carlsson
Veteran Member
This past weekend, I decided to play around a little with my Philips P2000c, a "luggable" CP/M machine. Mine is a P2012 which means it is equipped with two 640K QD floppy drives. I got the impression those won't be able to read 160K disks, but since I haven't really tried I don't know if that is the case.
Anyway, somewhere on the Internet I have a faint memory reading about how to use the external floppy drive interface. It is a standard 34-pin story described in the operator's manual. My idea was that perhaps one can hook up a 3.5" drive and configure it as a 640K drive for simpler data transfer, assuming there is some PC software that can format a 3.5" floppy disk to a 640K format readable on the Philips of course.
However, I tried two 1.44 MB drives, one external Amiga drive and even one internal drive from my Olivetti PC-1. Some of them I managed to get the LED shine constantly, but neither I got any action when trying to access a drive. Possibly the drive needs to be jumpered to DS2 or DS3? Out of the ones I tried, only the PC-1 drive has visible jumpers but when I researched it on the Internet, I didn't find any good reference which jumper does what.
Am I barking up the wrong tree in my attempts of using a 3.5" drive? I have a few spare 5.25" drives, both 160/180K (single sided) and 80 track double sided which effectively should work as another 640K drive if I get it properly configured. However I don't have a suitable cable, since it would take a 34-pin cable with female card edge connectors in both ends! Where can one find those? I don't fancy hacking and splicing my own cable as previous attempts in that area have been total failures.
As an alternative, I suppose I should try a serial connection. I just need to figure out if the boot disk I've got contains any CP/M comms program. I suppose neither WordStar or CalcStar does, perhaps Basic could be used in worst case.
Anyway, somewhere on the Internet I have a faint memory reading about how to use the external floppy drive interface. It is a standard 34-pin story described in the operator's manual. My idea was that perhaps one can hook up a 3.5" drive and configure it as a 640K drive for simpler data transfer, assuming there is some PC software that can format a 3.5" floppy disk to a 640K format readable on the Philips of course.
However, I tried two 1.44 MB drives, one external Amiga drive and even one internal drive from my Olivetti PC-1. Some of them I managed to get the LED shine constantly, but neither I got any action when trying to access a drive. Possibly the drive needs to be jumpered to DS2 or DS3? Out of the ones I tried, only the PC-1 drive has visible jumpers but when I researched it on the Internet, I didn't find any good reference which jumper does what.
Am I barking up the wrong tree in my attempts of using a 3.5" drive? I have a few spare 5.25" drives, both 160/180K (single sided) and 80 track double sided which effectively should work as another 640K drive if I get it properly configured. However I don't have a suitable cable, since it would take a 34-pin cable with female card edge connectors in both ends! Where can one find those? I don't fancy hacking and splicing my own cable as previous attempts in that area have been total failures.
As an alternative, I suppose I should try a serial connection. I just need to figure out if the boot disk I've got contains any CP/M comms program. I suppose neither WordStar or CalcStar does, perhaps Basic could be used in worst case.