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#1
04-28-2007, 03:36 PM
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Progress
I'm working on getting the machine to boot from an Altair 8" floppy drive. It's not there yet, but I do have it booting from a paper tape image of 8k basic.
Baby steps. 
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#2
04-28-2007, 11:26 PM
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I hate to admit this, but I have not had the time to make MY Altair replica do this!
 Of course with a real Altair...Keep the pictures and updates coming!
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#3
04-29-2007, 03:58 PM
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A little more progress
I still don't have it booting into Altair DOS yet, but I did get Disk Extended Basic 5.0 running and accessing the disk, so I know my controller cards and drives are working. That's further than I got when I was trying to get my 8800b working.
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#4
04-29-2007, 11:03 PM
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Got it booting into DOS
Finally, it boots into Altair DOS using a bootloader in PROM. Set a few switches, hit RUN, wait a few seconds and bam! there's DOS. Almost like a modern computer.
Next up: getting CP/M running. That will take me a while, though, unless I can find someone who already has CP/M on Altair floppys. 
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#5
04-30-2007, 12:38 AM
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Just for fun, put the AM radio near the Altair and tune it to an unused frequency. Reading a disk and running a program can make some really neat robot sounds!
Did you see the thread about the 3.5" disk drive, CP/M, and tarbell controller? Wouldn't be compatible with MITS software... 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... So have you gotten bored of watching the lights flicker when using the disk drive and running programs? Why should getting DOS to run be harder than Basic? Why can't you get this far with the 8800B?
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#6
04-30-2007, 01:10 AM
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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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#7
04-30-2007, 06:48 AM
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I did the same thing, kind of... I wrote a 10-15 byte program that loads a predetermined amount of bytes from the serial port and then does a jmp 0000. I had the 2SIO jumpered for 19200 and could boot basic 5.0 in about 3 seconds.
The program was small enough that I could use a terminal program with no delay between bytes. It was really screaming! The boot loader had to be modified for the specific binary image you wanted to transfer to the Altair.It was a good beginning project for 8080 assembly!
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#8
05-20-2008, 12:19 PM
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#9
05-20-2008, 07:03 PM
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 ). You'll find a collection of basic tape images, including 8k basic, in Rich Cini's Altair emulator code (http://www.altair32.com/Altair32code.htm). Download the latest version of the emulator and look in the files subdir for *.tap. The bootloaders needed to load the tapes are in files/loaders/tape_lodr.Geoff.
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#10
05-20-2008, 07:53 PM
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Hybrid Mode
