On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Steven Hirsch wrote:
Has anyone else on the list seen one of these?
I had a few of the 5150 version.
Sellam has them now.
I picked up a Vista V1200
disk system for Apple 2 that uses this type of drive. The mechanism takes
a plastic cartridge with five 5.25" floppy disks. The diskettes appear to
be conventional SS format with a couple of extra punchouts to mate with
the loader mechanism. Electrical interface is compatible with 8" floppy
drives (interface card was also sold for that purpose).
The 5150 version, and probably yours also, uses DSHD ("1.2M") disks. As
you mentioned, it has extra cut-outs. I have used diskettes from the
cartridges as regular 1.2m.
If you get desperate, I have a few cartridges kicking around.
I'm not able to turn up any information about the
drive and am wondering
how the diskette select/load scheme is intended to work. There are
at least a couple of possibilities:
- Treat the physical diskettes as portions of a single logical floppy and
select diskette by track range (first diskette 0-39, second 40-79, etc.)
Depending on the software that you use, . . .
The default software for the 5150 sees the pack as a single 6M disk.
(5 * 1.2M)
- Treat each physical diskette as a logical drive and
use binary select
lines on interface to choose.
. . . capable of that, but not the default in the 5150 software
Anyone have documentation on the drive mechanism or
the Vista product?
No.
. . .and I really wanted to get into it, particularly when an Amlyn rep
said that the seek was a closed-loop servo, and could do 48tpi, 96tpi,
100tpi, "or whatever else you want". But, I was not ready when it came
time to close my office, and had to abandon that project, along with many
others.
For a few years, before I ever saw an Amlyn, I used a Vista 5150 disk
controller for 8" drives on a 5150. I have/had some docs for that, but
not likely to be able to find them in a timely manner.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at
xenosoft.com