10 Nov
2007
10 Nov
'07
5:42 p.m.
On Saturday 10 November 2007 16:51, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Hopefully I'll either find that loose-leaf binder and it'll be in there or
I'll come across it out there somewhere on the 'net.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
On 10 Nov 2007 at 15:24, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
There is indeed a "SASI port" on the board, and in fact one of the questions
I had when I put it together was whether that 220/330 terminator pack (a DIP)
which was connected to that port was supposed to get warm like that. :-) I
saw mention somewhere today about the possibility of _two_ SASI connections,
but attempting to follow that got me nowhere, there were references to
stuff that wasn't there any more.
Just lookingat the picture in that file I
retrieved makes me want to play
with that thing a bit. :-) I think, though, that instead of the 2
5.25" drives I was originally intending to use with it (and which are
buried somewhere in storage at this point, I have no idea where), I'd
like to maybe have a go at interfacing a 3.5" drive to it. And maybe one
of the "smaller" (2G?) SCSI drives I have around here. Think that's
possible?
Certainly the SCSI drive is possible, given the interface on the BBII
(Doesn't have a SASI-ready interface or two already?) Not wide-SCSI,
but certainly 8-bit SCSI. Your biggest problem is how to deal with 2GB
efficiently with CP/M-80.
Indeed. Assuming that I run CP/M-80, that is. This strikes me as a nice
opportunity to do some hacking, and to maybe start out with that but to end
up with something a little further along, given the constraints of the
hardware (address space, etc.). ZCPR has some nice ideas, for example,
but I'm not sure I like the way some of those things got implemented. Ah
well, first thing I need to do is figure out how I'm going to use it, stuff
it in a box with PS, and hook it up with a serial cable. Then go on from
there.
3.5" floppy is easy, but a 3.5" PATA drive
is more problematical,
given the 16-bit interface for data. Of course, one could throw away
half the data or even treat the drive as two units to accommodate 8-
bit transfers.
PATA? I do have some small number of older drives, but I think that the
smallest of those is probably 80MB or so, going on up to a gig or so and a
bunch in between. OTOH, those 2G SCSI drives I mention I have a whole
*bunch* of here.
Best I can
remember, the code did a bunch of 16-bit math that
seemed to implement some kind of a polynomial (just a bit beyond me
when I read it) and ran this over the contents of the EPROM,
looking for a zero result.
Could even be XORing the contents with a LFSR. Hard to say without
seeing it.