27 Jan
2010
27 Jan
'10
1 a.m.
On Monday, January 25, 2010 at 14:02, Glen Slick wrote:
I wonder what it would take to get something like the
HPDrive emulator
setup for HP-IB tape drives. I have an HP A900 but no boot/install
tapes, and even if I had them I don't have any HP-IB tape drives.
Caveat: to my knowledge, HPDrive has not been tested on an A-Series. It
may work, though, as it's been tested extensively on the MEF-Series and on
the HP 64000 logic development system.
HPDrive natively supports the 9144A and 9145A cartridge tape drives. If
you have an HP-IB disc drive, you should be able to add an emulated CTD
using HPDrive.
To emulate both a disc and a tape drive, or a disc/tape combination drive
such as the 7912, you'd need two GPIB cards and two copies of HPDrive
running on the host platform, as the disc and tape units each would have
their own HP-IB addresses. HPDrive emulates the 7912 natively, but without
the embedded tape unit, as I understand.
On Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 17:54, Rik Bos wrote:
I'm able to make a binary image of the disc, with
a tool named
LIFDIAG.EXE It runs on DOS or WIN95/98 dosbox, but you need a HP
82335A HP-IB card to place the image back on a HP-IB drive. But I think
it shoudn't be difficult to use the image with the HP-IB disc emulator.
An HPDrive CS/80 disc image is a simple linear list of blocks, from block 0
to the number defined by the drive. That is, it's a block-for-block copy
of a real HP-IB disc. With a GPIB card, the HPDir program can be used to
make such a copy from a real disc. Or a utility program that can copy a
real disc to a file can be used.
One important point to note is that HPDrive images are accessed as a stream
of bytes. A program, such as SIMH, that writes disc images as a stream of
16-bit integers will write them in little-endian format on some platforms
(e.g., Intel). Such a SIMH image must be byte-swapped before being usable
as an HPDrive image.
-- Dave