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  • 3B1 disk replacement

    From Bill Gunshannon@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jan 21 18:52:10 2016
    Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
    SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
    plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

    bill

    --
    Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves [email protected] | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
    University of Scranton |
    Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

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  • From DoN. Nichols@21:1/5 to Bill Gunshannon on Fri Jan 22 03:36:58 2016
    On 2016-01-21, Bill Gunshannon <[email protected]> wrote:
    Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
    SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
    plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

    Not I. Are they emulating MFM drives? I think that the Color
    Computer used SCSI, not MFM, but I may be wrong. Mine had just
    floppies -- running OS-9. The TRS-80 would be likely to be MFM. I must
    admit to not knowing the P112 at all.

    And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
    accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
    any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
    prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.

    Good Luck,
    DoN.

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  • From Dave Brower@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jan 23 19:53:42 2016
    I'm happily using Dave Gesswein's MFM disk emulator with a Beagle-bone http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm. I'm in the middle of making some tools that will extract the filesystem from the emulation file, have it mount in linux, and let you put it back into
    the emulation file. I'll also have a mkfs ans fsck that runs on linux.

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  • From Bill Gunshannon@21:1/5 to DoN. Nichols on Wed Feb 3 17:34:03 2016
    In article <[email protected]>,
    "DoN. Nichols" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 2016-01-21, Bill Gunshannon <[email protected]> wrote:
    Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
    SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based
    TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
    plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

    Not I. Are they emulating MFM drives? I think that the Color
    Computer used SCSI, not MFM, but I may be wrong.

    I think there may have been a hard disk interface from Tandy but it would
    have been MFM. And rare.

    Mine had just
    floppies -- running OS-9. The TRS-80 would be likely to be MFM.

    There have been third party SCSI and IDE interfaces made for the Color Computer. Supported by both BASIC and OS9/NirOS9 on the COCO. TRS-80s
    had MFM but small, rarre and expensive.

    I must
    admit to not knowing the P112 at all.

    It's a single board CP/M box, small enough to mount on the back of a disk.


    And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
    accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
    any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
    prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.


    I know this. Thus my question. There are addon systems for the COCO and
    all of the TRS-80s and it would seem the only real difference would be the actual interface. I just wondeed if anyone had ever looked at any of these
    to see if they could be adapted as currently the 3B1 suffers from the same problem, a dearth of usable disk drives and lack of reliability of those
    that exist.

    bill

    --
    Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves [email protected] | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
    University of Scranton |
    Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From DoN. Nichols@21:1/5 to Bill Gunshannon on Sat Feb 6 04:06:25 2016
    On 2016-02-03, Bill Gunshannon <[email protected]> wrote:
    In article <[email protected]>,
    "DoN. Nichols" <[email protected]> writes:

    [ ... ]

    And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
    accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
    any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
    prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.


    I know this. Thus my question. There are addon systems for the COCO and
    all of the TRS-80s and it would seem the only real difference would be the actual interface. I just wondeed if anyone had ever looked at any of these to see if they could be adapted as currently the 3B1 suffers from the same problem, a dearth of usable disk drives and lack of reliability of those
    that exist.

    Hmm ... the bus for the 3B1 was rather complex and well deigned,
    and I think would be quite difficult to adapt to the COCO or TRS-80
    expansion cards.

    And -- I think that really the 3B1 would benefit most from a
    SCSI interface -- since that would allow much newer and faster drives.

    Or -- perhaps a card offering slots for USB thumb drives or the
    various flash cards for camera use. (Granted, those flash drives are
    not good choices for unix systems, because of the limited number of
    writes for a given memory cell, and the fact that unix updates the
    inode every time a file is read, so that area would burn out fairly
    quickly.)

    Good Luck,
    Don.

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