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My Datastore now open

smplfyi

smplfyi

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 31, 2007
Messages
259
Location
Warwickshire
For those of you with fond memories of 1980's computer systems especially S-100 please feel free to visit

http://maben.homeip.net:8217/static/S100/index.html

Several thousand hours of scanning, googling, downloading, reformatting so I can better remember the pioneering microcomputer systems I worked with.

Have fun reading and remembering

marcus bennett ;)
 
I can imagine the ISP's TOS disallows running a web server, but typically they only scan ports 80 and 8080.
 


Well Initially my webserver was broadcasting on port 8217 because being a paranoid android and from experience port 80 got continuos hacking attempts.

Now security has beeen improved and I am now bravely listening on both port 80 and 8217.

The Datastore was initially devised to support Cromemco users but has grown since.

So the two toplevel links are:

http://maben.homeip.net/static/index.html

http://maben.homeip.net:8217/static/index.html

Initially this site was documentation only but I am beginning to add code directories in various places. When my Cromemco computers are restored I will start making code images and putting them up (I am still thinking what the most useful image format should be).

In the last 12 months the website has been down for less than 96 hours, so that's not too bad IMHO but apologies if somehow you have not got thru

You can email scans to request AT majzel.com

Any S-100 or Cromemco scans will be gratefully received.



 
Cromemco Code now being added to Documentation Store

Cromemco Code now being added to Documentation Store

Well,

Since I last posted I have began to rescue not only my Cromemco Documentation

http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/cromemco/index.html

(toplevel link) but also the code itself.

I wont bore everybody with the problems I am having reading 22year old diskettes lets just say that there has been some success

The main efforts are now visible here:

http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/cromemco/code/disks/index.html

When I finally also to resurrect an IBM PC XT I hope to be able to use Dave Dunfield suite of programs

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

to make images of bootable diskettes that can be recreated.

And yes, of course sending me document scans of any S100 S-100 computer would be much appreciated to add to the total collection which is of course located at

http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/index.html

Again the preferred email is request at majzel.com

Kind regards, marcus
 
amouse said:
Well,

[snip]
(toplevel link) but also the code itself.

I wont bore everybody with the problems I am having reading 22year old diskettes lets just say that there has been some success

The main efforts are now visible here:

http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/cromemco/code/disks/index.html

When I finally also to resurrect an IBM PC XT I hope to be able to use Dave Dunfield suite of programs

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

to make images of bootable diskettes that can be recreated.

[snip]
Click to expand...

Hi,
Sorry for going slightly off topic here, but I noticed you are using the Dave Dunfield disk imaging software. I am doing something similar with the NorthStar Horizon with some extremely old and unreliable disks (ie, full of sector errors). It has been a challenge to say the least since the disk imaging software for the NorthStar Horizon cannot create a useable image if it encounters a sector error.

My solution, which may be useful to you, is I found a NorthStar Horizon CP/M program called "Copy Fast Utility" or cfu.com which I use to make a disk copy of the original disk. The sector errors are filtered out and I can make a clean image of the copied disk. I am sure this means some information is lost along the way but since the original disks already have sector errors, I suspect that data is long gone already. Better to have 90%+ of the files and data on the disk than none at all.

This might be applicable to you if you can get cfu.com to work on your Cromemco. Apparently, it is a universal CP/M disk copy program which uses the CBIOS to make copies. Since it is a sector reader, it does not matter what the operating system is of the disk being copied, only that cfu.com can read it. For example, I am using cfu.com to make copies of N* DOS disks which are basically unreadable under N* CP/M.

Best of luck with your project. If you have any pointers on how I can better recover my old data, I would appreciate it!

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch
 
Copy Fast and NorthStar

Copy Fast and NorthStar

Andrew,

Thanks for the tip on copy fast. Is this something you can send me i.e to request at majzel dot com perhaps.

Well for Cromemco of course the tricky thing would be that the first sector on the first side of the disk is single density even if the other parts of the disk have (say) double density. Therefore it is devilish difficult to read these disks on any other system. Cromemco did later come up with the UNIFORM disk format, which is 512 byte sectors and double sided , double density, but the bootable diskettes cannot be in uniform format (for CDOS and Cromix anyway).

I am still trundling on, the current hold up is that I can't get the XT 286 to boot, so if anybody has any links to the PC XT 286 GTOs (Guide to Operations) or TechRefs then please tell me.
 
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