On Tue, 3 Jul 2018, dwight wrote:
I was thinking someone has already done this. If no, as you say, it is
not an impossible task.
It can be done. It has been done. It is not the easiest.
A friend did it, but he died 4 years ago, and his stuff is GONE.
There should be GOOGLE reachable stories of how people have done it, and
some .ASM or .HEX files of useful utilities.
The TSS/B is suppose to be their scientific package. It at least has
BASIC in it. I have another disk marked CP/M in the same box. I should
be able to put something together under CP/M.
If you have CP/M, in a bootable form, then the utilities that come with
CP/M (PIP, LOAD, SAVE, . . . ) can be coerced into creating a
bootstrapping program to bring stuff over, to bring over more versatile
utilities, etc. PIP.COM, alas, is not an internal command.
If you use a PC as your terminal, you can come up with ways to move code.
You can PIP from the console. (to bring over a .ASM or .HEX file)
It is a North Star Horizon. There seems to be some images out there so I
don't know how they are being captured.
The images are probably created on a NorthStar.
There exist some rather rare hardware boards for PC to read/write hard
sector. Not easily available.
It may be possible to use a flux-transition board that has access to the
index signal and write code to do it.
BUT, the Horizon can also manage 8" drives (SSSD soft-sector CP/M
standard!) with appropriate controller, or use other S100 FDC boards.
Once the CP/M system is up, there are utilities that have been written for
it (some assembly required), for serial port transfer.
I have no idea what's available for NorthStar-DOS, but there is probably
something around.
I think that the original drives of the Horizon were Shugart SA400, but
Tandon TM100-x should work just fine.
Good luck,
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
