3 Jul
2018
3 Jul
'18
6:05 a.m.
On 07/02/2018 11:31 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
You can but none of the NS* software will recognize
it and it
effectively makes the Horizon just another nice S100 crate.
The NS* software is well wrapped around the hard sector controller which
is actually crude but effective.
Unplug the disk controller and the system has no rom or front panel.?
Its why I have two.? One is a basic 56K NS horizon where the only board
not NS* is the static 64K ram card.
The other is NS* horizon box and mother board aka the bus has all the IO
for serial, parallel and
hearbeat interrupt at one end. But a faster Z80 card (10MHZ modded
compupro) 256K of ram,
hard disk controller, soft sector controller (765based) and several
slave controllers for moving
stuff and printer buffering.???
A lot of the NS systems were improved with soft sector controllers and a
phantom rom card if the
controller didn't have one.? The box was good quality fair cooling and a
beefy power supply.
Allison
> BUT, the
Horizon can also manage 8" drives (SSSD soft-sector CP/M
> standard!) with appropriate controller, or use other S100 FDC boards.
On Mon, 2 Jul 2018, allison via cctalk wrote:
Really? not any of the MDS (SD or DD) controllers
as they only know hard
sector.??? A Soft sector controller with rom
on board then the situation changes.? Plan B is? a CPU with local eprom
and use that as the system monitor to boot
stuff to disk.
The standard NS controllers have only a small rom enough to boot a NS SD
or DD floppy using their controller
where the roms are.
. . . ??? The older
of mine runs a MDC4 765 based soft sector
controller and is an active highly modded CPM system.? The other is
vanilla and tucked away.
Really, I just assumed that you could install a non-NorthStar disk
controller, in addition to the stock one, or maybe instead, in order
to be able to do soft-sector.