Anyone out there with a working Victor 9000 (US only)?

[fozztexx at fozztexx.com]

> That's basically it--I can read the transitions and probably figure out
> the GCR, but the zoned recording is going to take some work--taken all
> together, more work than I'm willing to put in for a one-time job.  I've
> got some pressing medical issues and don't really have the time to
> dedicate for this.

samdisk can decode Victor 9000 images. It's hard for me to fully test because neither of my Victors will boot from floppy and the hard disk I have seems to have been wiped. But the original disks that I've read using scp do seem to mostly decode. They don't boot in MAME though. To decode using samdisk:

    samdisk copy --scale 120 -c0-79 v9k-dos.scp v9k-dos.raw

To convert the raw sector output from samdisk to a triangular image that is MAME compatible requires two more steps:

    v9k-raw2img-fixed.pl v9k-dos.raw v9k-dos.img
    dd if=v9k-dos.img bs=512 count=1224 of=v9k-dos.mame

v9k-raw2img-fixed.pl can be found here: https://forum.system-cfg.com/viewtopic.php?p=172637&sid=bc421b3642004100b88b43d22b50ac18#p172637

The point I'm at with trying to get my Victors working is to see if I can get a good sector image that will boot in MAME, so I I know I have a good working image and can get a better idea of what files are needed for booting. Then I can either somehow dump the RAM out of MAME and poke it directly into the Victor via serial boot (I was able to verify serial boot is possible) or somehow poke it in using my Fluke 9010. From there I'll need to probably write some diagnostics to try to figure out what is wrong with the floppy drives. Then eventually I could create a new .scp using my floppur project from a sector image that boots in MAME.

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