On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 7:15 AM Jules Richardson via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/31/21 12:35 PM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote: > > Greetings > > > > I recently purchased a QCS external hard disk on ebay. This was one of > the > > companies that was selling DEC Rainbow hard drives. I had hoped it was an > > old Rainbow drive with interesting to me bits... Turns out it is an Epson > > QX-10 hard drive, full of interesting to bits for the QX-10 CP/M > > enthusiast. I've had trouble finding a suitable community to note this in > > should there be people around that care... so I thought I'd ask here is > > people know of good CP/M groups and/or QX-10/16 groups, mailing lists, > irc > > channels, discord servers, etc I could find. > > I'm not aware of anything, unfortunately. I've got a QX-10 that was > originally one of Epson's sales demo machines, and got taken around to > prospective customers by one of their sales reps - which does mean that it > was well looked after and came with a *lot* of documentation (and media, > but nothing "exciting" beyond the usual OS, Valdocs etc.). > > Did you happen to take an image of the drive contents? > Yes. I do. It looks to be CP/M format, with 3 maybe 4 partitions. I've had a couple of requests, so I uploaded it to https://people.freebsd.org/~imp/qx-10-disk.img Raw sector dump, in physical order, of all the tracks. 4 heads, 16 sectors per track, 480 cylinders. Cylinder 480 and higher could be read, but were in a different format, so all bets are off as to what's there in this dump. The SASI to MFM adapter is a WD1002, but it wasn't in the loop when I imaged things. Can't talk SASI at the moment anyway, so there's no extra data I could glean from that, at least in a quick pass over the WD1002 docs. > (hanging a hard disk off mine would be fun, but I think they were SASI to > the external enclosure, and there was a SASI interface which plugged into > the expansion slots - I'm not sure if the latter is documented anywhere) > Yes, the unit I got was an external unit sold by QCS, which sold units for Apple, TRS-80, IBM PC, DEC Rainbow, Expson QX-10 and a few others I'm sure I've forgotten. It has the SASI to MFM adapter card connected to the mini-scribe disk. I got it mostly for playing with Rainbow stuff, but it doesn't have to wind up there... Warner
