30 Dec
2010
30 Dec
'10
1:11 p.m.
Yeah... I've been steadily working towards getting
a working TRS-80
Xenix machine. At the moment, I have enough parts (I believe) to make a
working Model II, and a line on the 68000 board. Unfortunately, the
difficult part to find is a hard disk. I have the Model II host adapter
for the early TRS-80 Eight Meg drive (which is, of course, completely
incompatible with anything else), but no drive. I can't even cobble it
to a regular MFM drive, since the actual disk controller is in the drive
cabinet (I have only the host adapter). Unfortunately, you can't really
run Xenix without a hard drive.
I wonder...
The Model 1/3/4 hard disk system consisted of a WD1001 controller board,
a disk drive and a very simple host adapter (just an address decoder
really). I would not be suprised if the M2 one was similar in concept.
Radio Shack were also very good about supplying technical/service manuals
(one reason I liked their machines, yes even back then I knew the value
of a schematic!), so I suspect some information on the M2 hard disk
system exists.
I wonder how hard itwould be to make up a devie to plug into the host
adapter, appear to have the smae M2-accessible registers, but using some
mode modern storage device. Probsbly a lot easier than replacing an ST412
hard disk, for example.
-tony