1 Apr
1999
1 Apr
'99
1:36 a.m.
At 04:27 AM 4/1/99 GMT, Lawrence LeMay wrote:
I finally got one of my Teraks setup again, and started
going over the old
software collection. Played a game of Asteroids, perhaps i'll try rogue
next. I dont think the guys who were working on PacMan ever completed
that game for the Terak, Dang it. I suppose that one was pretty tough
to animate on a LSI-11, 70's based computer system.
Does anyone know if there are any ftp sites that contain Terak software,
or perhaps RT11 for the Terak?
There aren't many Terak owners out here. :-) A number of relevant
links are on my Jefferson Computer Museum web page at
<http://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/index.html>
and don't forget to visit the UCSD P-System exhibit in the
west wing on your way out.
As explained on my page, I've archived a number of disk images
by performing the "filer / copy / #5: / REMOTE:" operation under
the P-System. This sends a logical disk image out the serial
port, where I capture it using the venerable Pro-YAM telecom package.
(Now there's a guy who belongs on this list <http://www.omen.com/>.)
I wrote portable utilities (also available on my web
page) that will perform directory listings of UCSD and RT-11
disk images made in this way. They'll also "burst" the files
from them, optionally translating line endings along
the way.
I was part of the Teledisk purchase, and hope to connect a spare
eight-inch drive to a spare PC one of these days, and find a
reliable way to write these disk image files back to Terak
floppies.
Another annoyance I'd like to fix and side-step is the issue of
bad sectors. The above raw-copy procedure works fine as long
as there is no disk error. If a sector is bad, the version of
the P-System I'd been using would become unstable, requiring
a reboot. (I never got around to testing newer versions of the
OS to see if this glitch had been fixed.)
Either way, what this calls for is an improved disk-reading
program that gracefully detects and recovers from bad sectors.
Also, I think it argues for an alternative disk archive format
that stored meta-information to indicate the known-bad sectors.
I think Teledisk or Anadisk or some such utility has a documented
format for this, and I think I even started to write a utility
to swap between pure binary images and that format.
As for software, I've been meaning to get a copy of the AT&T
Mini-Unix from Mark Riordan (see link on my page). I've got
several versions of the UCSD P-System and RT-11, as well as
factory diagnostic diskettes.
- John