Piecing together an HP9880

I find that last statement farily hard ot beleive. The HP9880 awas introduced in 1974, video tape recording, while possible, was not common then. Are we talking about the same machine? Thanks fo the kind offer, but I am not sure it's going to be that much help. I have most of the units from HP. The 9830 calcualtor and 9866 printer I know work. The 11305 cotnrolelr and th 2 cable aassemblies are compute and should be repairable, if they don;t work. I have already repaired one of the 5V PSU regualtors in the 11305 -- the 723 regualtor IC was defective. It's a metal can one and I was mildly supriesed that not only could I stil lget them, I could get an RoHS (lead-free) version, so I guess they are either still in production of have been discontiuend quite recently. But anyway. I have the ROM in an EPROM module. Seeing an original Mass Memory ROM wouldn't be vey useufl, I know waht the ROM modules look like. You are not going to weant me to take that apart if you have it, it's held gotehter by metal studs and dismantling it involves heating them with a slordering iron to sofent the plastic. In any case, I'll bet it's the same inside as every otehr HP9830 ROM modulem, 4 HP 512*8 ROM chips and a potential divider for the Vbb supply. The onl ways to get one of those are to either get the origianl module, or to put the ROM image into EPROMs and run them in an EPROM module. The system tape looks like a tape cassette. Unfortuantely there is no official way to copy binary program files on an HP9830 -- and of course this tape is full f them. So again, I have ot work out some way to read/write such tapes at the bit level, If I can do that, I can either borrow a system tape from somewhere and back it up, or I can figure out the tape file format of the HP9800e emoulator and use that data. The latter doesn't sound like any more work, I know what the drive looks like, I have one. The manauls are on the Australian site too. I jsut need to extract the drvie from whichever corner of my workshop it's hiding in and then see jsut how bad it is. Soem parts will have to be made. I jsut hope the heads are still OK... Again, I know what hte PSU looks like and have read the manuals on the museum site. I am not goign to try to copy that, I am goign to make a functional equivalent. After all, it's jsut DC power rails. I will rememebr your kind offer, and if I feel it woudl be useful to see the origianl parts, I will aks you. -tony