Re: xebec/apple questions

["David Chiu" <none@nowhere.org>]

My guess is that you probably have a 1410 SASI to MFM bridge hanging off the
Xebec card. Unlike the Sider, your 1410 bridge probably does not have the
drive geometry hard coded into the firmware (a friend referred to the
hardcoded 1410's as brain damaged,) thus requiring you to load it from a boot
floppy. I vaguely recall older Sider software (pre-4.0?) has a hidden option
that allows you to enter the drive geometry, although it has been so long that
I can't be certain. It should be fairly easy to find out however since the UI
of the software is written largely in BASIC.

Over the years Xebec has OEM'ed a number of hard disk subsystems to varies
vendors for Apple II (DataMac comes to mind) that are all more or less the
same design. The last version of Xebec HBA I know of was Rev. I.

Speaking of BBS'ing, anyone still have a working copy of CatFur lying around?

"Bruce Esquibel" <bje@ripco.com> wrote in message
news:cgkqk9$a9i$1@e250.ripco.com...

: Like I said, the hard drive was homebrew, always was. I think the host
: adapter and "controller" (usually mounted above the hd itself) were sourced
: directly from Xebec. It probably was the same as the Sider hardware using
: different firmware. Which is the problem now.

: The whole thing booted oddly from what I remember. From a cold start the
: floppy in slot6 booted the dos 3.3 and probably loaded something. Then it
: did a PR#5 and booted the hd into prodos and ran the bbs program. There was
: some other weird stuff, like when a user went into the file transfer
: section, the modem was held "on-line" while the machine rebooted into dos,
: ran Ascii Express (I think) then started the whole mess over again when they
: hung up.

: Beleive it or not I wrote that whole mess over years of experimenting and
: trying to get the bbs self-running and crash-free. These days it would
: appear I wouldn't know what to do at the ] prompt if my life counted on it.
:
: So the questions...
:
: The drive itself is a Seagate ST4096, which at the time was a monster, 80
: megs formatted but I think the partitions (/hard1 /hard2) were limited to
: 32megs each. The other 16 megs might of been dos for the ae line, not sure
: anymore.
:
: I know the hd could not boot the machine directly, it needed that floppy to
: boot first and I'm pretty sure there was something on it besides dos, maybe
: a patch. It's possible the file name was all numeric, like 8900976 or
: 8900976.bin. Maybe it executed, maybe the data from the file was "poked" in
: somewhere. It's also possible those files were firmware (eprom images) that
: were burned into the controller to support different drives and were not
: needed for booting.
:
: Does anyone remember this stuff using the xebec controllers and mfm drives
: from that era? Are the Xebec drive utilities still floating around anywhere?
:
: What I'd like to do is get a new drive (cough), try to get the machine
: running and add in the antique as a 2nd drive for safety (rather than trying
: to boot it directly).
:
: Either that or is there anyone reliable (and knows what they are doing) with
: a setup already that can extract the files out there?
:
: Like I said, it's sort of a snapshot of history (to me anyway) I'd like to
: try to preserve.
:
: -bruce
: bje@ripco.com
: