fritz kinderhoffen
Member
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2024
- Messages
- 37
Do you need instructions on how to tune the PDS for your 5-1/4" drives? You don't need an oscilloscope to do it. That might make the drives operate better.
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IMSAI PCS-80/35 or maybe an IMSAI 4x
- Thread starter AlbertS80
- Start date
I think you may be my light in the cavern....
The 5-1/4 news is really nice to hear; this is what the system has in it; the owners will be even more delighted.
I reverted to the 8" Shugarts when I realized the few images I could find were for 8" images (256256 bytes total, 128 byte sector x 26 sector x 77 tracks).
I have not found the 80K or so 5-1/4 images.
I'll send you a direct message to discuss further and to where the gratitude could be sent.
PS - I did the PDS tune per the DIO manual, so I believe the PDS should be good.
The tough part is having a second controller to make sure the apples I create are apples and not oranges.
Thanks again Fritz, you could be pulling this system together.
Now I really need to dig up a cool song.
The 5-1/4 news is really nice to hear; this is what the system has in it; the owners will be even more delighted.
I reverted to the 8" Shugarts when I realized the few images I could find were for 8" images (256256 bytes total, 128 byte sector x 26 sector x 77 tracks).
I have not found the 80K or so 5-1/4 images.
I'll send you a direct message to discuss further and to where the gratitude could be sent.
PS - I did the PDS tune per the DIO manual, so I believe the PDS should be good.
The tough part is having a second controller to make sure the apples I create are apples and not oranges.
Thanks again Fritz, you could be pulling this system together.
Now I really need to dig up a cool song.
fritz kinderhoffen
Member
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2024
- Messages
- 37
For those that are interested "The .001 micro-farad is used for the PERSCI drive while .0022 is used for Shugart or GSI drives."
Tomorrow I have to follow up on the free advice from my friend Fritz and check the cap on my card.
I will add findings.
I have visited the IMSAI a couple times in the past few weeks.
I have an SA800 that almost works with an image file titled imdos205r1-peters
I used it a few weeks ago and only booted once in a dozen trys, (drive FG1)
but my second drive, last week booted multiple times to IMDOS (drive T) last week,
I only had one drive with me (my car's weight limit will not allow more than one SA800 drives in it
)
I have 3 SA800 drives, FG1, FG2 , and T
FG2 and T seem OK
Tomorrow I will the T and FG2 drives.
Goal is to boot and create a new bootable disk off the second drive.
Stay warm, in the north It is coming down:
I will add findings.
I have visited the IMSAI a couple times in the past few weeks.
I have an SA800 that almost works with an image file titled imdos205r1-peters
I used it a few weeks ago and only booted once in a dozen trys, (drive FG1)
but my second drive, last week booted multiple times to IMDOS (drive T) last week,
I only had one drive with me (my car's weight limit will not allow more than one SA800 drives in it
)I have 3 SA800 drives, FG1, FG2 , and T
FG2 and T seem OK
Tomorrow I will the T and FG2 drives.
Goal is to boot and create a new bootable disk off the second drive.
Stay warm, in the north It is coming down:
Well the short answer is the IMSAI PCS-80/35 is somewhat up and running.
I had communication with Herb and obtained an IMDOS user manual (amongst others) that really added a needed details to using IMDOS.
To MFF, My Friend Fritz, I did check my PDS card an confirmed that I had the correct C2 0.0022 for the Shugart 8" and 5.25 Drives the unit has.
The only issue I am working around now is getting the system to boot in a reliable sequence.
The manuals I got from Herb noted a number of ways to boot the various configurations of the IMSAI systems to IMDOS.
As a brief refresher I have an MPU-B (8085 CPU) and currently using a PC with Teraterm to drive the system.
I follow the documented procedure, but end up pressing the red reset button, and praying ... still need to work this out.
Anyway I went in the past weekend and connected both the 8" Shugart SA800-2 and the SA400-xx (I'll fill this in later) .
Powered the system up, hit the space bar, and got the monitor output.
9600 BAUD SERIAL
IMSAI MPU-B MONITOR VERS 1.3
Put a disk with the imdos205r1-peters.dsk image in the "0" (Drive select 1) drive and issued a "B"
It didn't seem to boot.
I believe I pressed the red reset button on the IMSAI chassis and it booted after that.
Sorry I have to perfect that sequence.
Anyway it booted from 8" drive "0" DS1
I could do a dir of that disk.
I was able to install the minimum system files to boot to Drive b: (second 8" Shugart), Drive 9: the first 5.25: disk, drive 10:, the second 5.25 disk.
I booted from the 5.25 disk, drive 9
I then rebooted to the A Shugart 8" drive and copied all files from the A 8" drive to the B 8" drive.
The only thing I have to work out is getting the files on the 8" disk to the 5.25 disk.
PIP says something about format issue.
I have developed a half full level of optimism that I (you may likely help too) will get me to a point to get a good set of 5.25 disks.
The keepers of the IMSAI say I am almost done.
Enjoy this somewhat long video, Coming up for air - maybe like this project
I had communication with Herb and obtained an IMDOS user manual (amongst others) that really added a needed details to using IMDOS.
To MFF, My Friend Fritz, I did check my PDS card an confirmed that I had the correct C2 0.0022 for the Shugart 8" and 5.25 Drives the unit has.
The only issue I am working around now is getting the system to boot in a reliable sequence.
The manuals I got from Herb noted a number of ways to boot the various configurations of the IMSAI systems to IMDOS.
As a brief refresher I have an MPU-B (8085 CPU) and currently using a PC with Teraterm to drive the system.
I follow the documented procedure, but end up pressing the red reset button, and praying ... still need to work this out.
Anyway I went in the past weekend and connected both the 8" Shugart SA800-2 and the SA400-xx (I'll fill this in later) .
Powered the system up, hit the space bar, and got the monitor output.
9600 BAUD SERIAL
IMSAI MPU-B MONITOR VERS 1.3
Put a disk with the imdos205r1-peters.dsk image in the "0" (Drive select 1) drive and issued a "B"
It didn't seem to boot.
I believe I pressed the red reset button on the IMSAI chassis and it booted after that.
Sorry I have to perfect that sequence.
Anyway it booted from 8" drive "0" DS1
I could do a dir of that disk.
I was able to install the minimum system files to boot to Drive b: (second 8" Shugart), Drive 9: the first 5.25: disk, drive 10:, the second 5.25 disk.
I booted from the 5.25 disk, drive 9
I then rebooted to the A Shugart 8" drive and copied all files from the A 8" drive to the B 8" drive.
The only thing I have to work out is getting the files on the 8" disk to the 5.25 disk.
PIP says something about format issue.
I have developed a half full level of optimism that I (you may likely help too) will get me to a point to get a good set of 5.25 disks.
The keepers of the IMSAI say I am almost done.
Enjoy this somewhat long video, Coming up for air - maybe like this project
Last edited:
I had a tantilum cap issue a few weeks ago that made me famous for a few hours.
I installed a RAM16 card that I had tested before, but one of the 33uf larger tantilum caps
decided to entertain of us with a bit of noise and aroma; it was nice to have the shop to myself
for 15 minutes as the fragrence left the room.
This week I started on a tantilum purge of all the caps in the system.
MEMxx were the worst, 9 33uf 25v caps, one that has a lead to a big chunk of copper.
I took out my dad's old Weller to clean that hole out.
One last smaller cap and the 3 MEMxx cards were done.
The DIO and PDS were small change with 3 and 4 caps.
I still have a cap stash left and will give the MPU-B and VIO a look tomorrow.
This will remove all the old chaff and get the cards ready for the next 50 years.
...
I think Davy Knowles from last week deserved a small nod from the gang.
...
Slim passed recently.
I always get a tear in my eye from Time Like This:
I installed a RAM16 card that I had tested before, but one of the 33uf larger tantilum caps
decided to entertain of us with a bit of noise and aroma; it was nice to have the shop to myself
for 15 minutes as the fragrence left the room.
This week I started on a tantilum purge of all the caps in the system.
MEMxx were the worst, 9 33uf 25v caps, one that has a lead to a big chunk of copper.
I took out my dad's old Weller to clean that hole out.
One last smaller cap and the 3 MEMxx cards were done.
The DIO and PDS were small change with 3 and 4 caps.
I still have a cap stash left and will give the MPU-B and VIO a look tomorrow.
This will remove all the old chaff and get the cards ready for the next 50 years.
...
I think Davy Knowles from last week deserved a small nod from the gang.
...
Slim passed recently.
I always get a tear in my eye from Time Like This:
Attachments
When you have a problem it's nice to have a little help to work it through
I was getting close to getting this unit running.
MBJ, My Buddy Joel, offered to stop by this week; he had deep CP/M experience including porting to other platforms in his youth.
I added in memory up to 64K, 1 RAM-32 for 0-7FFF, then 2x RAM-16 for the balance to the top.
We went back to the 8" drives and created a 56K boot image from the 16K image that my Peters source was from.
From a new disk the procedure was
Predicates were
64K memory installed
System with 2 8" drives, no disks installed
Power on / Space bar / Come up in monitor
Load drive A with the 16K Peters image
Press
B
Wait 5 seconds
press space bar and the following should pop out:
16K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
Please note that the 16K at the beginning of this line noted the system memory size.
Place a new disk in drive B:
Run:
Format (cr)
These commands are a dialog type of command, you start the command and add the ingredients for the soup.
Example of dialog:
A>FORMAT
IMSAI FORMATTER-INITIALIZER VERS 2.05 REV 1
CAUTION: THIS PROGRAM ERASES
ALL INFORMATION ON DISKETTE
DRIVE NAME B:
REMOVE SYSTEM DISK, TYPE CR (CR)
VOLUME NAME FG-8-64 <--- 7 chars max
OK TO GO? (Y, N, V, OR *) Y
ENTER 'R' TO REPEAT, OTHERWISE
REPLACE SYSTEM DISK, THEN HIT CR (CR)
This gets the drive formatted.
A little quirk about the IMDOS format command is that it leaves some trinkets in track 0 sector 1 (1 indexed) about the format of the disk.
Moral to the story is don't expect to see a disk full of 0xE5, that first sector has some seeds to the VCB (Volume Control Block), disk sector size, number of sectors per track, number of tracks, I presume sides. and the sector interleave / spacing value.
The STAT command tells some of this stuff:
A>STAT B: VCB
VOLUME CONTROL BLOCK DRIVE A:
VOLUME NAME: PETERS
SECTOR SPACING 6
NUMBER OF DIRECTORY ENTRIES 64
# OF SECTORS FOR SYSTEM AREA 52
DIRECTORY OFFSET IN 1K UNITS 0
TOTAL UNITS INCLUDING DIR 243
26 SECTORS 77 TRACKS
128 BYTES PER SECTOR
Next step to get this disk to be a usable disk is to run the GENESYS command.
This seems to be a somewhat powerful command that depending on call options can do stuff that I am not acquainted with yet.
GENESYS has a simple command option,
GENESYS ^ (cr).
GENESYS will examine the system memory configuration and "adjust" the resident commands to run in the new upper memory region.
The only disappointment I have here is my PC rebooted and I lost my GENESYS command output, but in short you call GENESYS ^ (cr)
provide the drive that has the current system, it "thinks" a bit, and requests where the new system should go, B: in this case.
This creates a new set of resident commands located at the new upper / expanded memory region.
Following this I just PIP-ed (IMDOS file movement program) over the remaining files on the Peters volume.
When the system was rebooted with the new disk the splash following reboot showed:
56K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
The memory was increased from 16K to 56K.
This seemed to be a big deal, we were now using all (well most) of the available memory.
As a sidebar, if you just wanted to replicate the current bare boot disk you could run the FORMAT command, then SYSMOVE command to move over the resident commands,
and then PIP over the additional transient commands you wished to have on the disk, but retaining the 16K restriction of that image.
Next hurdle were the 5.25 disks.
IMDOS has physical drive designations that are predetermined based on controller up to like 11 disk controllers.
Physical reservations are as follows:
FIF Controller - drives 1-4
DIO 1 Controller 8" drives 5-8, 5.25 drives 9-12
DIO 2 Controller 8" drives 13-16, 5.25 drives 17-20
etc.
You must boot from the least significant drive within a group, so we were booting from an 8" drive on DIO 1, physical drive 5.
When IMDOS boots in this situation it assigns logical drives as shown from the output of the STAT DSK: command below:
A>stat dsk:
A: = 5:
B: = 6:
C: = 7:
D: = 8:
The 5.25 disks have no logical assignments, no E, F, G, H to reference to (E
Despite this restriction we found that we could evoke the format command and tell the system to format drive 9:
We could follow that up with the SYSMOVE command and direct that command to move the system files to drive 9:
The hitch was we couldn't PIP files from A to 9, it was reporting ... invalid format 9: if I recall correctly.
MBJ and I struggled with this a while, but I recalled that the STAT command could also assign logical assignments to physical devices.
Following a:
STAT 9:=E: (cr)
the first 5.25 disk was accessible as E: and we were able to PIP files over.
Next is finishing up the 5.25 disks, putting a VIO back in and hooking up the parallel port keyboard;
that is what we will call progress, regressing back in technology.
Thanks to MBJ your insight and support the past weekend and MBF for your input earlier.
We ran out of time on Saturday, closing time came, seems crazy to get 86-ed out of a nerd place called .... , but we couldn't stay there.
I was getting close to getting this unit running.
MBJ, My Buddy Joel, offered to stop by this week; he had deep CP/M experience including porting to other platforms in his youth.
I added in memory up to 64K, 1 RAM-32 for 0-7FFF, then 2x RAM-16 for the balance to the top.
We went back to the 8" drives and created a 56K boot image from the 16K image that my Peters source was from.
From a new disk the procedure was
Predicates were
64K memory installed
System with 2 8" drives, no disks installed
Power on / Space bar / Come up in monitor
Load drive A with the 16K Peters image
Press
B
Wait 5 seconds
press space bar and the following should pop out:
16K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
Please note that the 16K at the beginning of this line noted the system memory size.
Place a new disk in drive B:
Run:
Format (cr)
These commands are a dialog type of command, you start the command and add the ingredients for the soup.
Example of dialog:
A>FORMAT
IMSAI FORMATTER-INITIALIZER VERS 2.05 REV 1
CAUTION: THIS PROGRAM ERASES
ALL INFORMATION ON DISKETTE
DRIVE NAME B:
REMOVE SYSTEM DISK, TYPE CR (CR)
VOLUME NAME FG-8-64 <--- 7 chars max
OK TO GO? (Y, N, V, OR *) Y
ENTER 'R' TO REPEAT, OTHERWISE
REPLACE SYSTEM DISK, THEN HIT CR (CR)
This gets the drive formatted.
A little quirk about the IMDOS format command is that it leaves some trinkets in track 0 sector 1 (1 indexed) about the format of the disk.
Moral to the story is don't expect to see a disk full of 0xE5, that first sector has some seeds to the VCB (Volume Control Block), disk sector size, number of sectors per track, number of tracks, I presume sides. and the sector interleave / spacing value.
The STAT command tells some of this stuff:
A>STAT B: VCB
VOLUME CONTROL BLOCK DRIVE A:
VOLUME NAME: PETERS
SECTOR SPACING 6
NUMBER OF DIRECTORY ENTRIES 64
# OF SECTORS FOR SYSTEM AREA 52
DIRECTORY OFFSET IN 1K UNITS 0
TOTAL UNITS INCLUDING DIR 243
26 SECTORS 77 TRACKS
128 BYTES PER SECTOR
Next step to get this disk to be a usable disk is to run the GENESYS command.
This seems to be a somewhat powerful command that depending on call options can do stuff that I am not acquainted with yet.
GENESYS has a simple command option,
GENESYS ^ (cr).
GENESYS will examine the system memory configuration and "adjust" the resident commands to run in the new upper memory region.
The only disappointment I have here is my PC rebooted and I lost my GENESYS command output, but in short you call GENESYS ^ (cr)
provide the drive that has the current system, it "thinks" a bit, and requests where the new system should go, B: in this case.
This creates a new set of resident commands located at the new upper / expanded memory region.
Following this I just PIP-ed (IMDOS file movement program) over the remaining files on the Peters volume.
When the system was rebooted with the new disk the splash following reboot showed:
56K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
The memory was increased from 16K to 56K.
This seemed to be a big deal, we were now using all (well most) of the available memory.
As a sidebar, if you just wanted to replicate the current bare boot disk you could run the FORMAT command, then SYSMOVE command to move over the resident commands,
and then PIP over the additional transient commands you wished to have on the disk, but retaining the 16K restriction of that image.
Next hurdle were the 5.25 disks.
IMDOS has physical drive designations that are predetermined based on controller up to like 11 disk controllers.
Physical reservations are as follows:
FIF Controller - drives 1-4
DIO 1 Controller 8" drives 5-8, 5.25 drives 9-12
DIO 2 Controller 8" drives 13-16, 5.25 drives 17-20
etc.
You must boot from the least significant drive within a group, so we were booting from an 8" drive on DIO 1, physical drive 5.
When IMDOS boots in this situation it assigns logical drives as shown from the output of the STAT DSK: command below:
A>stat dsk:
A: = 5:
B: = 6:
C: = 7:
D: = 8:
The 5.25 disks have no logical assignments, no E, F, G, H to reference to (E
Despite this restriction we found that we could evoke the format command and tell the system to format drive 9:
We could follow that up with the SYSMOVE command and direct that command to move the system files to drive 9:
The hitch was we couldn't PIP files from A to 9, it was reporting ... invalid format 9: if I recall correctly.
MBJ and I struggled with this a while, but I recalled that the STAT command could also assign logical assignments to physical devices.
Following a:
STAT 9:=E: (cr)
the first 5.25 disk was accessible as E: and we were able to PIP files over.
Next is finishing up the 5.25 disks, putting a VIO back in and hooking up the parallel port keyboard;
that is what we will call progress, regressing back in technology.
Thanks to MBJ your insight and support the past weekend and MBF for your input earlier.
We ran out of time on Saturday, closing time came, seems crazy to get 86-ed out of a nerd place called .... , but we couldn't stay there.
Well it's been almost a month and I have not posted.
I have got a little IMDOS time under my belt.
For IMDOS the boot disk RAM size has to be no more than the actual RAM.
The deal is the memory will be set up so there are system files at the top and bottom of memory and the transient programs (things that get run and we move on)
will go into this middle area of memory.
IMDOS allows you to create a boot disk that has any RAM size via the GENESYS command.
The images I had to work were created with a 16K RAM size.
This really made sense because these images were really portable, you could boot a full memory configuration system with the 16K boot disk,
and then recreate a new boot disk to match your system.
So the Peters IMDOS 2.05 8 inch image I found was a 16K image.
I had 64K in my system, so I was able to format a new 8" disk, then run GENSYS and tell it to use the existing system configuration:
GENESYS ^ (cr)
The ^ told GENESYS to use the existing memory config.
So I was able to recreate my 8" 16K boot disk, a 8" 56K boot disk (that was all GENESYS let me have with 64K and the ^ option).
I was also able to create 5.25 80K byte 16K and 56K boot disks, and 2 additional disks with the balance of the files the single 8" disk had on it.
The 5.25 disks hold 80640 bytes and the 8" disks hold 256256 bytes.
I have a wierd boot up issue where I power on, get into monitor, issue "B" to boot and I get junk on the serial port.
I looked at the serial port and I believe the character rate was ~ 40K at this, not 38400.
I reset multiple times and the thing finally comes up.
This is what I see on teraterm:
IMSAI MPU-B MONITOR VERS 1.3
?b
×çgËË6îfîîîîfîîîîîfîî~K{çË
56K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
A>FORMAT
IMSAI FORMATTER-INITIALIZER VERS 2.05 REV 1
I hit reset multiple times to get past the gibberish.
I have a couple of plans to try for this issue.
It would really be satisifying to just this thing work as it should.
The cold seems to have lapsed for us, enjoy.
I'll get a new song next week, I promise.
A
I have got a little IMDOS time under my belt.
For IMDOS the boot disk RAM size has to be no more than the actual RAM.
The deal is the memory will be set up so there are system files at the top and bottom of memory and the transient programs (things that get run and we move on)
will go into this middle area of memory.
IMDOS allows you to create a boot disk that has any RAM size via the GENESYS command.
The images I had to work were created with a 16K RAM size.
This really made sense because these images were really portable, you could boot a full memory configuration system with the 16K boot disk,
and then recreate a new boot disk to match your system.
So the Peters IMDOS 2.05 8 inch image I found was a 16K image.
I had 64K in my system, so I was able to format a new 8" disk, then run GENSYS and tell it to use the existing system configuration:
GENESYS ^ (cr)
The ^ told GENESYS to use the existing memory config.
So I was able to recreate my 8" 16K boot disk, a 8" 56K boot disk (that was all GENESYS let me have with 64K and the ^ option).
I was also able to create 5.25 80K byte 16K and 56K boot disks, and 2 additional disks with the balance of the files the single 8" disk had on it.
The 5.25 disks hold 80640 bytes and the 8" disks hold 256256 bytes.
I have a wierd boot up issue where I power on, get into monitor, issue "B" to boot and I get junk on the serial port.
I looked at the serial port and I believe the character rate was ~ 40K at this, not 38400.
I reset multiple times and the thing finally comes up.
This is what I see on teraterm:
IMSAI MPU-B MONITOR VERS 1.3
?b
×çgËË6îfîîîîfîîîîîfîî~K{çË
56K IMDOS VERS 2.05 REV 1
A>FORMAT
IMSAI FORMATTER-INITIALIZER VERS 2.05 REV 1
I hit reset multiple times to get past the gibberish.
I have a couple of plans to try for this issue.
It would really be satisifying to just this thing work as it should.
The cold seems to have lapsed for us, enjoy.
I'll get a new song next week, I promise.
A
fritz kinderhoffen
Member
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2024
- Messages
- 37
I can't tell you how useful all your efforts are. I'm following in your footsteps. Thanks!!!
Hi Fritz,
The IMSAI front has been quiet for a while.
Since I have been able to get IMDOS up and running with both 5.25 and 8 inch disks I have been in a what's next phase.
My group had an open house planned, so I was on task for a demo, but a derailment has put this on temporary hold
In the mean time I have come in touch with an early Altair and a box full of early S-100 cards.
My latest efforts have been to come up with a new home platform to be able to test all vintages of S-100 cards.
I digress.
I will post more when the demo time looms and I have to come up with some tricks for the PCS.
Please send along any "simple" inqueries; I'll be glad to try to help.
Now let's dance:
The IMSAI front has been quiet for a while.
Since I have been able to get IMDOS up and running with both 5.25 and 8 inch disks I have been in a what's next phase.
My group had an open house planned, so I was on task for a demo, but a derailment has put this on temporary hold
In the mean time I have come in touch with an early Altair and a box full of early S-100 cards.
My latest efforts have been to come up with a new home platform to be able to test all vintages of S-100 cards.
I digress.
I will post more when the demo time looms and I have to come up with some tricks for the PCS.
Please send along any "simple" inqueries; I'll be glad to try to help.
Now let's dance:
firebirdta84
Experienced Member
Al, I'm truly honored to have seen your work on this machine in person at Free Geek Twin Cities...thank you for your dedication to revers-engineering and documenting all of this...a truly EPIC effort that deserves some great recognition!
Bravo, and thank you!
AJ
Bravo, and thank you!
AJ
syzygy
Veteran Member
Missed a couple
Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go? by The Leaves
The Leaves originally recorded Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go? written by Billy Roberts and The Leaves released it on the single Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go? in 1965. It was also covered by The Dutch Rhythm, Steel & Showband, Euphoria's Id, Doctor Mix and The Remix, Helge & The Firefuckers and...secondhandsongs.com
An absolute classic and performed by *many* artists. The citation you quoted may not, however, be accurate. Billy Roberts is generally credited as the writer (and an early recording is available, but I'm not sure the date [in the title] is substantiated.
Niela Miller claims that, in fact she wrote the song or iat least the song that it was taken from..
She is very specific and, in my view, makes a credible case...but, of course, I don't know. In fact I am not capable of producing music, only listening. I do hear similarities.
Belated reply on Hey Joe, Thanks syzygy for the insight.
The Niela Miller song carries a strong similarity, thanks for adding to the list.
...
As for the IMSAI, the organization I worked with on this project has sold the system to another IMSAI owner.
This seems like it will be at least the second in his IMSAI PCS collection.
I hope he reaches out (at least to me) and relays his experiences with his new 50-ish year old system.
This has been a fun post for me.
The Niela Miller song carries a strong similarity, thanks for adding to the list.
...
As for the IMSAI, the organization I worked with on this project has sold the system to another IMSAI owner.
This seems like it will be at least the second in his IMSAI PCS collection.
I hope he reaches out (at least to me) and relays his experiences with his new 50-ish year old system.
This has been a fun post for me.
fritz kinderhoffen
Member
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2024
- Messages
- 37
Just a quick note to say I've got all the drives to work. I moved the RAM-32 to the upper half of memory. I'm using another card for the lower half. The SA801s are configured to look like SA800s. The 6: drive took a while to configure so that it would work reliably. I'll document the jumpers that worked for me at some point in the future. My DIO-A is configured properly now also. I have formatted and used SSSD and SSDD disks in both 8" drives. The SA400s I'm using are also working great. These would be 9: & 10:. They are limited to SSSD as they are the original 5-1/4" drives that came with the machine. The 10: drive I'd swapped out for another SA400.
I don't remember which MPU-B I am using. I'll document the jumpers on that also. I can boot from 5: and 9: reliably. The 6: drive is liking being used as it is now working flawlessly. I've got a MDIO that I will try out as soon as I recap it. Don't want to fill the room with smoke. OS is Imdos 2.05. I've got licensed DR 2.08 Basic, Westico BDS C, Version 1.5, and Nevada Fortran.
Sure is nice to have MFM (DD) working on the 8" drives! Thanks for the effort to get this beast working. Not too many about these days. How many are still working?! All original software and hardware that is. Thank goodness for everyone who preserved the documentation!
I don't remember which MPU-B I am using. I'll document the jumpers on that also. I can boot from 5: and 9: reliably. The 6: drive is liking being used as it is now working flawlessly. I've got a MDIO that I will try out as soon as I recap it. Don't want to fill the room with smoke. OS is Imdos 2.05. I've got licensed DR 2.08 Basic, Westico BDS C, Version 1.5, and Nevada Fortran.
Sure is nice to have MFM (DD) working on the 8" drives! Thanks for the effort to get this beast working. Not too many about these days. How many are still working?! All original software and hardware that is
. Thank goodness for everyone who preserved the documentation!fritz kinderhoffen
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- Apr 28, 2024
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- 37
By the way there is a good looking IMSAI VDP-80 on eBay for $3k+ or so. It is pickup only. Portland? I told Adrian Black about it thinking he might want to restore it. Isn't Portland his area? Love to see him take it on. A very rare machine! Told him he could fix it up and flip it for a good price. Expect I'm right . He might not have read my text 
.
. He might not have read my text .fritz kinderhoffen
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- Apr 28, 2024
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I am running it as a 48k system right now. Intend to have it as a 56k system eventually. I suspect some difficulty with the RAM 32 card or its configuration. the 5-1/4" floppies seem very solid. The one 8" SA801 is also quite reliable. The other I had working but it isn't functioning right now. May very well be a configuration problem. I have been playing around with the jumpers on the drive. The assembler works and my basic also works. Haven't tried the C yet. I think I'll code a bit and see how that goes .
.fritz kinderhoffen
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- Apr 28, 2024
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- 37
I tried the C version of the DIO ROM without success. I have an A version working but it is rather limited in file formats supported. Unfortunately finding the D version is difficult but I know there must be a hundred DIO-Ds still in the wild.