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TRS-80 Hard Drive emulator demo and comparison with regular Tandy hard drive

I did a test with Montezuma Micro CP/M 2.2 (Bios 2.30) on my Model 4 with the hard disk emulator. I used the HDRS15M driver and had no problems mounting a drive, formatting it, using PIP to copy files on and then executing programs from it. I didn't do efficient partitioning at all.... just used

HDRS15M F=AB H=C

But given that the RS drivers had no trouble with the emulator board I wouldn't expect any problems.

All the TRS-80 emulators that I am aware of use the same virtual hard disk file format.

If you want to make your drive file available I am happy to run it up to confirm that it works OK. Alternatively suggest a partitioning scheme and RS driver to use (I only have RSHD5M and RSHD15M... not sure if there are others) and I can try that.

I don't have a Model 4 so cannot test if a 4p would actually boot CP/M from the drive.

Regards

Andrew
 
jaquinn said:
I did a test with Montezuma Micro CP/M 2.2 (Bios 2.30) on my Model 4 with the hard disk emulator. I used the HDRS15M driver and had no problems mounting a drive, formatting it, using PIP to copy files on and then executing programs from it. I didn't do efficient partitioning at all.... just used

HDRS15M F=AB H=C

But given that the RS drivers had no trouble with the emulator board I wouldn't expect any problems.

All the TRS-80 emulators that I am aware of use the same virtual hard disk file format.

If you want to make your drive file available I am happy to run it up to confirm that it works OK. Alternatively suggest a partitioning scheme and RS driver to use (I only have RSHD5M and RSHD15M... not sure if there are others) and I can try that.

I don't have a Model 4 so cannot test if a 4p would actually boot CP/M from the drive.

Regards

Andrew
Click to expand...

Thank you for that confirmation...

What capacity did it show you for C ?

I agree, if the driver program did not balk it suggests that I am about ready to order... :D

Supposedly it can only handle 2 drives? I see that the LDOS is split into more than 2 drives, so I can believe a HDRS15m can be split into 4 (tho I would prefer using 4x8Mb partitions...) ?

Unfortunately right now I cannot suggest a driver as my configuration is using a hand-built IDE setup... preferably one with 32Mb capacity would be best!
:D
 
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I don't recall what it said in that case but I did a more "real world" test using the configuration:

HDRS15M F=AB H=CDEF

This gives me 4 hard disk partions that appear as drives C,D,E and F. For some reason (this is in XTRS and SDLTRS also so not unique to the emulator board) I get drive C as 7296k free and drives D, E and F as 2424k free for a total of 14568k free across all the drives.

I need to study the MM Hard Disk setup documentation a bit more to understand if that mix is expected.

Using XTRS I copied dBase II, Wordstar and Zork from virtual floppies into virtual drive C. Shutdown XTRS and copied the virtual hard disk file to the SD Card to try out on the emulator board.

All the applications where there. I could relive the late 80's with dBase II and Wordstar. Seems to perform well. As an extra test I used PIP to copy all the files (about 1.4mb) from drive C to drive D and had no problems.

On the driver side the only files I have found are in the MMRSHD.DSK that is available on line. This provides drivers only for RS 5mb and RS 15mb drives. I haven't spent any time looking at what parameters exist in the drivers that control this and if they can be modified to support larger drives. To get 4 x 8mb partitions would require a driver that supports a drive larger than 15m.

The drivers.lst file on the MMRSHD.DSK disk suggests there is an HDRS35M.COM driver which would be ideal but it is not included in the .DSK.

Radio Shack #26-4271 or 26-4272 HDRS35M.COM
35 Megabyte, Heads=8, Cyls=512, PSC=280, RWC=n/a, Step=35us

Hopefully someone has a copy.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Andrew

leeb said:
Thank you for that confirmation...

What capacity did it show you for C ?

I agree, if the driver program did not balk it suggests that I am about ready to order... :D

Supposedly it can only handle 2 drives? I see that the LDOS is split into more than 2 drives, so I can believe a HDRS15m can be split into 4 (tho I would prefer using 4x8Mb partitions...) ?

Unfortunately right now I cannot suggest a driver as my configuration is using a hand-built IDE setup... preferably one with 32Mb capacity would be best!
:D
Click to expand...
 
jaquinn said:
I don't recall what it said in that case but I did a more "real world" test using the configuration:

HDRS15M F=AB H=CDEF

This gives me 4 hard disk partions that appear as drives C,D,E and F. For some reason (this is in XTRS and SDLTRS also so not unique to the emulator board) I get drive C as 7296k free and drives D, E and F as 2424k free for a total of 14568k free across all the drives.

I need to study the MM Hard Disk setup documentation a bit more to understand if that mix is expected.

Using XTRS I copied dBase II, Wordstar and Zork from virtual floppies into virtual drive C. Shutdown XTRS and copied the virtual hard disk file to the SD Card to try out on the emulator board.

All the applications where there. I could relive the late 80's with dBase II and Wordstar. Seems to perform well. As an extra test I used PIP to copy all the files (about 1.4mb) from drive C to drive D and had no problems.

On the driver side the only files I have found are in the MMRSHD.DSK that is available on line. This provides drivers only for RS 5mb and RS 15mb drives. I haven't spent any time looking at what parameters exist in the drivers that control this and if they can be modified to support larger drives. To get 4 x 8mb partitions would require a driver that supports a drive larger than 15m.

The drivers.lst file on the MMRSHD.DSK disk suggests there is an HDRS35M.COM driver which would be ideal but it is not included in the .DSK.

Radio Shack #26-4271 or 26-4272 HDRS35M.COM
35 Megabyte, Heads=8, Cyls=512, PSC=280, RWC=n/a, Step=35us

Hopefully someone has a copy.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Andrew
Click to expand...

Yes, it does! As I understand, the emulator pretends to be 2 drives, so there could be 2 drives split into 2 partitions... yes?

Yes, that mix is 'normal' for the geometry of the 15... but exactly why escapes me right now. I DO know that it internal to the driver...

FYI, in order for CP/M to boot from the HD ** ON THE 4p **, the FIRST partition/drive MUST be labeled drive A... so I would do it as

HDRS15M F=B H=A0C0D1E1
(I am using one 3.5 as different capacities... thus no 2nd FD)

then

SYSGEN the image IN RAM to A:


:D
 
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leeb said:
Yes, it does! As I understand, the emulator pretends to be 2 drives, so there could be 2 drives split into 2 partitions... yes?

Yes, that mix is 'normal' for the geometry of the 15... but exactly why escapes me right now. I DO know that it internal to the driver...

:D
Click to expand...

Yes you can have two virtual hard disk files on the SD Card and mount them as HD0 and HD1 using the configuration you suggest.

I had another look at the MM Hard Disk notes and there are certainly some interesting default allocations in the driver. What I got is the allocation with 4 partitions on a 6 head drive (50%,17%,17%,17%).
 
FANTASTIC!!!

NOW I only need to come up with the bux to get it! Oh yeah... and find somebody to buy my extra laptop! :p

I have successfully backed up all the files on my A/C/D/E 'drives', and could pull the IDE at any time... except that I like to play with it still... :rolleyes:
Going to (hopefully) stay with Keil's emulator tho I will need to take my desktop back to ME IOT have direct access to the floppy drive/SD card. I was planning to get rid of it, and might still if the Linux laptop can read/write to a USB floppy drive under xtrs... anybody know yay/nay?

Cant belive Im saying this, but I now have too much NEW stuff to go along with my too-much OLD stuff! :eek:

:D
 
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