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Super I/O chips and Getting floppy images to/from real disks

by Joshua Rice

Interestingly, i'm looking at procuring a reasonably vintage laptop for a computer festival i'm planning to attend soon. It seems that many laptops of the PIII era use SuperIO chips, but i'm rather confused as to how "low level" they get. Some of you may remember my RCA MS2000. I've had great luck writing bootable images from a PIII machine with a "standard" 1.44mb floppy drive, despite the format being 70-track, SSDD. The machine's floppy controller uses a bona-fide NEC uPD765 though, so no surprises it worked fine... ( Here's a video of me playing around with it for the curious... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKkaf-77dE ) I'm really asking if anyone has any recommendations for a laptop that is reasonably powerful, fairly modern (has USB), but also has a direct-connection floppy drive that can do device level shenanigans (via Omniflop) to allow me to write floppies in obscure formats. Bonus points if it can use it with a serial terminal emulator, and run the Emma02 RCA 1802 emulator on it as well. I, like Tony, don't drive, so i need something compact and portable for public transport travel. I've been eyeing up a Dell Latitude C series (C600?) But the whole SuperIO-over-parallel thing makes me think there might be proprietary drivers involved, preventing device level access of the floppy drives... Hopefully some of you might be a bit more wise. Cheers, Josh

3 years, 4 months

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HP 1000 A400, A600, A700, A900, A990 Servers, parts, & accessories

by Jesse Dougherty

Hi all, we are getting overstocked on the 1000 series stuff and wanted to see if anyone needed anything. We have most everything you could have in the 1000 A-series hardware. If anyone needs any loaded up A990 boxes we have a bunch of them configured below for $1,400.00 A990 Server 14-slot Micro 1000 Server 1 x 12990x A990 CPU 1 x 12221B 8MB Memory 1 x C2247A 1GB SE SCSI Internal disk drive 1 x C150xx DDS DAT Internal Tape Drive 1 x 12016A SCSI Controller board 1 x 12009A HP-IB Interface board 1 x 12005A Serial Interface board 1 x 12006A Parallel interface board 1 x 12040A Asynchronous Multiplexer Interface (MUX) board 1 x 02430x Voltage Jumper Board 1 x 12230A Front-plane memory connector (CPU to memory connector) Feel free to email if you need any HP 1000 hardware. Thanks Jesse Dougherty Cypress Technology Inc jesse(a)cypress-tech.com

3 years, 4 months

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Super I/O chips

by emanuel stiebler

Anybody out here, still in business using them? Which ones are still easily available? (I look for something which has 2 UARTs, FDC and IDE?) Thanks

3 years, 4 months

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ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer Club (GCCC)

by Jim Brain

At the most recent CoCoFEST!, I brought home the old Glenside Club Computer Hard Drive. The mechanism is an ST-251, and I was wondering if someone on-list would be willing to attempt to pull data off the drive. I have no ability to configure to read this drive type, and the data is not precious or anything, I just though we should try to pull it off for historical sake. I was not in the club when teh drive was in use, so I do not know what could be on it. I assume BBS data, but it could be anything. Happy to post to someone who wants to give it a go. If the drive needs to be destroyed to get the data, or if attempting to read the data destroys the drive, I will not hold anyone responsible. I don't even need the drive back, just data if it is recoverable. Jim -- Jim Brain brain(a)jbrain.com www.jbrain.com

3 years, 4 months

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Re: Getting floppy images to/from real floppy disks

by Robert Feldman

>Message: 6 >Date: Sat, 20 May 2023 07:25:39 -0700 >From: Chuck Guzis <cclist(a)sydex.com> >Subject: [cctalk] Re: Getting floppy images to/from real floppy disks. > >On 5/20/23 04:21, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > >> I was startled to discover my (long gone) Athlon XP box could only >> handle a single floppy drive. The BIOS has no option for a 2nd. >> >> I can't imagine that was a significant cost saving. > >It's a matter of pins. I believe that it started when the "SuperIO" >chip started packing in more support for various peripheral functions >and the 2 pins for drive select and motor control of an extra drive were >viewed as least important. Earlier versions of the chip often allowed >re-purposing the pins used for the parallel port as an interface for an >extra floppy--you saw this on laptop systems, which often had only one >floppy drive in any case. cf. Intel's PCISet chip sets. > >--Chuck My main computer is a 15-year old Dell Precision T3400 (Core 2 Duo). It can handle multiple floppy drives, but the BIOS does not allow 360KB 5.25" disks, only 1.2MB in that size. Bob

3 years, 4 months

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VCF Swap Meet June 10, 2023. Wall, NJ.

by Jeffrey Brace

VCF will be having another Swap Meet this coming June 10 from 8AM to 2PM for the general public and 7AM for vendors. Signup here to reserve a spot. <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLdDjGN1TtOjPxNq38VA43p36oW5HXuX0…> Same place as the previous swap meets in the big parking lot on Monmouth Boulevard in Wall, NJ <https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B011'05.5%22N+74%C2%B003'47.9%22W/@40.1848619,-74.0643212,350m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m13!1m6!3m5!1s0x89c228394afc24b3:0x793045909b6e8fba!2sInfoAge+Science+and+History+Museums!8m2!3d40.1857343!4d-74.0593097!3m5!1s0x0:0xbe14db9783fe1872!7e2!8m2!3d40.18486!4d-74.0633081> . A change for this year is that we will have some food being sold by the South Monmouth Fire Museum. This will be a fundraiser for them and a welcome service for our attendees. All the information that you need is here: https://vcfed.org/vcf-swap-meet/ Take care, Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner VCF Mid-Atlantic Event Manager Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/>

3 years, 4 months

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Paper Tape Reader Needed

by Mike Katz

I have just acquired a number of PDP-8 paper tapes. My reader/punch is not working at the moment (neither is my PDP-8 but that's another story). I am looking to beg, borrow or buy a paper tape reader or reader/punch (stand alone or PC04) so that I can archive these tapes as they are getting more and more rare. I would prefer a serial (RS-232) reader or reader/punch but I could deal with a parallel and create my own parallel to serial converter or get some kind of USB to parallel adapter. There are several "hand pull" types of readers out there (like the OP-80A) but I am afraid of damaging the very old fanfold paper tape by using my inconsistent hand rather than some kind of motor driven mechanism which is designed for smooth paper tape flow. Does anyone have any ideas or something they have to sell or donate? Please contact me by email directly. Note: This is also being posted to the VCF DEC Forum. Thank you, Mike Katz bitwiz@12bitsbe

3 years, 5 months

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Re: ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer Club (GCCC)

by Robert Feldman

>Message: 23 >Date: Thu, 18 May 2023 17:32:00 +0100 >From: Tony Duell <ard.p850ug1(a)gmail.com> >Subject: [cctalk] > <snip> <But that's a minor issue. The loss of RS232 communications is a lot <more serious. < <-tony Can you fix it using MODE.com from a DOS prompt? Bob

3 years, 5 months

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Re: ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer Club (GCCC)

by Robert Feldman

>Message: 21 >Date: Wed, 17 May 2023 04:56:05 +0100 >From: Tony Duell <ard.p850ug1(a)gmail.com> >Subject: [cctalk] Re: ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer > Club (GCCC) <snip> >As for the target machine having a serial port, one of the machines I >want to get stuff onto is an Osborne 1A. The serial port on that is >horrible. <snip> >-tony For CP/M computers such as the Osborne, you can read and write their diskettes on an MS-DOS computer with a program like Media Master. KayPro disks are harder, as there are problems formatting them on an MS-DOS computer. Bob

3 years, 5 months

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Using Teledisk 2.16 to read old RX50 images

by Chris Zach

Hi! Well, after a good bit of work I have finally gotten my Compaq XE4000 up and running with Windows 98, the BIOS all set, a new battery, and of course a 1.2mb 5.25 floppy that seems to be working. I'd now like to start sucking the rare images I have here on RX50 into a TD0 format which can be converted to a .IMG format which can then be used on the mighty GoTek's to allow people to run such operating systems as: Micro RSTS 2.1 Micro RSX (I forget the exact version) Micro-11 Maint disks Ultrix 11 Version 2.0 (all 30 disks) Before I start popping these in I have a question: I just did a test using an XXDP floppy and the message I got included Single sided, double density Interleave 1:1 Sector Size is 512 And then for each track from 1 to 82 (?) it said "Data, No ID adding sector 110" Is this right? Something else I might need to do for reading RX50's? Thanks! CZ

3 years, 5 months

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