Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves billg999@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

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On 2016-01-21, Bill Gunshannon <bill@server3.cs.uofs.edu> wrote:

Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

Not I. Are they emulating MFM drives? I think that the Color
Computer used SCSI, not MFM, but I may be wrong. Mine had just
floppies -- running OS-9. The TRS-80 would be likely to be MFM. I must
admit to not knowing the P112 at all.

And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.

Good Luck,
DoN.

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I'm happily using Dave Gesswein's MFM disk emulator with a Beagle-bone http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm. I'm in the middle of making some tools that will extract the filesystem from the emulation file, have it mount in linux, and let you put it back into
the emulation file. I'll also have a mkfs ans fsck that runs on linux.

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In article <slrnna38uq.7n6.BPdnicholsBP@katana.d-and-d.com>,
"DoN. Nichols" <BPdnicholsBP@d-and-d.com> writes:

On 2016-01-21, Bill Gunshannon <bill@server3.cs.uofs.edu> wrote:

Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever looked at any of the replacement
SSD systems for things like the P112, Tandy Color Computer or Z-80 based
TRS-80's with an eye towards making something similar that could be
plugged into the expansion bus of the 3B1?

Not I. Are they emulating MFM drives? I think that the Color
Computer used SCSI, not MFM, but I may be wrong.

I think there may have been a hard disk interface from Tandy but it would
have been MFM. And rare.

Mine had just
floppies -- running OS-9. The TRS-80 would be likely to be MFM.

There have been third party SCSI and IDE interfaces made for the Color Computer. Supported by both BASIC and OS9/NirOS9 on the COCO. TRS-80s
had MFM but small, rarre and expensive.

I must
admit to not knowing the P112 at all.

It's a single board CP/M box, small enough to mount on the back of a disk.

And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.

I know this. Thus my question. There are addon systems for the COCO and
all of the TRS-80s and it would seem the only real difference would be the actual interface. I just wondeed if anyone had ever looked at any of these
to see if they could be adapted as currently the 3B1 suffers from the same problem, a dearth of usable disk drives and lack of reliability of those
that exist.

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves billg999@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

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On 2016-02-03, Bill Gunshannon <bill@server3.cs.uofs.edu> wrote:

In article <slrnna38uq.7n6.BPdnicholsBP@katana.d-and-d.com>,
"DoN. Nichols" <BPdnicholsBP@d-and-d.com> writes:

[ ... ]

And by "expansion bus" -- do you mean a modified 3B1 which can
accept a second MFM hard drive? The expansion chassis did not accept
any disk controller to my knowledge (except perhaps the one only
prototype SCSI card which one of the regulars of this newsgroup owned.

I know this. Thus my question. There are addon systems for the COCO and
all of the TRS-80s and it would seem the only real difference would be the actual interface. I just wondeed if anyone had ever looked at any of these to see if they could be adapted as currently the 3B1 suffers from the same problem, a dearth of usable disk drives and lack of reliability of those
that exist.

Hmm ... the bus for the 3B1 was rather complex and well deigned,
and I think would be quite difficult to adapt to the COCO or TRS-80
expansion cards.

And -- I think that really the 3B1 would benefit most from a
SCSI interface -- since that would allow much newer and faster drives.

Or -- perhaps a card offering slots for USB thumb drives or the
various flash cards for camera use. (Granted, those flash drives are
not good choices for unix systems, because of the limited number of
writes for a given memory cell, and the fact that unix updates the
inode every time a file is read, so that area would burn out fairly
quickly.)

Good Luck,
Don.

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