Ampro Little Board questions... - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

16 Dec 2001

From: Richard Erlacher &lt;edick(a)idcomm.com&gt;

...
 I'm curious about something here ... Was this
particular system ever observed to
...
 run as configured?  I've never owned a prepackaged
AMPRO box/system, so I have
...
 no experience with them on which to base any guesses. 
With a SCSI drive and no
...
 bridge, the thing should either run or not, though, and
if it doesn't there's
...
 probably a good reason. 

Over the years I've seen two and added hard disks to them (purchased
without).
If you have the right controller and drive it's an assemble the peices
project.
Those included some of the early SCSI drives.

...
 I'm not in a good situation to help you out with
this, at the moment, but I
...
 could send you a bridge controller of the sort that the
firmware is supposed to
...
 recognize on its own.  With that you can test the
Little Board side of things.
...
 The Little Board supports the Xebec controller as well
as a number of models
...
 from OMTI, ADAPTEC, and others.  You'd have to
attach an ST506/412-interfaced
...
 drive that works properly at the other end, though. 
The Adaptec models I've got
...
 are capable of either RLL or MFM, depending on which
model you use and, of

If you match the known configs it's pretty straightforward, if not you
need to go
into the bios and set up the config by hand.  The latter is a bit less
obvious as
the Ampro BIOS for hard disk was done in three layers, one for the
physical
SCSI driver, then the SCSI protocal for the controller target and then
hard disk
interface.  There are several added tables not normally seen in a CP/M
bios.
Those tables allow for things like assigning logical unit 3 (whatever it
may be) as drive A:.  As BIOS for CP/M go it's very sophisticated.

Allison