On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 11:28:42AM -0500, Neil Cherry via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 12/26/2017 10:20 AM, Joseph Oprysko via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Dave???s MFM Emulators work well, I remember when I exhibited one at VCF, while a bit confusing to use, no pretty GUI or anything like that, it does what it needs to do. I had tested it and duplicated an existing hard drive, and created several ???blank??? hard drives over my time with it.
MFM emulator, this means it can emulate hard drives like those inside the 3B1 & 3B2 or earlier drives? Were the early PC drives the same?
Yes it works with 3B1 and 3B2. http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/ http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/status.shtml It works for systems using the ST-506 or ST-412 style interface (the 34 and 20 pin cables). The drives are pretty similar but the controllers are not. I currently have 34 different formats it can decode. I don't have support for RLL encoding, only MFM. May get to RLL sometime. The DREM unit support RLL emulation. ESDI drives look similar but it is an entirly different interface that I also don't support. I may be able to support the earlier 8" SA1000 drives with adapter but the drive I have (Quantum Q2040) doesn't have the electronics board and I don't have any computer with that interface to test with.
BTW, found the missing Xebec interface card. I think this to allow those earlier drives to interface to SASI (early SCSI). I have no idea if it works.
I have one of those in my TI professional. The seeker expansion board we put in it had SASI but SASI drives were very expensive. We got a good deal on the Xebec controller and a 10 Meg hard drive. I think it was from someone in the TI users group and the drive was used.
Unfortunately this year, I didn???t get anything vintage related.
Nothing for me either.