Re: xebec/apple questions

[bje@ripco.com (Bruce Esquibel)]

David Chiu (none@nowhere.org) wrote:
: 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.

You might be on to something here.

Not sure of the controller number (but it was 1x10 something) but that
hidden or backdoor thing rings a bell now. Again, it's been so long that I
don't remember for sure, but it didn't work.

The Sider software was basically for their drives, which looking around
appeared to come in only 10 and 20mb sizes. The ST4096 was 80mb formatted
which I think was "out-of-range" with some of the settings, like you
couldn't input more than 8 heads or 1024 cylinders or something.

I dunno, hmmm, thinking about this, maybe that floppy start disk was just
plain old dos 3.3. The 4096 couldn't boot (from a cold start), but if dos or
prodos was already loaded, you could still use it. Apple had a similar
problem with the early versions of OSX, if the boot drive was larger than
6gig or something, you had to partition a boot slice for OSX but any 2nd
drive, no matter what the size was seen ok.

Blah, probably going to have to try to wire everything together and figure
this out by trial and error. Also remembering now the prodos boot from
floppy was painfully slow compared to a dos boot. If from a cold start it
booted a dos floppy then issued a pr#5 and the prodos loader was on the hard
drive, warm boot it worked. I think. Maybe there wasn't any hack besides
that.

Anyway, when I find some time I'll start some electrical tests and see if
any of this stuff works anymore. Suppose if the drive is frozen and doesn't
spin up, not much point going on.

Thanks again to everyone responding, it's slowly coming back now.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com