1 Mar
2011
1 Mar
'11
4:11 p.m.
Yes, a whole stack of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks for your Victor computer.
All copies, no originals.
Are they any good? Who knows!
Do you want them? Heck yeah!
Pay shipping and we can make it so.
No sniping allowed.
1 Mar
1 Mar
7:36 p.m.
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, steven stengel wrote:
Yes, a whole stack of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks for your
Victor computer.
All copies, no originals.
Are they any good? Who knows!
Do you want them? Heck yeah!
Pay shipping and we can make it so.
No sniping allowed.
Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him what's special about the format
until he ferrets it out! :-)
Does Al have an archived system disk?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
2 Mar
2 Mar
midnight
On 02/03/11 03:36, Fred Cisin wrote:
Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him
what's special about the format
until he ferrets it out! :-)
If memory serves, it's a GCR based format recorded in 9-zone Z-CLV.
Constant bit density mode, in other words.
Of course, the bloody technical reference manual is missing almost all
the relevant figures, and provides no details about the GCR coding
scheme other than the sync pattern (lots an' lots o' 1s -- how predictable).
Hmm.
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
11:31 a.m.
On 02/03/11 03:36, Fred Cisin wrote:
I can tell you the controller PCB schematic is almost identical to the
relevant bits of the Commodore 8050 (not suprising, given the designer).
I have no idea if the contents of the encoder/decoder ROM are the same
though, and that you would need to know.
-tony
Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him
what's special about the format
until he ferrets it out! :-)
If memory serves, it's a GCR based format recorded in 9-zone Z-CLV.
Constant bit density mode, in other words.
Of course, the bloody technical reference manual is missing almost all
the relevant figures, and provides no details about the GCR coding
scheme other than the sync pattern (lots an' lots o' 1s -- how predictable).
5 Mar
5 Mar
2:18 a.m.
>> Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him
what's special about the format
>> until he ferrets it out! :-)
When I first read that, I thought "How did Fred know I had a Sirius?" :-)
I haven't done anything with my Sirius for years, so I can't easily
justify buying more disks for it. But if you have no other takers, I
might try and scrape together the shipping. Where are you?
I can tell you the controller PCB schematic is almost
identical to the
relevant bits of the Commodore 8050 (not suprising, given the designer).
I have no idea if the contents of the encoder/decoder ROM are the same
though, and that you would need to know.
Interesting. The Sirius was famous in its day for the "wining tones" of
the variable speed disk drive, which the Commodore didn't have (in a
later post someone says that the Commodore drives changed the data rate
instead), so I'm surprised they're so similar.
Philip.
7 Mar
7 Mar
8:24 a.m.
On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Philip Belben wrote:
Interesting. The Sirius was famous in its day for the "wining tones" of the
variable speed disk drive, which the Commodore didn't have (in a later post
someone says that the Commodore drives changed the data rate instead), so I'm
surprised they're so similar.
Didn't Chuck Peddle design the Sirius? It would explain the commonality
in features between its drives and the Commodore drives.
g.
--
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http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
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Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical
minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which
holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd
by the clean end.
10:16 a.m.
On 7 Mar 2011 at 8:24, Gene Buckle wrote:
Didn't Chuck Peddle design the Sirius? It would
explain the
commonality in features between its drives and the Commodore drives.
I believe so, but it was called the Victor 9000 initially (and here
in the US)--and I believe in the same area where Al Shugart was
getting Seagate going. I remember that you could see the Victor
building as you were going through Scotts Valley on highway 17. The
name of the company was originally Sirius, but was changed to Victor
after the merger with the Victor Business Products division (remember
the Victor Comptometer?) of Kidde (the fire extinguisher maker) who
was the chief source of capital for Peddle's venture.
The early years were a storm of legal squabbling over names.
Peddle's Sirius Systems Technology lost a lawsuit by Sirius Software
over the firm name. The new Victor then went about suing anyone in
the electronics business who was using the name Victor (including a
fellow running a TV and appliance store who had used the name for 30
years).
A typical Silicon Valley riches-to-rags story. The firm lasted less
than 5 years.
There was a prevalent myth that an innovator, once successful, could
repeat history. Anyone remember Gene Amdahl and how fast he burned
through venture capital with WSI?
--Chuck
10:11 a.m.
>>> Send one to Philip. But, don't tell
him what's special about the format
>>> until he ferrets it out! :-)
On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Philip Belben wrote:
When I first read that, I thought "How did Fred
know I had a Sirius?" :-)
Sorry. I was referring to DiskFerret Philip. We need to keep him
supplied with all of the weirdest ones.
I always thougth that the Sirius/Victor 9000 was a significant machine,
just because it was one of the last to do things differently. Kind of a
serious office version of the Commodore (which was a serious home machine)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
12:49 p.m.
>> Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him
what's special about the format
>> until he ferrets it out! :-)
When I first read that, I thought
"How did Fred know I had a Sirius?" :-)
1:18 p.m.
Interesting. The Sirius was famous in its day for the
"wining tones" of
the variable speed disk drive, which the Commodore didn't have (in a
As I mentioned in a later message, the Commodore drives were fixed
spindle speed, variable data rate, the Sirius ones were fixed data rate,
varaible sipindle speed. Comes to muc hthe same thing in the end
later post someone says that the Commodore drives
changed the data rate
instead), so I'm surprised they're so similar.
The motor cotnrol circuitry is very different, of course. I was taling
about the GCR encoder/decoder as being the part that is very similar. I
assum,e you have schematics of both.
The other thing about the Sirius which is odd if you don't realise the
originalsm but obvious wehn you do is that it is _full_ of 6522 VIA chips
(in a 8088 system). There are 3 on the CPU board. IIRC one for system
cotnrol buncutions like brightness, contrast, etc, one for the printer
port (which is actually a GPIB port on the wrong connector and with an
odd pinput! [1]) and one for the user port (actually, I think one of the
timers in that one also generates the cound system clock). And anotehr 3
6522s on the disk cotnrolelr board, one for the data ports, one for the
motor control, and one for various other control functions.
[1] It's a 36 pin Microribbon connaotr, and it nomiallu, at least, a
Centronics port with a standard pinout. It's actually driven by 75160 and
75161 chips (I think it's those), -- GPIB buffers. The data lines end up
on 2-9 of the connectector (Centronics data lines), DAV is on pin 1
(stb/),. and so on. With the standard software it's a Centronics port,
but it would only take a little software and the right cable to link GPIB
devices here.
-tony
8:55 a.m.
On 02/03/11 15:49, Al Kossow wrote:
On 3/1/11 7:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Apparently someone did figure it out, back in 2009:
http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=44930&am…
Search for "figured out". Message 49597 by "Lord Nightmare".
Apparently most of the work was done by Karsten Scheibler, assisted by
"Lord Nightmare". I wonder if this is the same Karsten Scheibler who
wrote the Catweasel driver app 'cw'...
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
Send one to Philip. But, don't tell him
what's special about the format
until he ferrets it out! :-)
Does Al have an archived system disk?
No. I assume someone has figured out what the GCR format is on them?
9:15 a.m.
On 02/03/11 16:55, Philip Pemberton wrote:
Apparently most of the work was done by Karsten
Scheibler, assisted by
"Lord Nightmare". I wonder if this is the same Karsten Scheibler who
wrote the Catweasel driver app 'cw'...
SCORE!
The GCR tables are in the current version of CW (v0.13), which is
downloadable from http://www.unusedino.de/cw/ .
Every 4-bit nibble becomes a 5-bit GCR block, per this table:
input output
0 01010 0x0a
1 01011 0x0b
2 10010 0x12
3 10011 0x13
4 01110 0x0e
5 01111 0x0f
6 10110 0x16
7 10111 0x17
8 01001 0x09
9 11001 0x19
a 11010 0x1a
b 11011 0x1b
c 01101 0x0d
d 11101 0x1d
e 11110 0x1e
f 10101 0x15
A sync seems to consist of a stream of '1' bits (16 or more?), followed
by a '0' bit. I seem to recall this being one of the few things covered
in the Victor 9000 docs (on bitsavers) though. Checksums are additive,
either 8 or 16 bit.
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
3 Mar
3 Mar
1:58 a.m.
On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Philip Pemberton wrote:
Every 4-bit nibble becomes a 5-bit GCR block, per this
table:
input output
0 01010 0x0a
1 01011 0x0b
2 10010 0x12
3 10011 0x13
4 01110 0x0e
5 01111 0x0f
6 10110 0x16
7 10111 0x17
8 01001 0x09
9 11001 0x19
a 11010 0x1a
b 11011 0x1b
c 01101 0x0d
d 11101 0x1d
e 11110 0x1e
f 10101 0x15
Are you sure it works for the Victor? At least the table is the same for
the Amiga and Apple GCR formats according to
http://bandwidthco.com/whitepapers/compforensics/datarecovery/hardware/elec…
Christian
4821
days inactive
4826
days old
13 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
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aek＠bitsavers.org -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
cc＠informatik.uni-stuttgart.de -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
classiccmp＠philpem.me.uk -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
philip＠axeside.co.uk -
tosteve＠yahoo.com