Ampro Little Board questions...

From: ajp166 <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Sun Dec 16 13:48:32 2001

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>


>I'm curious about something here ... Was this particular system ever
observed to
>run as configured? I've never owned a prepackaged AMPRO box/system, so
I have
>no experience with them on which to base any guesses. With a SCSI drive
and no
>bridge, the thing should either run or not, though, and if it doesn't
there's
>probably a good reason.


Over the years I've seen two and added hard disks to them (purchased
without).
If you have the right controller and drive it's an assemble the peices
project.
Those included some of the early SCSI drives.

>I'm not in a good situation to help you out with this, at the moment,
but I
>could send you a bridge controller of the sort that the firmware is
supposed to
>recognize on its own. With that you can test the Little Board side of
things.
>The Little Board supports the Xebec controller as well as a number of
models
>from OMTI, ADAPTEC, and others. You'd have to attach an
ST506/412-interfaced
>drive that works properly at the other end, though. The Adaptec models
I've got
>are capable of either RLL or MFM, depending on which model you use and,
of


If you match the known configs it's pretty straightforward, if not you
need to go
into the bios and set up the config by hand. The latter is a bit less
obvious as
the Ampro BIOS for hard disk was done in three layers, one for the
physical
SCSI driver, then the SCSI protocal for the controller target and then
hard disk
interface. There are several added tables not normally seen in a CP/M
bios.
Those tables allow for things like assigning logical unit 3 (whatever it
may be) as drive A:. As BIOS for CP/M go it's very sophisticated.


Allison
Received on Sun Dec 16 2001 - 13:48:32 GMT