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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 12th Jul 2020, 10:14 pm   #1
arjoll
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Default Sord M68 with floppy emulator

About five (!) years ago I purchased an HxC 2001 floppy emulator, with a view to using it to create disk images for a Sord M23 mk III. It uses SSQD 100 TPI disks - a little unusual.

Fast forward five years to our period of lockdown back in April, and a combination of emptier weekends and a guy in Germany who insisted on sending me euros for some M68 boot disks before I said when I could do them, and I decided it was time to tidy the spare desk in the office and get the M68 running instead. After copying his floppies (which he was stoked about) I decided that the M68 would get the HxC treatment.

The M68 has a Z80 and 68000 and boots in either 8 bit or bit mode - it seemed to be intended as a bridge between their 8 bit computers like the M23 and future 16 bit computers, although it was one of the last they made. It uses DSHD disks, but using a logical format based on IBM 2D256 8" floppies - 77 tracks, 26 sectors, 256 bytes per sector, 360 RPM, 500 kbps. The HxC should cope with these, but attempts to format the images gave "rotation error" in both Sord FDOS (8 bit) and CP/M-68K (16 bit).

After to-ing and fro-ing with the creator of the HxC Jean Francois, I formatted a blank disk in the Sord then used imaging software to read it on a PC with 5.25" drive - that was a mission in itself, as my PII/Win2k machine was stuck in a reboot loop and the last 5.25" drive I purchased (in 1992) appeared to be struggling to just read a disk. After throwing XP on an old Core 2 Duo board I had sitting around and finding an over-length screw on the head shield of the floppy (which had an odd cap on it - I must have replaced it 10+ years ago and used the wrong screw) I managed to image the first 35 tracks or so before the read errors kicked in. That was enough for Jean-Francois to create a clean FDOS blank disk image, which I could then copy a boot disk on to from floppy to HxC.

On Saturday I imaged every 8 bit disk I had in the office for the Sord, and then tried formatting an image in CP/M - rotation error again.... but just in case I used Sord's COPYDISK utility in CP/M to copy to the blank FDOS image - and it worked. Obviously seeing a valid logical format was all it needed, even though it wasn't CP/M. So I proceeded to copy all of the 16 bit stuff as well!

Next step for the M68 will be to order in the "rev F" emulator which is in a 3.5" floppy drive form-factor, mount in a 5.25" adapter and leave it in the machine. That's a medium-term project, getting stuff out of Europe seems to be a drama at the moment. The only downside with this will be that in Sord FDOS, I can jumper the HxC as two drives - say 0 and 1, or 0 and 2 - and leave a floppy connected as 1 or 2, and it can access all three drives. With CP/M, it'll only recognise A and B, so I'll need to set up some kind of switching system that can switch the second logical drive of the HxC between ID 1 and 2, with the floppy taking the other - I think a DPDT switch will do it. That's a project for another month though.

In the meantime, the M23 beckons....

Oh, and the obligatory video - this is my M68 booting PIPS-III - a sort-of hyrbid database/spreadsheet - from the emulator, browsing some of dad's record collection from 1988 (he's into classical), and running the demo auto program version of Towers of Hanoi - and an attached pic of what an M68 looks like when it's not opened up to attach the floppy emulator!
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Old 13th Jul 2020, 1:01 pm   #2
SiriusHardware
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Default Re: Sord M68 with floppy emulator

Hello arjoll, nice to see you in this section rather than in the modern tech section where your expertise on modern systems is always much in demand.

With this being a mainly UK-centric forum I'm not sure whether there will be many here who are familiar with Sords as they weren't very mainstream here - in fact, I had for decades laboured under the impression that Sord were an American marque until someone here - possibly you - told me that they were in fact Japanese.
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Old 13th Jul 2020, 5:52 pm   #3
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Default Re: Sord M68 with floppy emulator

I had heard of them but, never seen one in action. The keys sound excellent and the drive noises very authentic - I assume they are generated by the HxC?

Looks like a pretty powerful bit of software that PIPS - did it come with the machine and is it running on the 68000 rather than the Z80?
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Old 14th Jul 2020, 1:30 am   #4
arjoll
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Default Re: Sord M68 with floppy emulator

Quote:
Originally Posted by SiriusHardware View Post
With this being a mainly UK-centric forum I'm not sure whether there will be many here who are familiar with Sords as they weren't very mainstream here - in fact, I had for decades laboured under the impression that Sord were an American marque until someone here - possibly you - told me that they were in fact Japanese.
That sounds like me

It looks like the M5 home computer (a predecessor to MSX) was more popular in Europe than the business machines, but I've spoken to a few people with Sords in various continental European countries. The Sord facebook group is run by an Italian guy, but very M5-heavy.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Timbucus View Post
I had heard of them but, never seen one in action. The keys sound excellent and the drive noises very authentic - I assume they are generated by the HxC?
Yes, they are from the HxC - and a lot quieter than the actual drives!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Timbucus View Post
Looks like a pretty powerful bit of software that PIPS - did it come with the machine and is it running on the 68000 rather than the Z80?
PIPS was usually supplied with the machine. PIPS-II and III were on the 8 bit side, written in Z80 assembler. Apparently the original PIPS was originally written in Sord's BASIC and compiled, but I've never seen that. Dad's M23 (1982) came with PIPS-II.

4G-PIPS ran on the 68000 on the M68 and M68MX (a version without Z80), and there was also an MSDOS version released. I only have the MSDOS version, as by the time it came out we were moving over to PC at home. I think most of the use it got was to convert all his old PIPS-III data to something he could use on the PC - you could transfer from PIPS-III on the M68 to 4G-PIPS on a PC using a serial cable. I haven't really touched PIPS for 30 years, but 4G-PIPS runs in DOSBox.
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