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Old 04-30-2007, 01:10 AM
Geoff Harrison Geoff Harrison is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 104
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Quote:
Did you see the thread about the 3.5" disk drive, CP/M, and tarbell controller? Wouldn't be compatible with MITS software...
Yes, and that would be interesting. I'm not concerned about maintaining MITS compatibility; in fact, I'd probably move the 8" drives back to the 8800b and keep that one as an all original machine.
Quote:
The Altair32 emulator comes with a CP/M image. I wrote a basic program to transfer a disk RAW from the Altair to my Windows machine. I never got around to Windows -> Altair...
I'll look into that. I'm not sure yet how I'll transfer the image to the Altair floppys, I'll have to figure that out.
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So have you gotten bored of watching the lights flicker when using the disk drive and running programs?
Not yet, in fact I quickly got to the stage where I could tell quite accurately whether a disk access was going to fail long before the machine printed an error message.
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Why should getting DOS to run be harder than Basic? Why can't you get this far with the 8800B?
The biggest problem with the 8800b was just that I didn't invest enough time. I tried to get it to boot from three of the floppys that I had and had no luck and I didn't want to keep trying in case I was trashing the disks. I intended to get back to it but never found the time.

This time around, I wrote a perl script to generate altair paper tape images of any binary so that I could load things easily via the serial port and then worked my way up from simple, small programs until I established that the disk hardware was healthy. In the end, the original problem with booting turned out to be that only a few of my floppys are readable. The ones I was trying to boot from before were simply bad. I'll have to write something to try to read raw sectors from them and see if there's anything I can salvage before they turn to dust.
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