6 May
2013
6 May
'13
5:34 p.m.
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
The subject says it all, is anyone working on
archiving TI-99/4A software?
Coincidentally, I ran across some TI software on 5.25" while sorting
the garage last weekend and wondered the same thing. I doubt I have
anything that planet-99 does not but one never knows (they were Scott
Adams games, iirc.)
I'm more interested in the process - can TI99 disks be read without a
TI? Say with imgdisk or another PC-based program or, failing that, a
Kryoflux?
If it does require an actual TI, how would it handle disk imaging?
There are no native serial ports, although you can get an RS-232 card
for the expansion box. do have a pile of TI99/4A systems and a PEB or
two with floppy drives but they are not easily accessible.
-j
6 May
6 May
6:18 p.m.
On Mon, 6 May 2013, Jason T wrote:
I'm more interested in the process - can TI99
disks be read without a
TI? Say with imgdisk or another PC-based program or, failing that, a
Kryoflux?
SOME PC FDCs should be able to handle it.
Dave Dunfield has a small program that you can use to determine whether
your PC has a suitable (FM/SD capable) controller
(Stock PC does not support single density, but SOME FDC chips can do it.)
It is apparently single density, using a 1771 chip, with 9 256 byte
sectors per track. single sided, but with provision for expansion to
double sided, and/or double density.
http://shawweb.myzen.co.uk/stephen/tidisk.htm
seems to have a fairly complete write-up about it.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
6:32 p.m.
On May 6, 2013, at 3:18 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
SOME PC FDCs should be able to handle it.
Dave Dunfield has a small program that you can use to determine whether
your PC has a suitable (FM/SD capable) controller
(Stock PC does not support single density, but SOME FDC chips can do it.)
I've successfully read TI 99/4A floppies with ImageDisk on a PC. My FDC is the
embedded controller implemented in the Adaptec AIC7700.
I haven't tested writing yet.
ok
bear.
7 May
7 May
4:12 a.m.
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 5:32 PM, r.stricklin <bear at typewritten.org> wrote:
I've successfully read TI 99/4A floppies with
ImageDisk on a PC. My FDC is the embedded controller implemented in the Adaptec AIC7700.
My ImageDisk floppy controller of choice is the one on the Adaptec
AHA-1522A, mainly because I had one around but also because it rates 9
"P" scores on Dave's list of tested controllers.
Do you know if the AIC7700 tests similarly well? It might be useful
to have a PCI card that works with ImageDisk also.
-j
11:33 a.m.
On May 7, 2013, at 1:12 AM, Jason T wrote:
Do you know if the AIC7700 tests similarly well? It
might be useful
to have a PCI card that works with ImageDisk also.
It seems to? I haven't explicitly compared it with the 1522. AFAIK the PCI cards are
all AIC7800 - I'm only aware of EISA and VLB cards.
ok
bear.
--
until further notice
11:51 a.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
On 5/7/13 8:33 AM, r.stricklin wrote:
On May 7, 2013, at 1:12 AM, Jason T wrote:
I'm confused. AIC-7800 has nothing to do with controlling floppies. You still need a
separate floppy disk controller and the gunk
required for PCI DMA mastering/forwarding.
Dig back on the list for the discussion last year talking about John Wilson's efforts
at building a floppy controller in an
FPGA, my request for a PCI version, and how getting that to work on 'modern' PC
hardware is difficult.
Do you know if the AIC7700 tests similarly well?
It might be useful
to have a PCI card that works with ImageDisk also.
It seems to? I haven't explicitly compared it with the 1522. AFAIK the PCI cards are
all AIC7800 - I'm only aware of EISA and VLB cards.
12:04 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
On May 7, 2013, at 11:51 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Dig back on the list for the discussion last year
talking about John Wilson's efforts at building a floppy controller in an
FPGA, my request for a PCI version, and how getting that to work on 'modern' PC
hardware is difficult.
I don't remember that discussion, which is odd, because it's right up my
alley (and another one of my pipe dreams that I have a hard time actually
getting around to). How fixed are you on PCI? USB is a little more
forward-compatible and also a lot easier to do drivers (or pseudo-drivers
in libusb) for. And that would be relatively cheap hardware to build,
which is what typically stops me from doing most of my projects.
It occurs to me, though, that a lot of modern microcontrollers are fast
enough to decode the data using the built-in capture and compare timer
functions, though I think there's a good chance that would be a lot more
work to make reliable than a digital PLL in an FPGA.
- Dave
1:12 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
You don't need an FPGA to do floppy interfacing. Most speedy microcontrollers
can do it with just bit-banged I/O.
What would be nice from a feature stand-point is a floppy<->USB board that could
go both ways. eg.
Mode 1) Read a USB stick and emulate a drive to a host.
Mode 2) Interface a real drive to a USB host both as MSC and with full image
archive capture capability.
Would require a micro that goes both ways on USB like a PIC32 or STM32 as well
as switchable pull-ups on every floppy data line. But it could be done very
cheaply.
-Alan
On May 7, 2013 at 12:04 PM David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
On May 7, 2013, at 11:51 AM, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
Dig back on the list for the discussion last year
talking about John
Wilson's efforts at building a floppy controller in an
FPGA, my request for a PCI version, and how getting that to work on 'modern'
PC hardware is difficult.
I don't remember that discussion, which is odd, because it's right up my
alley (and another one of my pipe dreams that I have a hard time actually
getting around to). How fixed are you on PCI? USB is a little more
forward-compatible and also a lot easier to do drivers (or pseudo-drivers
in libusb) for. And that would be relatively cheap hardware to build,
which is what typically stops me from doing most of my projects.
It occurs to me, though, that a lot of modern microcontrollers are fast
enough to decode the data using the built-in capture and compare timer
functions, though I think there's a good chance that would be a lot more
work to make reliable than a digital PLL in an FPGA.
- Dave
2:49 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 12:04:49PM -0400, David Riley wrote:
I don't remember that discussion, which is odd,
because it's right up my
alley (and another one of my pipe dreams that I have a hard time actually
getting around to). How fixed are you on PCI? USB is a little more
forward-compatible and also a lot easier to do drivers (or pseudo-drivers
in libusb) for. And that would be relatively cheap hardware to build,
which is what typically stops me from doing most of my projects.
All the same thoughts I had, but I'm using a microcontroller instead of an
FPGA so it may not have caught your eye. I have a USB to SA4xx/SA8xx prototype
sitting here based on the XMOS XS1:
http://www.dbit.com/wilson/usbflop.jpg
... but some E11 user requests came up so I'm un-sidetracked for the time
being (hoping to get back to this once that stuff's released).
I'm also working on an ISA version which is much farther along:
http://www.dbit.com/wilson/isaflop.jpg
That's a pic of Rev B -- I have a Rev C now which fixes some HW bugs and
gets it down to one internal 34-pin connector (in Rev B I blindly lifted
the needlessly complex connector setup from Rev A which used a real PC8477B,
but of course everything's bit-banged in the XMOS XS1 version so all pinouts
can be accommodated in one connector). The firmware is about half done --
read-only, works with SD or DD (RX02 there but untested so far), but the BIOS
in my (Compaq) test machine doesn't detect it as an FDC and refuses to drive
it so I have to sort that out. (I've got a new ISA mobo supposedly arriving
today since the ISA slots in my main PC flaked out ages ago -- I *love* that
anyone still makes new mobos with ISA slots!)
I think the window for sensibly doing a PCI version has really closed.
Evidently (I found this out only recently or I might have wasted a chunk of
my life on it), classic PCI *does* have a method ("distributed DMA") for
accessing the i8237 DMA controller on the motherboard (which is required for
SW compatibility with an ISA FDC), but recent motherboard chipsets no longer
support it. Now if you build a PCI FDC, it can't be SW compatible with a
real FDC, so why bother? It might as well be a USB device, since for now
USB looks like less of a moving target. Plus, thanks to BIOS trickery, it
might even still be bootable.
John Wilson
D Bit
12:19 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
On May 7, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
I'm confused. AIC-7800 has nothing to do with
controlling floppies. You still need a separate floppy disk controller and the gunk
required for PCI DMA mastering/forwarding.
I was talking about using the floppy controller on the AIC7700 boards with ImageDisk.
Somebody thought that meant PCI. It doesn't. Thus, "AFAIK the PCI boards are all
AIC7800". I'm not aware of an AIC7700 that isn't EISA or VLB. Certainly
I've never seen an Adaptec PCI SCSI host adapter with a floppy interface on it.
ok
bear.
--
until further notice
12:38 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers
Certainly I've never seen an Adaptec PCI SCSI host adapter with a floppy
interface on it.
We have VLB boards with SCSI and floppy, and we have several versions of
Adaptec ISA boards with SCSI and floppy, but I have never seen a PCI card
with SCSI and floppy either.
On the other hand, there are plenty of PCI cards that control both floppy
and IDE drives, but not SCSI.
Cindy
-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2013.0.3272 / Virus Database: 3162/6304 - Release Date: 05/06/13
1:33 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers
On 05/07/2013 09:38 AM, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote:
On the other hand, there are plenty of PCI cards that
control both floppy
and IDE drives, but not SCSI.
I've never seen one--at least not one that supports "legacy" floppy
interfaces (e.g. DMA 2, IRQ 6, port 3Fx). I suppose that one could be
built using a PCI-to-ISA bridge, but that's not a project I'd be eager
to undertake.
Non-legacy controllers (i.e. ones that won't work with Imagedisk) are
available, such as the Catweasel, but they're a very different animal.
--Chuck
2:02 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers
On May 7, 2013, at 1:33 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 05/07/2013 09:38 AM, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus
wrote:
Oh, I see. You can definitely do THAT with an FPGA talking PCI; since PCI
is an architecture designed for PCs, it certainly supports the concept of
I/O space (much to the consternation of the non-x86 world, which by and
large doesn't do I/O space and has to emulate it somehow). If you made a
standard floppy controller and set up your PCI configuration space to
specify the proper I/O port and such, you could definitely make that work
with DOS just fine.
Is that what you were talking about, Al?
- Dave
On the other hand, there are plenty of PCI cards
that control both floppy
and IDE drives, but not SCSI.
I've never seen one--at least not one that supports "legacy" floppy
interfaces (e.g. DMA 2, IRQ 6, port 3Fx). I suppose that one could be built using a
PCI-to-ISA bridge, but that's not a project I'd be eager to undertake.
3 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2013 12:33 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: PCI floppy controllers
On 05/07/2013 09:38 AM, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote:
On the other hand, there are plenty of PCI cards that
control both
floppy and IDE drives, but not SCSI.
I've never seen one--at least not one that supports "legacy" floppy
interfaces (e.g. DMA 2, IRQ 6, port 3Fx). I suppose that one could be built
using a PCI-to-ISA bridge, but that's not a project I'd be eager to
undertake.
Try the Gigabyte GA-107 or GA-108
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy-controllers/E-H/GIGA-BYTE-TECHN
OLOGY-CO-LTD-Four-IDE-AT-drives-GA.html
-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 2013.0.3272 / Virus Database: 3162/6304 - Release Date: 05/06/13
6:36 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers
On 05/07/2013 12:00 PM, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote:
Try the Gigabyte GA-107 or GA-108
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy-controllers/E-H/GIGA-BYTE-TECHN
OLOGY-CO-LTD-Four-IDE-AT-drives-GA.html
Well, you're right--both the GA-108 and GA-107 have that capability.
Both appear to rely on the UM8663AF for floppy and UM8667AF for game
port support.
A datasheet search brings up nothing on either of these. Anyone got any
information on the two ICs?
This appears to be a unique product.
--Chuck
2:04 p.m.
New subject: PCI floppy controllers (Re: Is anyone archiving TI-99/4A floppies?)
On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:19 AM, r.stricklin <bear at typewritten.org> wrote:
I was talking about using the floppy controller on the
AIC7700 boards with ImageDisk.
Somebody thought that meant PCI. It doesn't. Thus, "AFAIK the PCI boards are all
AIC7800". I'm not aware of an AIC7700 that isn't EISA or VLB. Certainly
I've never seen an Adaptec PCI SCSI host adapter with a floppy interface on it.
Correct - I had interpreted 7700 as a PCI board - forgot about good
ol' EISA. Was going to say I had never heard of a PCI SCSI card with
a floppy controller in it.
5:35 p.m.
Shame on me for not remembing this, but the DeviceSide FC-5025 is a little
USB-connected, microcontroller based gadget that will read TI-99 diskettes
(and many others as well):
http://www.deviceside.com
I have one here, but have obviously never used it for TI diskettes :-).
Steve
--
6 May
6 May
9:01 p.m.
On Mon, 6 May 2013, Jason T wrote:
On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Zane H. Healy
<healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
The SVD (Semi-Virtual Disk) is able to emulate the TI99 drive. If you
have access to a TI expansion chassis it should be possible to image-copy
diskettes to the SVD and download to a host PC.
--
The subject says it all, is anyone working on
archiving TI-99/4A software?
Coincidentally, I ran across some TI software on 5.25" while sorting
the garage last weekend and wondered the same thing. I doubt I have
anything that planet-99 does not but one never knows (they were Scott
Adams games, iirc.)
I'm more interested in the process - can TI99 disks be read without a
TI? Say with imgdisk or another PC-based program or, failing that, a
Kryoflux? 
9:05 p.m.
At 4:34 PM -0500 5/6/13, Jason T wrote:
Coincidentally, I ran across some TI software on
5.25" while sorting
the garage last weekend and wondered the same thing. I doubt I have
anything that planet-99 does not but one never knows (they were Scott
Adams games, iirc.)
The stuff I have looks like it might be obscure, which leads me to
think it should be saved, however, I have neither the time, nor the
setup to do so.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Photographer |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| My flickr Photostream |
| http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ |
| My Photography Website |
| http://www.zanesphotography.com |
4094
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4095
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18 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
alan＠alanlee.org -
bear＠typewritten.org -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
fraveydank＠gmail.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
sales＠elecplus.com -
silent700＠gmail.com -
snhirsch＠gmail.com -
wilson＠dbit.com