12 Apr
2007
12 Apr
'07
10:06 p.m.
Hi all --
Recently picked up a TRS-80 "Eight Meg Disk System" (model 26-4151) and
the associated interface board, with the intent of hooking this up to my
TRS-80 Model 16.
On further investigation, it appears that the 26-4151 is a Secondary
drive, which makes me curious as to whether this effort is going to be
ultimately fruitless. So, without further ado, here's the questions I have:
1. Is it possible to get this secondary drive working as a primary, or
am I up a creek without having a primary drive (or extra magic hardware
in the drive I have.)
I believe you've got problems... The host interface board is pretty
simple, I think, just buffers and an address decoder. It talks (8 bit
parallel data bus, register select lines, etc) to the controller board
mounted inside the primary drive cabinet. This controller talks to the
drives by an interface somewhat similar to ST506 (I don't think it _is_
ST506, though.), in that there's a control cable that links from the
controller to all the drives and a separate data cable from the
controller to each drive.
The controller board can handle up to 4 drives, the one mountedin the
primary cabinet and up to 3 more secondaries
Without the cotnroller board (which is, IIRC, similar to a Western
Digital thing), you are not going to get it working.
-tony