Imaging and Emulating Rainbow

[Jules Richardson]

On 08/14/2016 10:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
> If it's running MS-DOS, you should be able to find/write something to do a raw image
> dump out the serial port.
>
> That reminds me, I need to image some Rainbow floppies I have.
>
> I would think someone would have already written this in the MS-DOS world.

Indeed. I got as far as hacking something to sector-dump chunks of data 
from the hard disk to floppy, then sneakernetting that across to a modern 
PC for reassembly (~20MB is a little painful, but not too bad, writing to 
one disk while reading from another).

My initial intention was to polish the code a bit and add serial support, 
but that was immediately followed by the thought of "surely someone else 
has done this already?", at which point I'd done what I immediately needed 
to do anyway, and so never did anything more with the code.

If anyone knows of an x86 DOS util which does sector dumps over rs232, I'd 
be interested to hear about it (particularly if the transfer protocol is 
something supported by any old comms program). I do have various '80s-era 
PCs with ST506/412-type drives which could benefit from a backup.

cheers

Jules