1 Dec
2008
1 Dec
'08
11:16 a.m.
Hello,
A gentleman from the East Coast contacted me to see if I can extract old BASIC programs
from his IBM-5110 8-inch floppy disks.
I have a working IBM-5120 with internal floppy drives, but the serial communications
option is not installed in my system.
I think the best I can do is LIST the programs and photograph the screen.
Any other ideas?
Anyone else with a serial port who can do it?
Anyone with a spare communications card?
Thanks-
Steven Stengel
1 Dec
1 Dec
11:42 a.m.
steven stengel wrote:
Hello,
A gentleman from the East Coast contacted me to see if I can extract old BASIC programs
from his IBM-5110 8-inch floppy disks.
I have a working IBM-5120 with internal floppy drives, but the serial communications
option is not installed in my system.
I think the best I can do is LIST the programs and photograph the screen.
Any other ideas?
Anyone else with a serial port who can do it?
Anyone with a spare communications card?
how many programs do you need to convert? if it is more than one, probably the best bet
is this:
read the disks using a modern PC equipped with 8" drives, capturing the disk image
with
Dave Dunfield's IMD program. Then write a program on the PC which understands the
disk
and file structure, dumping out the program listing.
2 p.m.
On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Jim Battle wrote:
how many programs do you need to convert? if it is
more than one, probably the best bet
is this:
read the disks using a modern PC equipped with 8" drives, capturing the disk image
with
Dave Dunfield's IMD program. Then write a program on the PC which understands the
disk
and file structure, dumping out the program listing.
Similarly, if the 5110 is in good working order, you could install a 1.2M
5.25" drive on it, copy the files, and then extract them at your leisure
on an AT.
or
serial port transfer
etc.
Are those BASIC files stored as plain text, or are they tokenized?
2 Dec
2 Dec
1:31 a.m.
On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Fred Cisin wrote:
Similarly, if the 5110 is in good working order, you
could install a 1.2M
5.25" drive on it, copy the files, and then extract them at your leisure
on an AT.
Apparently you don't know the 5110/5120. You can't just connect a 5.25"
drive to it. You may have a look at the 5114 MIM or the 5120 MIM (which
partially contains the 5114 MIM), the latter is online on my site.
Are those BASIC files stored as plain text, or are
they tokenized?
They are tokenized.
Christian
11:59 a.m.
> Similarly, if the 5110 is in good working order,
you could install a 1.2M
> 5.25" drive on it,
On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Christian Corti wrote:
Apparently you don't know the 5110/5120.
True
You can't just connect a 5.25"
drive to it. You may have a look at the 5114 MIM or the 5120 MIM (which
partially contains the 5114 MIM), the latter is online on my site.
URL handy?
I never said that it would be EASY, . . .(although I did erroneously imply
practical)
I've put 5.25" drives in a few machines that ran SA801 interface (with
mixed results). I've never done it for a drive where I would have to
build a logic board or interface.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
3 Dec
3 Dec
2 a.m.
On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Fred Cisin wrote:
Oh, I forgot:
ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/ibm5110
You can't
just connect a 5.25"
drive to it. You may have a look at the 5114 MIM or the 5120 MIM (which
partially contains the 5114 MIM), the latter is online on my site.
URL handy? I never said that it would be EASY, . . .(although I
did erroneously imply
practical)
Although it would be nice, it really isn't practical. One problem is that
the diskette controller is external, i.e. within the 5114 case, and quite
discrete (TTL and IBM sugar cubes). This controller does FM and MFM (i.e.
3740 and System/34 format) and is attached to the 5110 I/O bus. The 5110
"firmware" (the Executable ROS) talks in a very basic manner to the
controller, like "turn the erase head on *now*" or "I'm writing address
mark bytes now, so please modify the clock pattern accordingly". Timing is
*very* critical, there are timing loops e.g. to delay turning the erase
head off after the last byte has been written to disk.
And the stepper control lines are controlled by software.
Attaching a 5.25" drive to this controller would be practically
impossible, alone because of the different erase gate delays or write
currents.
So without a 5114 (or a 5120 with internal drives) you need to make a
controller that emulates the Diskette Interface Adapter Card accurately.
The ROS I/O Supervisor routines are very unforgiving (I know that...)
I've put 5.25" drives in a few machines that
ran SA801 interface (with
mixed results). I've never done it for a drive where I would have to
build a logic board or interface.
Practically, you would need to create your own disk interface and I/O
Supervisor routines (which you can load into RWS).
Christian
12:46 p.m.
>> Are those BASIC files stored as plain text,
or are they tokenized?
> They are tokenized.
On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Alexandre Souza wrote:
PC basic? It is compatible with MSX Basic :D
It would not be "PC BASIC", nor even a MICROS~1 BASIC.
Even if it were, the tokenization is not standardized.
When MICROS~1 CP/M BASIC went from V 4.51 to V5.0, the tokens changed.
People had to run the old version, load, and resave in untokenized form.
We, and many others, wrote routines to change the .BAS files, but it was
still an annoyance.
1:22 p.m.
On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Alexandre Souza wrote:
PC basic? It is compatible with MSX Basic :D
Well, it's compatible with IBM BASIC (of the pre-IBM PC era of course). I
think that most constructs can be found in the System/3 BASIC. In fact,
the BASIC interpreter of the 5110 is written in System/3 code which is
interpreted by a subset System/3 emulator written in PALM (the native 5110
processor) assembly. One feature of this BASIC is matrix operations.
It took me a long time to actually prove that the 5110 BASIC is in
System/3 code; the APL interpreter is System/360 code.
BTW the /360 emulator supports quite a lot of features (not all, of
course).
I have partially disassembled the /3 and the /360 emulators and found out
that there are hooks to execute own code from RWS! So in theory you can
write /360 programs on the 5110, I just don't know how to do that yet.
For the curious the file aplros.asm (the /360 emulator disassembly) is on
the FTP server now.
Christian
Are those BASIC files stored as plain text, or are
they tokenized?
They are tokenized. 
2 Dec
2 Dec
6:46 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
Similarly, if the 5110 is in good working order, you
could install a
1.2M 5.25" drive on it, copy the files, and then extract them at your
leisure
Possible, but slightly less easy that it sounds. IIRC, the 8-inch
floppy drives used in the 5114 disk drives for the 5110 (and built into
the 5120) are IBM 53FD drives, which do not have the same electrical
interface as the industry-standard drives pioneered by Shugart.
1 Dec
1 Dec
12:14 p.m.
Did John Titor get all the way home before he realized that machines in
2036 can't read and write legacy floppy formats?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
2 Dec
2 Dec
2:33 a.m.
On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, steven stengel wrote:
A gentleman from the East Coast contacted me to see if
I can extract old
BASIC programs from his IBM-5110 8-inch floppy disks. I have a working
IBM-5120 with internal floppy drives, but the serial communications
option is not installed in my system.
I think the best I can do is LIST the programs and photograph the screen.
Any other ideas?
I have a 5110 with 5114 drive and also the Async. Communications
Adapter. I have written a Kermit called KERM5110 so I can transfer single
files to/from a PC. But this requires the Comms Adapter.
Along with the IBM Async. card comes a cartridge/disk with a serial port
"driver" (I think it's called SIO8BIT). With that you can SAVE directly to
the serial port (e.g. to a paper tape punch or to a PC in capture mode).
But I also have an 8" FDD attached to my multi media PC which handles
FM and MFM. For this configuration I have written a DOS program to
read/write/format/dump IBM 5110 diskettes and show/transfer individual
files. I've put it on our FTP server, it's called ibmdisk.exe.
So if you have an FM capable FDC and an 8" drive you may choose this
options.
BTW you need to SAVE SOURCE your 5110 BASIC programs in order to have them
stored detokenized, i.e. in EBCDIC, e.g. SAVE "FILE1",SOURCE,D80 (or D40
for the right drive).
Anyone else with a serial port who can do it?
Yes, but I'm in Germany.
The simplest would be to create disk images with ImageDisk and send them
to me in order to extract all the files in whatever format you like.
Christian
PS:
I have a working 5110 emulator that runs under X and has both APL and
BASIC (it uses the original ROS images). I will release it as soon as I
have cleaned up the code. This will allow you to run the BASIC programs
and have the printer output (text only) in a file.
2:53 a.m.
On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, steven stengel wrote:
> A gentleman from the East Coast contacted me to see if I can extract old
> BASIC programs from his IBM-5110 8-inch floppy disks. I have a working
> IBM-5120 with internal floppy drives, but the serial communications
> option is not installed in my system.
On my conversion system, I have a format called IBM 5520. It might be the
same family, so if you have a non-critical disk with some data on it, I
would be happy to try to convert it. However, I'm located in Denmark.
Nico
www.farumdata.dk
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7:26 a.m.
Christian Corti wrote:
...
PS:
I have a working 5110 emulator that runs under X and has both APL and
BASIC (it uses the original ROS images). I will release it as soon as I
have cleaned up the code. This will allow you to run the BASIC programs
and have the printer output (text only) in a file.
Christian, that is great news! I knew you were working on it, but I didn't know you
had
resolved those last kinks.
I know somebody (Richard?) volunteered to make a wxWidgets port of your emulator, but if
that falls through, I might make the time to do it, if you don't object. It would
help
whomever does the port if during your code clean up you tried to keep the core emulation
and the user interface aspects separate. For instance, it is OK for the GUI code to have
intimate knowledge of the core emulator, but the core emulator shouldn't have any
dependencies on X libraries.
5646
days inactive
5648
days old
13 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
alexandre-listas＠e-secure.com.br -
cc＠informatik.uni-stuttgart.de -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
frustum＠pacbell.net -
nico＠farumdata.dk -
tosteve＠yahoo.com