At 07:53 AM 6/12/01 -0400, Douglas Quebbeman wrote: Contrary to your earlier surmise, I actually have only one complete SOLUS NEWS issue. I have a jumble of disorganized copies that I haven't been able to sort out yet. However, the one issue that I do have talks about this mod. At least, I think it is what you are talking about. The Vol 1, Num 5 issue (aug/sep 78) has an article by Ron Parsons called "A Soft-sector Disk Controller for the Helios". The Helios disk controller remains the same, but his system also has a Tarbell disk controller. Through extensive hardware and software mods, he can mux between the original PT hard-sectored disk controller to drive the Helios system, or toggle some flop to instead use the soft-sectored Tarbell disk controller. The article has some code snippets and a (partial?) schematic of the mod. If you want it I can scan it and send it along to you. I know that feeling. I've found that I'm enjoying working on my Sol emulator more than using the real system, so it has changed the nature of my collecting/collection. I learn so much more in writing an emulator because you really do have to understand every last bit. There are parts of the machine that I thought I knew, but when it came time to write code that handled every possibility, that's when I really had to learn how things worked (not that I'd actually duplicate all functionality, but at least I'd know which corners I was trimming). Emulation projects (certainly not all of them will get done before I burn out): 1) Sol emulator (Solace) -- northstar disk emulation, Helios disk emulation, PT-DOS 2) Wang 2200 emulator (I'll die happy if I can get this running). CPU/keyboard/display/tape system. Floppy disk and hard disk are not likely to be emulated. I just want to recreate the machine that taught me how to program. Then in the back of my head, I'm toying with the idea of graduating from software emulation to hardware emulation. It would be fun to put a Wang 2200 on a 3"x3" pc board using a Xilinx, an SRAM, and an EPROM. Video out would be standard baseband B&W video; the keyboard would be a standard PS/2 PC keyboard mapped to look like the wang keyboard, plus emulation of the cassette drive via a removable flash ROM cards. 3) HP-85/86/87 emulator (cool little CPU) -- I have most all the resources I need, but it will depend on time and getting legal approval 4) TI CC-40/TI-74. Another neat little CPU. I've contacted TI legal and they gave me preliminary "I don't see why not" email, but it is pending on them checking to make sure they didn't sell the I.P. for it to some third party. I was impressed that T.I. would go along with the joke. Likely to just be a minimalist job with no support for I/O other than LCD and keyboard. I'm in the process of selling off a good portion of my computer collection to raise money for shipping the Wang system. Besides, the machines I'm selling have already been emulated or aren't that interesting as emulation targets. Good luck! ----- Jim Battle == frustum(a)pacbell.net