Looking for North star software

[allison]

On 07/04/2018 08:37 AM, systems_glitch via cctalk wrote:
> Yeah, you do need a monitor or something to get started on either Mike
> Douglas's solution or Dave Dunfield's NST. I've used both successfully.
>
> If you have hard-sectored disks, I can just make you a boot disk. I have
> both single and double density controllers.
Makes sure they are configured for the NS* native IO.  If they are not
your still
stuck as then the OS is looking for an IO board that is foreign.

I know that as before the horizon I had the bare NS* MDS in the Altair
using the SIO as serial. 

Putting a boot monitor in is by far the easy way out.  I did that early on
and it has serial transfer and embedded loader for soft sector controller.

I rarely use the stock  NS* system but the older one with all the changes
is still in use.  Hard disk (2x 31mb) makes it more useful.

There is one excuse I use occasionally for pulling out the stock NS,
UCSD Pascal.  The first IDE.

Allison

> Thanks,
> Jonathan
>
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 12:39 AM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>> I'm told that the N* controller can write H89 formated disk but the H89
>> controller can't do N* format. I could have that backwards but that is what
>> I recall. One can't do the other.
>>
>> The H89 hard sectored controller is single density only, while the newer
>> N* can do both single and double density, still hard sectored though. There
>> is always confusion on the N* controllers as to which can do double
>> density. My research indicates that the MDC-nA are single density only and
>> the MDC-nDA can do both ( n is a rev. number 1, 2, 3, or 4).
>>
>> Dwight
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Fred Cisin via
>> cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, July 3, 2018 11:08:18 AM
>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
>> Subject: Re: Looking for North star software
>>
>> On Tue, 3 Jul 2018, dwight via cctalk wrote:
>>> I'm not as worried about 10 hard secrtored disk. I still have the punch
>>> I had made for my H89. I can create 10 sector from old 360K disk.
>> If you have a working H89 (hard sectored), then you should be able to
>> write a program to run on the H89 to write hard sectored disk images!
>> Can it do single density 256 byte sectors?  or MFM 512 byte sectors?
>>
>> .ASM for PCTOFLOP should be available, as a guide to what you need, but
>> will need modification for the H89 disk controller.
>>
>> Most of the NorthStar disk images should be availablem once you've got the
>> H89 writing disks from them!
>>
>> Once you've got the NorthStar booting CP/M plus a copy of PIP, you can
>> then continue on it.
>>
>>
>>