NorthStar Double Density - DOS low level DCOM function

From: Dave Dunfield <dave04a_at_dunfield.com>
Date: Tue Jun 29 16:42:49 2004

>Hi Dave

Hi Dwight - seems we have several interests/machines in common.


> I have a couple of Horizons and a older style box ( no wood ).

I used to have an early Horizon in the blue metal (no wood) box -
gave it away years ago, which I regret - would love to be able to
build up another one, so if at some point you decide you have too
many boxes (metal or wood) - please think of me - I still have a
spare SD controller and a few other N* parts.


>I've not had time to fiddle with these but I think the Horizons
>use the double density controllers. Right now, I'm still fiddling
>with the H8 machines but the N* was on my list of machines
>to create a transfer program for. It sounds like you have already
>done the work here.

I wrote a transfer program for the N* SD controller in order to
extract the disk images for my Altair simulator (I'm running the N*
SD controller in the Altair) - All it needs is a bit of tweaking to
allow it to handle DD disks.

I've got tons of native software that I wrote for the N* system, and
a few other utilities (the PC->N* binary input program I mentioned
in previous post, as well as utilities to transfer files directly into
and out of N* disk images) - I have no idea how many people are still
into N*, but perhaps we should think about creating a pool of resources
such as we have for the H8 - If enough people are interested.


> None of my machine have been powered on since I got them ( at
>least 2 or 3 years ). It'll be fun turning them on and watching
>the smoke.

I assume you know the right (and wrong) things to do - if not, contact
me off-list and I can provide some pointers.


> I think I have some disk with these but I've not looked to
>see what I got. Projects, projects and more projects.

I've got tons of SD software (much of it my own) - and I know a few
people running DD horisons - I'm sure we can get you setup with usable
software.

Btw, in doing my Altair project, I contacted Dr. Charles Grant - the
surviving founder of NorthStar, and he granted permission to distrubute and
use all of the NorthStar material - I have the SD software and many of
the N* manuals posted on my web site.

It would be a fairly simple matter to tweak my Altair simulator into a
Horizon simulator - mainly removing the front panel support and modifying
the I/O map...

Regards,
Dave
-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Vintage computing equipment collector.
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Received on Tue Jun 29 2004 - 16:42:49 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:37:01 BST