From: ian at platinum.net Subject: NorthStar Horizon Bootstrap Assistance Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 20:29:04 -0700 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Hello All, I've mentioned before that I'm bringing a NorthStar Horizon back to life. I've managed to get quite far, with a fully functional 32K machine running (the second 32k board has an unknown problem at the moment). I've used Dave's NSI utilities to create a CP/M boot disk, which is now working. CP/M is able to format disks, etc. The problem I'm having now is getting other CP/M utilities in to the machine. I'm thinking that KERMIT is a good tool to get in, because once I've got that, I can use serial to transfer anything else I want. I'm trying to follow the kermit-80 documentation about getting a couple of HEX files in to the machine then using MLOAD to merge them and create the binary. The problem I'm having is that the main kermit hex file (CPSKER.HEX) is 70k in size. I've tried both the bootstrap ASM that comes with kermit, as well as using pip, but as soon as I hit the buffer size and a disk write happens, I get a buffer overflow and the transfer breaks. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm thinking that if I could get the kermit binary (or even the hex files) on to a CP/M formatted NSI image, I could bootstrap that image over. Does anyone have a binary for kermit for the Northstar Horizon? Is anyone able to create an NSI image (double density single sided) that contains this binary, or the two HEX files in it? Or is there some magical incantation that I might be missing? I've got a very limited subset of programs on the CP/M boot disk: A>dir A: MOVCPM COM : CONFIG COM : ASM COM : COPY COM A: FORMAT COM : FILECOPY COM : DDT COM : ED COM A: LOAD COM : PIP COM : STAT COM : SYSGEN COM A: SAVEUSER COM : SETCPM COM : SUBMIT COM : XSUB COM A: DUMP COM : DUMP ASM : MEMR COM : MEMR DOC A: HORUSER ASM : USER ASM : DISKDEF LIB : READ-ME DOC A> Thanks in advance for any assistance!!! Ian

Hello All, I've mentioned before that I'm bringing a NorthStar Horizon back to life. I've managed to get quite far, with a fully functional 32K machine running (the second 32k board has an unknown problem at the moment). I've used Dave's NSI utilities to create a CP/M boot disk, which is now working. CP/M is able to format disks, etc. The problem I'm having now is getting other CP/M utilities in to the machine. I'm thinking that KERMIT is a good tool to get in, because once I've got that, I can use serial to transfer anything else I want. I'm trying to follow the kermit-80 documentation about getting a couple of HEX files in to the machine then using MLOAD to merge them and create the binary. The problem I'm having is that the main kermit hex file (CPSKER.HEX) is 70k in size. I've tried both the bootstrap ASM that comes with kermit, as well as using pip, but as soon as I hit the buffer size and a disk write happens, I get a buffer overflow and the transfer breaks. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm thinking that if I could get the kermit binary (or even the hex files) on to a CP/M formatted NSI image, I could bootstrap that image over. Does anyone have a binary for kermit for the Northstar Horizon? Is anyone able to create an NSI image (double density single sided) that contains this binary, or the two HEX files in it? Or is there some magical incantation that I might be missing? I've got a very limited subset of programs on the CP/M boot disk: A>dir A: MOVCPM COM : CONFIG COM : ASM COM : COPY COM A: FORMAT COM : FILECOPY COM : DDT COM : ED COM A: LOAD COM : PIP COM : STAT COM : SYSGEN COM A: SAVEUSER COM : SETCPM COM : SUBMIT COM : XSUB COM A: DUMP COM : DUMP ASM : MEMR COM : MEMR DOC A: HORUSER ASM : USER ASM : DISKDEF LIB : READ-ME DOC A> Thanks in advance for any assistance!!! Ian

Hello All, I've mentioned before that I'm bringing a NorthStar Horizon back to life. I've managed to get quite far, with a fully functional 32K machine running (the second 32k board has an unknown problem at the moment).