Thanx for the info! At some point I'd like to get this up and running myself. Has anyone looked at this HPDrive project? http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/ looks to be windows only, but source is available.

Is this what you are after? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200205642428

David Betz wrote: congrats. :) Keep us posted on progress. What card do you have on the PC side? I'm very interested to hear your progress. I've been watching for a good cheap hp-ib pci or usb adapter, but I've not picked one up yet. Can't seem to find a good _and_ cheap one. :)

cards pretty cheap on eBay. I'm also looking for an HP-IB floppy drive.

Yo, This thread got me interested in playing with HP-IB stuff again so, I installed an ISA board in a Linux system and tried to see if I could make it do something useful. After days of tinkering, I've finally had some moderate success. The card I have uses a NEC7210 HP-IB controller chip which in it's self is a problem. There is very little documentation on the web for this chip, and the register / function assiociations are pretty funky. I found a few code samples but, in my opinion, they aren't very well documented. For instance, to make the board a CIC (Controller In Charge), where it will send command strings (data + ATN aserted), you set the chip to assert the IFC (Interface Clear). When you clear the IFC, the board remains in the CIC mode. A found just one comment in one document that briefly mentions this mechanism. To make the chip send data (non-commands), you put it in standby mode (I think?)... WTF...It's just screwy! The programming model for the 9914 is much simpler and I have considerable documentation (and some experience) to support that chip. I do have several STD bus HPIB interface cards w/docs but, no ISA 9914 cards. So, I'm stuck with the board I have. Last evening, I finally got the board to talk to a simple instrument (HP 3437 multimeter). It will send the meter's Talk Address and then listen to the data coming back from the meter. Comparitively, it's a simple protocol but, you wouldn't believe how long it took to get that far :-) I hope in the next few days to get PC to talk to a more complicated device. At this time, the intended target is a CS80 harddrive. I do have experience with those drives so, I only have to learn the programming model for the card and not the device. I'm gonna see if I can write a bootable image to the disk and then boot a HP1000 from it. BTW: I did look at the HP-IB disk simulator project but, didn't find it useful for my goals. I also took another look at the Linux-HPIB project and see that it has been rekindled. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a good build on my system. It's probably an incompatability in the kernel... Somewhere... That project is fairly complex in that it installs device drivers for the card where the user can make highlevel system calls and talk to devices. I'm more interested in standalone applications specific to each device. The programs would use a common library for the functions but, that's all. If anyone's interested, let me know and we can discuss the internals in more detail. See yas, Steve Robertson steerex [at] ccvn [dot] com

Anyway, there were at least 3 command sets ued by HP -- Amigo (mostly used on older flippy drives), SS/80 (more modern floppies and small hard disks) and CS/80 (larger hard disks). I _think_ specifcations of all exist,