On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Fred Cisin wrote:
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.
Is Sellam "The Computer History Museum"? They appear to have manuals and
drives, but no means of accessing documentation. I guess it's nice if you
want to look at pictures.
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 would like to take you up on that if you can locate them. I also saw a
note from you referring to a frame for punching holes in 1.2M floppies to
make them fit. If you have one of those, I'd be interested.
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)
Hmm. I wonder how they map tracks, then? The A2 Vista controller uses a
WD179x controller and I think those are limited to one-byte track values.
- 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.
Thanks for the response - I'll keep looking. And do let me know if you
want to part with the cartridges and/or punch jig.
Steve
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