On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 7:15 AM Jules Richardson via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 1/31/21 12:35 PM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
Greetings
I recently purchased a QCS external hard disk on ebay. This was one of
the
companies that was selling DEC Rainbow hard
drives. I had hoped it was an
old Rainbow drive with interesting to me bits... Turns out it is an Epson
QX-10 hard drive, full of interesting to bits for the QX-10 CP/M
enthusiast. I've had trouble finding a suitable community to note this in
should there be people around that care... so I thought I'd ask here is
people know of good CP/M groups and/or QX-10/16 groups, mailing lists,
irc
channels, discord servers, etc I could find.
I'm not aware of anything, unfortunately. I've got a QX-10 that was
originally one of Epson's sales demo machines, and got taken around to
prospective customers by one of their sales reps - which does mean that it
was well looked after and came with a *lot* of documentation (and media,
but nothing "exciting" beyond the usual OS, Valdocs etc.).
Did you happen to take an image of the drive contents?
Yes. I do. It looks to be CP/M format, with 3 maybe 4 partitions. I've had
a couple of requests, so I uploaded it to
https://people.freebsd.org/~imp/qx-10-disk.img
Raw sector dump, in physical order, of all the tracks. 4 heads, 16 sectors
per track, 480 cylinders. Cylinder 480 and higher could be read, but were
in a different format, so all bets are off as to what's there in this dump.
The SASI to MFM adapter is a WD1002, but it wasn't in the loop when I
imaged things. Can't talk SASI at the moment anyway, so there's no extra
data I could glean from that, at least in a quick pass over the WD1002 docs.
(hanging a hard disk off mine would be fun, but I
think they were SASI to
the external enclosure, and there was a SASI interface which plugged into
the expansion slots - I'm not sure if the latter is documented anywhere)
Yes, the unit I got was an external unit sold by QCS, which sold units for
Apple, TRS-80, IBM PC, DEC Rainbow, Expson QX-10 and a few others I'm sure
I've forgotten. It has the SASI to MFM adapter card connected to the
mini-scribe disk. I got it mostly for playing with Rainbow stuff, but it
doesn't have to wind up there...
Warner