19 Jul
2010
19 Jul
'10
1:41 p.m.
I talked to Tom Freeman who owned Vista, and is not that technical about
this. The assets of Vista were auctioned off, so he did not retain any
documentation of any sort, sad to say. However from what he recalls
they probably did have preformatted media. I do have a pile "somewhere"
of the media from vista, but it will be well buried and is 1300 miles
from me (and will be some time before I can get to it).
I'll share here when I find it and let anyone interested then have the
media. I have 2 changers in the pile as well.
There was an engineer who did the software and hardware for Vista, but I
know he purged his archives about 15 or 20 years ago my direction, and
there was no documentation about this product at that time, sad to say.
Jim
On 7/19/2010 5:00 AM, Steven Hirsch wrote:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2010, Steven Hirsch wrote:
<sigh>.. It appears that the OEM Amlyn diskettes are pre-formatted in
some manner.
I found a utility (from my Vista 8" Apple subsystem) that recognized
the data on my Amlyn drive cartridge and was able to retrieve the
system generation and format utilities. The latter works fine on one
of the cartridge diskettes, so I tried it on a blank 1.2M HD floppy
that was cut up to fit the unit.
The new disk loads properly without mechanical issues, but will not
format or otherwise show signs of life. I'm guessing they wanted to
preserve a market for blank diskettes and cartridges. Reminds me of
the DEC Rainbow (wasn't that system deliberately crippled to prevent
it from being able to format blank media?).
Steve
On 17 Jul
2010 at 16:16, Steven Hirsch wrote:
Gets stranger as I go... I disassembled the drive to take a short at
cleaning the heads. Turns out to be "head" (singular). If the total
capacity is 6MB, then they were writing 160 tracks on a single side.
That's pushing the envelope for mechanical alignment on a floppy and
certainly explains why they used servo-feedback positioning instead
of blind stepping like a conventional drive. The majority of claims
on the patent pertained to track positioning, so this is all consistant. I pulled down a copy of their patent application
for the unit and it
almost looks like the Minipac diskettes have some sort of pre-written
servo track. Perhaps the unit can actually write this servo, but
without documentation I'm just surmising.
Could be. It sounds a bit like the Drivetec drives of the same time
period. Something like (ISTR) 192 tpi, using an embedded servo,
making factory-formatted disks mandatory, something that probably did
more to kill the drive than anything else. I've still got a couple
of the Kodak/Drivetecs with media from Dysan, but basically they
exist for the eventuality that someone, somewhere has data written on
one of these that they need to get at.