UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum - View Single Post - Gemini 80-Bus System

cosmocat · 21st Oct 2019, 9:50 pm

Hi Neal.
I might take you up on the offer of a boot disk but I am a little confused by these disk formats. Do you mean the drive the disk works with only steps over 35 tracks , and so the track spacing would be incompatible with a 40/80 track drive? How does PolyDos know how many tracks the drive works over?
I have taken a copy of your PolyDos3 image ( that one seems most compatible with my hardware) from your github and I was mulling the possibility of writing a program on the Nascom to read the disk image (in sections) over the serial port (from a PC) then using low level NASDOS routines to write the disk tracks so that when the PolyDos boot rom was installed the files would appear correctly. I was unsure if this approach would work though.
I think I may instead look at your SDcard adaptor as you suggest.

JohnBHanson. Thanks for the suggestion but unfortunately the march of progress is such that none of my PCs have floppy drive interfaces on the motherboards anymore so I can't write a disk.

Andrew.

21st Oct 2019, 9:50 pm	#248
cosmocat Triode Join Date: May 2011 Location: Bristol, UK. Posts: 35	Re: Gemini 80-Bus System Hi Neal. I might take you up on the offer of a boot disk but I am a little confused by these disk formats. Do you mean the drive the disk works with only steps over 35 tracks , and so the track spacing would be incompatible with a 40/80 track drive? How does PolyDos know how many tracks the drive works over? I have taken a copy of your PolyDos3 image ( that one seems most compatible with my hardware) from your github and I was mulling the possibility of writing a program on the Nascom to read the disk image (in sections) over the serial port (from a PC) then using low level NASDOS routines to write the disk tracks so that when the PolyDos boot rom was installed the files would appear correctly. I was unsure if this approach would work though. I think I may instead look at your SDcard adaptor as you suggest. JohnBHanson. Thanks for the suggestion but unfortunately the march of progress is such that none of my PCs have floppy drive interfaces on the motherboards anymore so I can't write a disk. Andrew.