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Pertec ISA interface card

I'll get more information and maybe pics tomorrow, but the odd tape drive has a very tiny tape slot with a handle not unlike most 5.25" floppy drives. It is two layers, with a big-ass controller card (or something) on the bottom and the drive on the top. It has a big rainbow-colored ribbon cable going from the drive to the internal connector on a controller labeled Power Convertibles. I found it in a box of my Dad's computer stuff from who knows when that he probably got somewhere for cheap or free and never used. On the back of that card is a connector that looks like a parallel port (two rows of pins, way longer than parallel port) - a connector that some of my other gear has. It's branded DEL-MAR, a local company that does medical computing (or did, rather). After becoming more familiar with odd custom equipment I notice that this card also says "Multi Sample Acq.", which leadsm e to think the back port is for some sort of data collecting equipment. I've seen the same connector on element sensors that I had from a university. The internal connector actually looks like it COULD be IDE - but it's probably some sort of SCSI or proprietary stuff. I have cables for the wide connector that convert to external SCSI, and a straight-through. I have a quad-IDE bay intended for CDROM drives, but I think 3/4 of the CDROM drives that were in it are dead - I removed the working one to use outside of the enclosure in a machine, because they were asthetically nice caddy drives. They're standard IDE on the inside, though, so you could put modern DVD burners in it, lol, doesn't matter. My other card with that connector on the end is also an MFM controller, and was made by Data Tech. Corp.. That one was pulled from my Zenith Z-200 286 backplane-based machine iirc. Both of these are 16-bit ISA full-length.

I don't use tape drives (can never get them to work, can't get tapes, can't find controllers, etc.) so I'd be willing to part with any/all of this stuff for whatever the best offer is.
 
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"Power Convertibles" is a maker of DC-DC hybrid converters, so the label is a little strange. I suspect that your tape is something like QIC-02 or QIC-36, but there are stranger interfaces out there.

Probably not SCSI, I'm guessing.
 
I managed to get a Qualstar 1052 tape drive from Germany to Romania via e-bay. They do ship to other countries and in the European Union, packages get directly to the receiver's local post office without paying customs taxes (while packages from US or China or Israel are subject to customs fees in the EU). This tape came with an ISA adapter, it's called MCS-1. I have the MsDos drivers for it and also for the tape which I will try to attach here. the address is [w][w][w].seprom.ro/qualstar.rar (adjust the address). There are 4 folders: some MsDos utilities (including the driver), the "msdos stuff" containing the config.sys line for loading "mcstape.sys" with the proper address, some asm, C, cobol and pascal examples for accessing the tape via pertec interface (using mcs-1 controller driver) and also some tape drive utilities (disk2tape, tape2disk, tapediag, tapelist, tapeclone,tapebackup,taperestore and some more).

It is recommended not to use the flash when you take pictures of your tape drive (while it is working). You will sure trick the light-sensor on the tape (used for BOT and EOT detection - begin of tape and end of tape - both marked with a small aluminium foil to reflext the light emitted by a LED), the drive will believe it reached the end of tape and will spin it backwards. Big headache when you need to fit a lot of data into some tapes (the procedure is called "volume splitting").

There's another model of Qualstar Tape Drive, it's called Qualstar 1260 and it works on... SCSI. Now guess what is hiding under its hood? There's a Qualstar 1052 (yea, that one!!!) + a Pertec-2-SCSI adapter. So whoever of you are in the US, watch the e-bay for that tape and also keep an eye on the pictures and see the connector. This spring I had the chance to buy such a tape drive, but the high price (US$900) to ship the tape to Europe... stopped my dream.

If anyone can find the Qualstar 1260 tape drive service manual in a complete edition - there is a complete schematic of the pertec-to-scsi adapter. I do have the manual in PDF format but it is not complete. Guess what pages are missing... anyway the board is horrible. 3/4 the height of the qualstar tape drive. There are also other tape drives containing such an adapter. for example the state of the art tape drive ever built: the HP 88781a - a real masterpiece with amazing spin speed and also a few MBytes transfer rate. If you can get one of those - they are really heavy. I missed one of those on e-bay last year, also from Germany. 1 euro the price, 60 euros shipping. The wonderful thing is that as soon as the tape is connected to SCSI, any *NIX system will know there's a tape drive connected. There's no need for driver, *nix already has a generic SCSI tape driver included. If the controller manages to detect the tape drive at Power-on-self-test, then unix/linux will have no trouble. SCSI is preferred instead of pertec. You can send files to the tape in the same way you append data to a file. Also you can compress the data, so on a 6800CPI 2400ft tape you can transfer up to 700 MBytes. The driver will do the rest - spinning, rewinding, parity check, sector read retry and so on. But that's the dream in our lives that we all hope to become true. Unix/Linux have no ideea of Pertec standard. There was some pertec support in the FreeBSD 1.x but I could not find anything else. Need to finish some exams to get some free time.

@Gerardcjat - http://www.electrovalueinc.com/software/software.htm - that big big circuit board is the controller I have. Maybe you can find one of those in the same place you found the tape drive. It's called "MCS-1". Drivers are already here. Also there are tapes on e-bay. look for "9 track tape" on ebay.com or "9 spur magnetband"/"magnetband" on ebay.de. There are tapes coming from Hungary and Ukraine at around EUR9.00 per set and around 15 EUR per transport.


Please let me know if these files are useful to you guys. I am interested in the pertec-2-serial project and I hope these files will help you a lot - with the functions I already wrote about: spinning, rewinding, error check (parity on track 9), bad sector request, erase data, write volume and so on.

With respect,
Fox
____________________
PhD Research Assistant
Petroleum and Gas University of Ploiesti, Romania
 
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@ Skaarj
Wonderfull and helping Post !!! Thank you very much !!!
I have just sent you a Private Message ....
Let me know, thru the forum, if it does not come thru ....
Best regards to all,
Gerard

BTW,
1 - I just, two day ago, buy two 11" magnetic tapes, ( one used from USA, the other ( NOS ) from Bulgaria ), both at around 15 Euro, shipping included.

2 - OF COURSE, the files you posted have great interest ( at least, for me ;-) if I find a MCS-1 card )

3- I am still locking for a 800 BPI data tape ( obviously with "some" data on it )
 
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@Gerardcjat
I was sure at least someone will like it. Message arrived, reply will come soon.
You should know that your qualstar 1052 is not able to read 800bpi tapes. 1600bpi and 3200bpi ONLY. qualstar 1260 tape drive can also read 6800bpi.
I will let all of you know when any tapes will appear on ebay for sale and I will also try to get as much information as possible about tape drives.

For anyone here living in the US (and also in love with tapes):

- This is what you need: http://www.comco-inc.com/hp-88781a-9-track-tape-drive-p29922.html - read the specifications. Sounds sexy. You guys have the organization called "Salvation Army" in the US. Go to them and ask about such tape drives. Tell them you wish to play some church music from such a 9-track tape. They will love you and will be at your service. As long as you (tell them you are excited and) wish to record/play prayers using the tape drive, the starting price will continue to decrease. At least it worked for me some years ago while I was working there (Denver, CO and Kansas CIty, MO). Got myself a video-tape camera with US$10.

- For anyone in love of tape drives - search the e-bay, there are some qualstar tape drives, unfortunately no such HP. Be careful to look at the connector. Everyone knows how SCSI looks like. But if the connector looks like the parallel port but has three rows of pins - that's PERTEC. Bad news if there's no controller and no drivers.
 
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@skaarj

Thank you for the forum reply ....
I know that the 1052 is not able to read 800 Bpi tapes, but as I am a little crazy ;-)
my plans are to hack it ( modify it ) in a way that it COULD !!
Little crazy, isn't it ??

Also, and I apologize for the forum users ...
Let me know ( thru the forum ?? ) if you send a reply thru PM, because, as I am on vacation, far from home .....
and I am not sure at all that all emails or emails like goes thru ....
Last point : I had absolutly NO RESULTS, searching German Ebay for tapes and/or tapes drives.
What is the trick ???
Best regards to ALL.
 
Well if you wish to hack into the tape drive, you should know that the frist thing to do is to get an adapter (check the eBay links I sent) and start testing the tape drive. After you give life to your mechanical love, making her "sing" in 800CPI means there is a big chance for you to stop at the internal EPROM memory. I hope I scared you enough ;)

about e-bay Germany: I am searching it 6 times/week. Believe me, there's still no 9track tape drive yet. I will let you know when such tape drives will arrive. I also sent you some instructions about what to search (the magic words).

Examples (keyword = "Magnetband" - magnetic tape)

http://cgi.ebay.de/RAR-Antike-Softw...e_Computer&hash=item43a1b87be8#ht_1077wt_1137 - 1 piece computer tape, cannot say what parameters. he does not have paypal account, did not write his location (location = "Zuhause" = at home) but he is more than 90% OK. Trouble with payment, I do not recommend the effort just for one tape.

http://cgi.ebay.de/10-Stuck-Magnetb...andmaschinen&hash=item53e3ae75a2#ht_500wt_928 - this says about 10 pieces of 2400ft computer tapes made in the east Germany, possible 6250CPI but I cannot say for sure. PayPal accepted.

Other keywords: "Bandmachine" (tape-machine), "Bandlaufwerk" (tape-drive), "Streamer" (tape drive). After a search you just have to look at the pictures and copy-paste the interested pages into Google translator (German to English = recommended)

Almost anyone in Germany can speak English. Just talk to him/her. They are nice. For them it is important to sell their products and to keep their "trusted" coefficient as high as possible - that trust keeps them in business. If someone cannot speak English, then he will ask for help from someone who does. (Usually a grammatically English/German correct-written sentence can be correctly translated by google in both ways so you should not worry too much, but use english and not french/bulgarian/romanian/italian or others). Remember that many Germans live only by their online (ebay) shops.
You should check that e-bay page with the external tape drive from England (you have 4 days left). There's also an internal PERTEC interface, it is possible there is also a disk containing its drivers. If so, you can use those drivers to make the computer recognise the controller. After that you connect the pertec cable and you can use my tape utilities to "talk" to your qualstar 1052. Not my driver, that's for the MCS-1 board.
 
Suprise. I finally got hold of some 9-track tapes and along with it came another Qualstar tape drive (seen on the left)

P8184055.jpg

It's identical in every way and that being so, once again I'm missing the damn controller.

The cable coiled up below it goes from the two edge connectors on the drive to a DB62 connector. If I want to use that cable I'll need a controller with this connection:
180-062-272-010.jpg


I'm also open to a card with cable so long as I can plug it in to the drive. I'm now tempted to take both units now and make a single cabinet for it.
 
??? Do not understand your post well NeXT.
Don't you have a controller card, the one at the bottom of the RIGHT Qualstar drive ??
So, I understand you are looking for a SECOND one ?? If so, what is exactly the reference(s) of the card you seem to already have ??
Correct or I missed something ???
BTW, me too, am still loking for a damned controller !!
 
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Yes, I'm looking for a second controller now (the one you can see is the one I said I received earlier in the thread and it works great). I don't need it as immediately though this time because the other one is working fine enough (getting two up and running merely doubles the fun).
 
Are there any drivers for your controller card? I'm trying to find as many Pertec drivers as I can. If you have any drivers... can you please post them here?
That's Pertec interface. Try to search for a pertec-to-scsi adapter (outside the internet), you'll raise the fun sky high.

Nothing new on my side of the world. Still looking. In the mean time... you guys should find these very sexy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVx31unjf-g and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wk4I1DFJe0
 
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On a card this old, so long as you properly configure the card, software tools like Seagate Backup and the likes will work with it. If I were to buy a SCSI adapter I would be batter off looking for one of the front loading drives which are overall a lot faster.
 
Actually, I don't think I'll need another card.
I was reading the pinout that Chuck posted and apparently I can address up to two drives per controller. Not sure how the software would behave to this, nor do I know how exactly the drives are addressed but this would make my life a lot easier and further tempts me to make a cabinet to hold the drives and still use a single cable to connect it to the host computer.
 
You should be able to address up to 4 drives on a single controller, if your controller allows manipulation of ITAD0 and ITAD1. Note that if you daisy-chain drives, the usual terminator issues apply.

I'm working out my own controller design now--it uses an AVR ATMEGA162-16 with up to 256K of SRAM. The nightmare is that you've got 52 signal lines to control a drive, some of which are latched, others are real-time and still others are pulsed (i.e. the "you snooze, you lose" type). Outputs are all OC, which makes for a fair amount of TTL just to do the basic interface.

I checked my understanding of the protocol out by using a digital I/O board in a PC that uses 3 8255 PIAs. Not quite fast enough to catch all of the data as it comes on my Fujitsu drive, but it's a good way to test out what lines do what.
 
Not yet--still sussing out the design I'll keep you posted.

FWIW, I'm using an AVR ATMega162 (40-pin DIP) with a 128K SRAM for buffering. The nasty part is that there are about 52 signals on the bus:

Pertec interface signals by category:

1. Data output, IW0-IW7 and IWP; latched with IWP derived.
2. Data input, IR0-IR7 and IRP; latched.
3. Real-time status, IFBY,ISGL,IDLP,IDENT,IEOT,INRZ,IRDY, IRWD, IFPT,
IDBY,ISPEED,IONL,(Read buffer full),(Write Buffer empty)
4. Drive status pulsed signals, IFMK, IHER, ICER (cleared by IGO)
5. Drive command bits, some pulsed (by host), ILWD,IGO,ILOL,IREV,IREW,
IWRT, IRTH1, IRTH2, IEDIT, IERASE, IWFM, ITAD0, ITAD1, IFEN, IRWU,
IHSP

So there's a fair amount SSI TTL in the design.
 
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