Some more Lilith / Ceres software recovered.

[jdreesen]

I was at the Museum fur Kommunikation in Berne yesterday, where I was allowed to recover the contents of the harddisk of the Lilith they have on display.
That would be this particular specimen : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(Computersystem)

Among the goodies recovered is the source code for the single-pass Modula-2 compiler for the Lilith, a NS32032 assembler, written in Modula-2, NS32032 assembler source for the build-in low level monitor of the Ceres-1, and M2 source for a program they used during development of the Ceres, where the Ceres is controlled via a serial channel and a 16bit parallel bus from a Lilith.

Plus source code for disk drivers and source for a couple of games. 1890 files in total, and Medos, the Lilith OS, does not know subdirectories.....

 

[bear]

Nice!

BTW mine looks like this one. I never meant to let so much time pass by after our last correspondence and I've been needing to get back to this project for ages now. I got a bit overwhelmed by not having a clear place to start, since the console and winchester are both missing. I will try to make a point of replying in the next week or two.

Were you able to make an mfm emulator image of the drive? Or was some other method involved.

 

[jdreesen]

Were you able to make an mfm emulator image of the drive? Or was some other method involved.

The contents was recovered using David Gesswein's MFM-reader, I wrote some software to extract the Lilith files from the resulting binary diskimage. That particular Lilith has not been turned on, only the disk itself was powered up. So yes, I have a very good binary image for you, the actual diskcontroller is a variant of the WD1001 controller. Keyboard / mouse are not an issue, only difficulty in your case will be the monitor. You might have to go via a scanrate convertor.

The disk is an IMI5018. There were no bad sectors on any of the 3 Lilith MFM-disks I have recovered.

 

[bear]

That's great to hear because one of the circles I'd been chasing my tail around instead of getting started, was you had mentioned the floppy disk could not be used to boot the machine and I wasn't sure how else, without a DPU board, I could get any kind of software into the thing.

I agree the keyboard/mouse aren't much of an issue (and I have a mouse anyway), so the scan converter is probably the thing I should focus on now.

You had wanted me to dump my microcode ROMs; if you have some instructions on putting together a wiring harness so the mask PROMs can be read as 2732 or whatever EPROMs, that'll save me from tiptoeing through that project. I understand it in principle but it would be much simpler to just follow work someone else has already done.

 

[tingo]

Nice work!

 

[nigwil]

Well done with the recovery. Will the recovered software be placed online at some stage? thanks.