3 Apr
2011
3 Apr
'11
2:37 p.m.
This afternoon I picked up a complete OSI Challenger 4P (model C4PMF)
with 5.25" disk driveand a stack of manuals. It's in decent shape and
I've been going over it and cleaning it up (with a little wood polish
for the sides :)). Power supplies seem to be working nominally so I've
fired it up, and it appears to be working correctly.
It came with half a dozen floppies, but they're in pretty sorry shape
and only one of them actually boots (well, almost boots - it errors out
after a little while into the boot process). I've of course cleaned the
drive's heads beforehand :). The C4PMF does not have a cassette
interface (alas) so I can't load cassette software on this thing. And
no BASIC in ROM, so if I want to bootstrap this thing over a serial port
I'll be entering in machine code to do it :).
So I have two immediate questions:
1) Is there an archive anywhere of disk images for this machine? I've
done a fair amount of searching and I haven't found much outside of a
few OS images included with emulators.
2) Anyone have any experience getting software onto the machine from a
"modern" PC? Can floppies for the C4P be written on a PC (using
ImageDisk or the like)?
Thanks for any advice. This looks like a really cool machine, and I
can't wait to get it running.
- Josh