Finally, SUCCESS! (Re: M200 interfacing continues...)

Ok, being that CA1 on my rig is definitely screwy, I moved the ERROR signal (which hardly, if ever, gets triggered) over to it and moved the Index Mark signal to CA2 (which is triggering reliably), fixed some bugs, and I got one whole card read in! The data was almost complete with some NULLs in the data. It turns out my decoding routine was not properly decoding row 9. I fixed that and voila, one (misinterpreted) FORTRAN code line! I am using the IBM EBCDIC character table right now which is why I say "misinterpreted". I just need to fix it to the classic FORTRAN character set and that's it. The way I designed this, I have a table that contains the characters for the cards being read. You either have to know what character set the cards are using or figure it out somehow, then load that character table into the character space so the cards decode properly. The last step will be to shoot the data out the serial port and I'll have myself one punch card to serial data converter. Thanks VERY, VERY much to all who helped, especially Mr. Lawson, Mr. Duell, and Mr. Dunnington. Thanks also to Mr. McConnell for linking me up with Doug Jones' punch card information, which was especially invaluable. And of course, special thanks to David Gesswein for providing the documenation which I used extensively throughout this project. It'll be nice to get an original manual for the reader eventually (anyone have a copy they're willing to part with? :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *