What about taking an external USB 3.5" floppy drive and connecting a 5.25" drive to the interface that is being used for the 3.5" drive? It seems like it should work. -- Golan Klinger <gklinger at gmail.com> Dark is the suede that mows like a harvest.

ImageDisk controls (and expects) a 765 family diskette controller directly - via corresponding hardware I/O addresses, DMA channels and interrupts - This is necessary in order to be able to analize, read and write non-DOS format disks. It will *NOT* communicate with a "smart" device connected via USB or any other non-765 interface - it would be quite likely that such a device would not be able to understand non-FAT formats, formats where the sector size is not 512, formats where sectors are not numbered 1-(expected number for media), or sector/head numbers recorded on the disk don't correspond to what PCs think they should be.... I have a Eurocom laptop with a connecter to which connects an external 5.25" drive enclosure - this appears as a standard floppy drive connected via the FDC - such an arrangement should work OK with ImageDisk - I'm pretty sure there are other older laptops with similar external drive schemes. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Are there any available specs for this ...? Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

On 8 Jan 2007 at 13:12, Chris M wrote: Hmmm, I don't know of a single floppy drive that responds to the video interrupt (10H) or Terminate-and-Stay-Resident (27H). I assume you mean INT 13H (BIOS Read/Write) and INT 25H and 26H (MS-DOS read/write logical sector). We did a special project for the backpack that gave one low level access to the drive under both DOS and Win9x, but never received much of a demand for it, except for a few custmers needing to read NEC 9801 CP/M formats on their laptops. As far as USB drives--forget low-level access. These things have firmware that understands 512x9x2x80, 512x18x2x80 and 1024x8x77 "conventional" formats, but nothing else. Conversation with the drive resembles ATAPI or SCSI protocols; i.e. relative sector (LBA) addressing. While there are USB MS-DOS drivers, don't expect anything like INT 13H access. Some very old USB drives had a separate controller board that talked to a conventional drive; depending on the firmware, they might be able to talk to 5.25" 1.2MB drives, but don't hold your breath. All later 3.5" drives have the interface integrated with the drive electronics, so no hope there. Cheers, Chuck

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote: When it comes to floppy drives, if neither Chuck nor I have EVER SEEN one, then you are not going to find one available. THAT is the LEAST important difference! You need different "encoding" circuitry for the disk controller. You don't even need to play silly games with motor speed (especially NOT "bumping up voltage"!) You can handle the same differences by altering the data transfer rate (which ALSO will not respond well to "bump up the voltage".)

On 8 Jan 2007 at 14:40, Chris M wrote: That's why God made Catweasels. There are three other good reasons to vary the data clock rate and not the spindle speed (bear with me here). The first is that keeping the spindle at the same RPM is much less likely to produce problems with ISV (instantaneous speed variation; an oxymoron if there ever was one) as the motor changes its speed to match the zone. The second is that the signal level induced in the read head is proportional to the square of the linear velocity of the medium. You're best off setting the motor to run where the signal level-vs- head characteristcs is best. The third is that tachometer design is much simpler. You have a fixed-frequency reference, such as a crystal or a ceramic resonator to work with, not some software approximation. And GCR doesn't imply varaible data rate or spindle speed. That Durango that I posted a web page on used GCR to good advantage without fooling with spindle speed (almost a 1MB on a 360K 5.25" diskette). I believe that Microtech marketed a PC that worked similarly (although I'd have to check to make sure). I think someone's written a Catweasel driver that fits almost 4MB on a 1.44MB diskette... Cheers, Chuck

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Golan Klinger wrote: We have been there before. It seems reasonable that the USB circuitry would then connect to the SA400 like circuitry of the drive. BUT,... USB drives have "fully integrated" circuitry, with one board for both the USB interface AND the floppy, and do NOT contain a normal drive.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Robert Feldman wrote: I think that we've been there before. Has anybody seen a PCMCIA or USB drive that IS convertible?

is anyone familiar with the P1/P2 Thinkpads? My *busted* 560e has an external...well everything actually. It probably has close to 34 pins on the floppy connector. The 380z *also busted* has an internal unit. I wouldn't be adverse to going inside and routing the connections to the outside world. But even if a suitable controller/drive combination were to be found, there's still the possibility that it will be very discriminating w/it's affections. I tried, and tried, to get ID to work with 2 boxes over the weekend (the ones I had on hand). It didn't like neither a generic 486 (although that controller could have been flaky), nor a generic Cyrix MII which has never let me down otherwise. My frustrations led me to ask the question... If anyone has a small batch of working ISA floppy/ide controllers they don't want to hang onto, I'm interested. --- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

--- Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: they do have those usb to serial port contraptions, and I even see a usb to parallel port version on the shelves at Walmart (no I don't typically buy any gear there). I've to date only tried the serial thing, and didn't have alot of success, though it probably had nothing to do with it, just my funky cellphone or software that supposedly allows you to connect to the internet. All hope is not lost. And you don't find that preferable to that blasted track-point thing? The keyboard on my "old" Sony is better (i.e. bigger) then this Toshiba's, but there's no way I am ever going to pay that kind of money for anything ever again. Of course that was my first new lt, and in some way of looking at it first "new" computer, so I opted for the latest and greatest. A rather sweet 16" (non-panoramic) lcd. But it's in the pile at the moment waiting for a rainy day. Or make that week. Probably just a bad regulator board though. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Yeah, one of those would be nice I suppose. I'm just too cheap. "And GCR doesn't imply varaible data rate or spindle speed. That Durango that I posted a web page on used GCR to good advantage without fooling with spindle speed (almost a 1MB on a 360K 5.25" diskette). I believe that Microtech marketed a PC that worked similarly (although I'd have to check to make sure). I think someone's written a Catweasel driver that fits almost 4MB on a 1.44MB diskette..." Yeah and what was the point of making that chick suspend the thing in air while they snapped the picture? I think the picture would have been just as alluring if they set it on a table and had her embellish it that manner. The Victor 9000 places 1.2 megs (how conveniently deceptive) on a DD floppy. I know it uses GCR encoding, and yes that doesn't equate to a variable speed spindle, just that commonly they go together (it seems anyway). I'm not sure if it does, but my guess is yes Now that's good news, because I know the Macs have variable spindle rates (that was my whole point about getting a REAL vintage Mac! You get to hear the whir-WHIR-whir-whir-WHIR-whir). I have an apparently early version of the "Deluxe" Option Board (were all them designated Deluxe?). It uses all discrete logic. I was pointed to a site that had all or most of the associated warez, but I've yet to try it out. If it wasn't obvious, the underlying subject of this part of thread is how to deal with the lack of a Victor 9000 boot floppy. It's been a while *obviously* but aren't the means to format individual tracks embedded in the rom-bios? Or were those dos services? I have a few books out in the shed, maybe I should just look it up! I had envisioned a scheme by which I could hack onto the bios so a blank floppy could be formatted in a V9000, and subsequently the date/image from a normal floppy could be transferred to it (I have a whole boatload of images for the machine, but I'm not quite sure how they created the image of a boot floppy...or why if it can't be created w/o a bootable V9000). *went out to the shed. Yes there is present in the BIOS a service to format tracks. Not all clones comply in this way though (but where would the routine to do this be if not in the bios?). I noticed in the docs for my NEC APC III that DOS function calls were more or less the same as a vanilla pc, but I don't recall seeing mention of the equivalent BIOS calls. Anyone know?* __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

--- Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Yeah but that's laying an egg somehow w/o the chicken. What I was thinking was tacking some code into a rom chip. After POST/before bootstrapping, cause it to format a floppy. Umm the rest I haven't figured out yet... I'm not sure that a Vic can read IBM disks, but I would think so. If those images I downloaded 5000 years ago are useful after a fashion...ummm the rest I haven't figured out yet. :@ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

Fred Cisin wrote: And people wonder why computers don't work very well... :-)

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote: Not unless you lift yourself by your bootstraps to do it. It is obviously a physical impossibility, just like using the operating system functions that are available once the OS is loaded, for loading the operating system. "To bootstrap" also shows that verbizing nouns has been around for quite a while. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 16 Jan 2007 at 21:40, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: And, correspondingly: "You must be talking about the verbation of nouns." Cheers, Chuck

On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote: Not necessarily. The BIOS INTs are mostly in ROM. The OS INTs are loaded in a later stage of the bootstrapping. In general, yes. You might run into a few complications with setting configurations. Are you sure that it can read PC style MFM without loading significant additional software? IF it can read PC style MFM, then I would recommend rewriting the boot code to boot from an MFM diskette. Most bootstrapping these days seems to consist of ROM code sufficient to display on the screen (THAT makes life easier!), and sufficient disk I/O in ROM to copy the first sector of a disk into a fixed RAM location and do a jump to that location. IF that code can handle MFM, then I'd recommend making a modified version of it that expects MFM. Then you can write any programs that you need in the first sector of a floppy disk, and expect it to be loaded into memory and jumped to. As you've mentioned, you can accomplish a LOT in 512 bytes. If THAT isn't enough, then you can include code in the first sector to load x additional sectors. Once you've written a bootstrap routine, the rest just follows from there, although be aware that porting Windoze to the Victor 9000 would be a helluva lot of work, and not well received by some. :-) Writing a DEBUG ROM would be especially useful. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, Chris M wrote: Yeah. They don't give you a front panel with toggle switches anymore. NT would be the most practical; it's about 90+% portable C code, and MICROS~1 even did ports to a few other types of machines. doubtful The interrupt vector table exists, and during the bootstrapping process, sections of it get filled in. Therefore, BIOS INTs MIGHT be ready to go, but OS INTs, NO. Why else would we do this stuff? 2.11 would probably be the best; I don't think that they ever got to 3.31 for the Victor. (1.25, 2.11, and 3.31 seem to be the most common versions for "less compatible" DOS machines) On "more compatible" machines, 1.25 can handle double sided 8 sector per track, but not the 9 sector per track used in 2.xx 'Course, once you get 1.25 booted, then you can write programs to format a 2.xx diskette, and read the content through the serial port and write it to disk. Be aware that 1.25 doesn't know from sub-directories, nor "File handles", so you'll have to use FCBs for any file I/O. But, you'll have a version of DEBUG! The DeSmet C compiler tends to be a good choice for developing in a DOS 1.25 environment. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: There's sufficient code to load the boot record from a disk present in the firmware, this we know for a fact. We can get into definitions of bootstrapping, and you would be far more qualified to give it accurate and thorough justice, but "boot code" has to be present in any computer. But again there is the possibility that the bios code, *whoops* that resides on disk just like a Tandy 2000, could be burned to an eprom. And I only say possiblity because the though images that are floating around doubtless contain the necessary bios routines, neither I nor anyone I've spoken to have made *effective* use of them. I haven't even tried yet. Thanks for pointing out that there's more work involved with the hack then I initially thought. Thanks an awful lot grrrr. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need a quick answer? Get one in minutes from people who know. Ask your question on www.Answers.yahoo.com

On 1/10/07, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Amen. Just this week, I found the envelope for the Kaypro disk he sent me years ago. -ethan

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Richard wrote: I have many hundreds of "alien" diskettes that were to go to him when I blue-screen. Now I don't know who to will them to. I have never seen the machine either, but I have seen floppies from it. I don't know whether that was made by Beehive, or was an aftermarket add-on to convert a terminal into a computer. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 1/10/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: I did. -ethan

Reminds me of something I did with a TeleVideo 955 once. Turns out that model has a custom-firmware ROM socket, with an escape sequence in the stock firmware to execute it. I disassembled enough of the various pieces to work out much of the interface to the hardware, and wrote a small video game to run in the custom firmware ROM as a proof-of-concept exercise. This promptly started a friend asking me when I would release NetBSD/tvi955.... (Yes, he was joking. The tvi955 is far too computron-poor to run anything even vaguely like a Unix variant. A few KB of RAM at most, and a G65SC802 - a slightly improved 6502 - as CPU...only way I can think of to do it would be to run an emulator for something beefier, with remote storage accessed via serial line. Never mind "run", never mind even "walk"; "crawl" would be too fast a word for it.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 1/10/07, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote: Well, since it has a 6502 variant (in fact, the 65812 is used in the C64 SuperCPU cartrige) why not port Lunix? :-) Might need a bit more RAM though...and the C= serial bus. http://hld.c64.org/poldi/lunix/lunix.html Joe. ...or maybe Contiki?

Thank you! I actually did a lot more. The thing has three socketed ROMs. I pulled all three and dumped them (at the time I had access to a PROM burner station at work). It was instantly clear that one was a character generator and nothing else - the bitmaps were obvious the moment I looked at the dump in binary. I promptly burned a variation on that one and as a result now have a tvi955 with an ISO-8859-1 font, something that may well not exist anywhere else in the world by this point. :) (The stock font is close but not quite 8859-1, differing in maybe a dozen characters; a friend of mine who knows fonts looked at it and says it's probably an early draft of what eventually became 8859-1.) I also dug out a breadboard and some RAM and a bunch of jumper wires, and brought out that socket's pins to the breadboard, where I made them access the RAM instead. I added additional logic so I could write to the RAM via a serial line, and presto! I had a tvi955 with downloadable font glyphs! It was a cool hack, but has long since been torn down. Because the flying wires introduced noise, the per-bit error rate on reads was very high (for memory), probably 1%-5%. For the character generator ROM this just produced snow on the screen, but for firmware it would of course have been catastrophic, so I didn't try to give it downloadable firmware. Yes, though it's been years since I so much as turned it on. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 10 Jan 2007 at 21:48, der Mouse wrote: When I wrote the firmware for the Fortune Systems text terminal, I added a special escape sequence that would allow one to load a program into RAM via the host and execute it. It was used for terminal QA, but the code stayed in as far as I know. If anyone has one of these animals and wants to know the escape sequence, drop me a line and I'll dig it out of my files. IIRC, there's not a lot of RAM there, but enough to goof around with. Cheers, Chuck

On 11 Jan 2007 at 12:15, Richard wrote: AFAIK, they were sold only with Fortune Systems 68K boxes. Not very unusual--your basic VT52/VT100 terminal, with some international character (Videotex) extensions. Given that FS boxen were never very popular, the terminals are probably fairly rare. Cheers, Chuck

In article <1e1fc3e90701111750i2d95f8c1p667a7539044a2cbc at mail.gmail.com>, "Glen Slick" <glen.slick at gmail.com> writes: Wow, that's even more interesting since I have two 2648A's! A few google searches didn't turn up anything obvious; if you can dig up a URL that would be great! -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

If you need a Victor 9000 boot floppy I can supply one. Contact me off-list with a postal address. The "universal" boot ROM is supposed to have a serial bootstrap capability. I haven't burned one to try in my Victor yet, but had considered using it for something like vtserver or ADT. I haven't seen docs on the protocol, but I expect you could reverse-engineer it from the boot ROM disassembly. Unfortunately the lack of any decent documentation for this machine could make the rest of the job a real PITA. I've seen mention of a Hardware Technical Reference for the Victor. If anyone has a copy I'd be interested in hearing from you. Regards, -- Eric Josephson <ericj at speakeasy.org>

On 11/1/07 16:24, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: It's the ACT Sirius 1 over here, I used to use one at college though only as a terminal through to the PDP 11/44 :) -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

--- Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: I lift the hood on mine and shut it real quick! It's insides are the scariest looking thing I've seen in a while! If you want to make copies and mail them to me, I'll scan and post them on my site...if I ever set it up!, and/or forward them to other interested parties. ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/

Why? It's actually very easy to dismantle, most of the time you only have to loosen (and not completely remove) the screws. I've forgotten if it's better to remove the disk drive chassis or the PSU/back panal first (if you do it in the wrong order) you have to remove, not just loosen, a screw that links those 2 sections). But the machine will split ito the PSU, mainboard, disk drive mechanisms and disk controller PCB quite quickly. And there's nothting that scared me when I looked inside mine. It's all standard chips (apart from the ROMs) -- chips I could identify, get data on, etc. Nest job, thenm is to find them... -tony