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Ta alphatronic pc: tape software repos and floppy emulation

A

azazel

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Jun 1, 2024
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Hi guys,
i got a TA alphatronic pc and after a long way of failed tries i was able to connect it to a SCART tv using the composite port.
the computer works well and i'm thinking to make 3d print of the mising key.
As it is i can connect it to a tape and get software from that source, so i'll try to use the pc soundcard to play a wav of the tape, the issue is finding wav of software tapes for this machine online

The (major and real) issue i'm facing now is that i would like to use CP/M and it software base on disk, so i need the disk drives (5,25). I would like to adapt some gotek instead of real floppies but afaik
the F1 disk drive is the one containing the controller while the other is connected as a second unit to the controller included only in the F1 drive. So i think i'd need to emulate the controller

So my question, if anyone know this machine is:
1) is there a source for tape software for ta alphatronic pc to be downloaded as wave to send to a real tape or to the tape port of the computer?

2) is there a way to emulate floppies via some device as gotek or i'm forced to find a F1 real drive?
 
First of all, welcome to VCF!

Now...you can use a Gotek to emulate floppies in the Alphatronic PC, sure enough; but your main problem is the floppy controller, the one found in the F1 unit.

You can build it by yourself using schematics/gerbers from this page. More information here.

You can check how a Gotek work in this video:

 
Hello!

A bit late in the game, but I recently designed an external PATA/IDE extension card that connects to the TA system bus connector. That way you can use for example CF cards as your disk/floppy. It does not require any hardware changes to the TA Alphatronic PC. Just connect the extension card and the associated boot ROM to the external ROM socket. Then you just have to follow the instructions to get the modified CP/M 2.2 installed on the CF card. Admitted, the process is a bit tedious at the moment, but on the other hand, you have to do it only once.

As a result you have a TA that boots to CP/M and has drives A: ... D:, each 2 Mbytes in size. By disconnecting the boot ROM and the extension card, your TA is back to normal.

I'm still (slowly) improving the documentation, but here it is: https://bitbucket.org/jukka5/cp-m-pata-ide/src/main
 
Hi Jukka5,

Thanks for posting that. I have a broken TA one my "Shelf of Good Intentions" and was wondering how to do disks etc.
That looks great.

Cheers,

Andy.
 
Is there a reason you didn't make the CP/M drives 8MB? AFAIK that's the largest drive size/partition for CP/M 2.2...

Great project!

g.
 
Ah well .... laziness. One of the first sources I found was http://www.cpuville.com/ and because his approach was very straightforward and simple, I just used that. My focus was in getting the hardware to work and didn't want any complications at that moment. Now when everything is working, I'm thinking of returning to the topic. I found two, apparently widely used, disk configurations and will probably implement one of them. I think they both give 8 MB drives.

Besides, I spent some hours today streamlining the installation process (not pushed to the repository yet) and was reminded how painfully slow the current disk formatting code is. It's a brute force method, writing the full disk although formatting only the directory tracks/sectors is needed in reality. If I have to invest time in really understand the disk setup to fix the formatting issue, I might as well change the disk configuration at the same time.

However, weather is gradually getting better here, so there are some chores in the garden and house repairs waiting - not to even mentioning my motorcycle. No estimation when I can get this moving forward.

Cheers,
Jukka
 
An update; I cleaned up the code and changed the default disk size to be 8 MB. You can still recompile it to 2 MB disks, by setting a flag in file "ta-alpha.inc".

// Jukka
 
If its any help, I have the source of the boot monitor rom and also the bios for the alphatronic PC. Assemble/link with M80 and L80. I have modified my floppy disk controller to be able to handle High Density disks as well as Double Density disks. Sources are included. In addition I include the modification to the floppy disk controller to support high density while maintaining compatibility with the original software.
 

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I’m travelling this week but I’ll delve into this as soon as I get back to my computer - thank you!!

Just FYI: since my last post I have added 8 MB disk layout, a setup/installation utility and some other improvements.
 
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