I've just put a bunch of TSS/8 stuff at:
ftp://ftp.dbit.com/pub/pdp8/tss8/
This is mostly a bunch of doodads I wrote when I had a TSS/8.24 system
running briefly (from late 1983 when I bought it, to mid 1984 when the RS08
disk became too unreliable for the system to stay running), including an
unfinished VT52 text editor and a pretty good start on a FORTH compiler.
But also there's the source to the TSS/8.24 monitor itself, which I typed
in from a borrowed listing (so some typos may have gotten through) and then
lost on DECtape for many years.
FYI in case anyone else ever needs this, TSS/8.24 DUMP tapes are really
simple:
The first and last blocks of each 1474-block DECtape are not used. Each 4
KW "track" (actually two tracks on an RS08) is stored as 32 (decimal)
consecutive DECtape blocks, starting at block 1. Only the first 128 words
of each block are used, and they're all recorded in the forwards direction.
So up to 46. consecutive "tracks" fit on each DECtape, and you just concanate
all the "tracks" from all the DECtapes in the set to get the disk. It starts
at the very beginning of the disk, and even the swap tracks are saved.
Anyway the ever-further-behind-schedule new version of my PUTR.COM utility
for DOS will include at least read-only support for TSS/8.24 disk images (as
long as they're similar to mine, i.e. SEGSIZ=256 and new enough to support
the hack where filename extensions are added by encoding them in the high 5
bits of the protection code). It will read and write TSS/8 PUTR.SAV DECtapes
too (which turn out to use the OS/8 file format, but with 11:1 interleave,
TSS/8 style ASCII encoding, and the weird 5-bit filename extensions).
Speaking of DECtape, does anyone know anything about PS/8 DECtapes? I have
one image from David Gesswein which is supposed to be from PS/8, and it looks
just like an OS/8 tape except that it uses only every other block for the
first 256. OS/8 blocks on the tape. After that I can't figure out *where*
things pick up again, I suspect some of the blocks may have been recorded
backwards (like with TSS/8). Sound familiar to anyone?
The tape has OMSI's hack of Edu-30 (?) BASIC on it and somewhere in there,
there's a blurb about how proud they are of having sped things up on DECtape
systems. So I suppose it's possible that this is just an OMSI-hacked DECtape
driver and nothing to do with PS/8 at all. But then again maybe OMSI just
changed how BASIC accesses the tape through the vanilla driver so it really
is a PS/8 thing. Help!!!
John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Tue May 23 2000 - 13:49:52 BST