Imaging and Emulating Rainbow

[Karl-Wilhelm Wacker]

Jules:

  If you don't mind doing a little hardware / software:

  I've been using a module from FTDI that 'talks' TTL level RS232 at
baud rate up to / past? 115Kbaud, and 'talks to' USB thumb drives.

 Go to digikey / etc, and look at the 'VDRIVE3' from FTDI.

  It does all the grunt work in handling file creation and reading.

Karl Wacker

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jules Richardson" <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
To: <General at classiccmp.org>; "Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic and 
Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2016 6:03 PM
Subject: Re: Imaging and Emulating Rainbow


> On 08/14/2016 10:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>> If it's running MS-DOS, you should be able to find/write something to do 
>> a raw image
>> dump out the serial port.
>>
>> That reminds me, I need to image some Rainbow floppies I have.
>>
>> I would think someone would have already written this in the MS-DOS 
>> world.
>
> Indeed. I got as far as hacking something to sector-dump chunks of data 
> from the hard disk to floppy, then sneakernetting that across to a modern 
> PC for reassembly (~20MB is a little painful, but not too bad, writing to 
> one disk while reading from another).
>
> My initial intention was to polish the code a bit and add serial support, 
> but that was immediately followed by the thought of "surely someone else 
> has done this already?", at which point I'd done what I immediately needed 
> to do anyway, and so never did anything more with the code.
>
> If anyone knows of an x86 DOS util which does sector dumps over rs232, I'd 
> be interested to hear about it (particularly if the transfer protocol is 
> something supported by any old comms program). I do have various '80s-era 
> PCs with ST506/412-type drives which could benefit from a backup.
>
> cheers
>
> Jules
>
>