interesting tapes (e.g. games), and I think the ROMs from the cartridges
should be dumped, too.
Christian
==============
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