HP9885 8" floppy unit

At 09:48 AM 4/5/03 +0200, you wrote: I don't have a 380 any more so I'll tell you aas best as I remember. If the wide 50 pin port is built into the machine it's probably a serial port. A lot of the HP's had those built in. If it's on a card then it may be GPIO but if so it should be clearly marked as much. If the port on your machine is GPIO and you are running HP BASIC then you don't need anything to manage it except for the binary driver file. If you do a LIST BIN. It will tell you all of the driver files that are loaded. I'm guessing that there's a good chance that you're not running BASIC on a 380. If you're not, then let me know what you're running and I'll try to find out if you need a driver and what it's name is. Let me explain further. If you are running BASIC and have the necessary BIN file loaded then you can control the GPIO port much like you'd control an Intel 8255. You can access it's internal registers, set each I/O line as 0 or 1 for logic true, st each as input, output or both. You can also set characteristics for the hand shaking lines and interrupts. But you still won't have any high level DOS type commands to access the disk drive (no read, write, save, load commands). I'm not sure but there MAY be a BIN file that you can load that may give you those commands. Bt even if you can do that, you'll still need to figure out the connectiosn between the GPIO interface and the 9885. Can I ask why you're trying to use a 9885? A 9895 has a HP-IB interface and would be a lot easier to use. And it has a lot higher capacity. Joe