[sebhc] Re-creating actual floppies from archive

[Robin England]

Hi Dwight

Thanks for your comments. Well I've tried it but cannot get it to work. I've
followed the instructions to the letter, but can you clarify a couple of
points for me? First, when you initially turn on the H/Z89 and press B with
no disk in the drive, I assume that it *is* necessary to press enter at this
stage to actually start the boot attempt in order that the BIOS variables
are initialised? Secondly, what should the DOS utility H89TRANS respond with
after you've pressed L and it has successfully sent the loader (e.g. should
the command prompt re-appear?).

I'm finding that when I start H89TRANS and select the correct COM port
(COM1) I get the command menu. Then I press L (obviously with cable
connected and H/Z89 running the loader code) and it just sits there. As the
loader seems to be only about 800 bytes I'd expect it to complete fairly
quickly at 9600 baud, but it does nothing. I can exit the DOS program with
ESC, so the DOS PC hasn't hung.

I'm pretty sure that the problem is not with the RS232 side of things (cable
etc). If I connect the internal serial cable (brown molex conn) to the
terminal board instead of the serial card, I can happily send characters
from the DOS PC (using Procomm) and receive them from the Z/89 keyboard,
which suggests all is OK there. If I keep this setup and run your H89TRANS
on the DOS PC, upon pressing L the loader is clearly sent because I can see
it dumped to the H/Z89 screen.

So, I believe that the problem I have is related to the internal H/Z89
serial configuration. On my serial card, the LP port is labelled on the
silkscreen of the PCB as being the topmost connector (when viewed with the
card as mounted normally). However I have tried both the other serial ports
without success. I have also looped the CTS/RTS DSR/DTR handshaking lines at
the Z/89 connector just in case the BIOS serial routines require the 8250 to
use these.

The serial card itself only has jumpers for IRQ setting. In the case of both
my machines, the IRQ setting is OFF for all three 8250s. I'm not sure what
other jumper / switch settings may be important? As far as I can tell, the
DIP switch on the logic board is concerned only with the serial I/O between
terminal board and logic board.

Also, is it possible that your code will not work on certain BIOS versions?
I'm not sure but I think I've got MTR-90 on this machine (it supports the
(V)iew function).

Have you any suggestions or perhaps some code that will dump input from the
LP serial channel to the H/Z89 screen as a test? I will look at writing this
myself if not, however my time with these machines has been more focussed on
restoring the hardware itself and not the programming yet!

Regards
Robin

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dwight Elvey" <dwight.elvey at amd.com>
To: <sebhc at sebhc.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:36 AM
Subject: Re: [sebhc] Re-creating actual floppies from archive


> Hi
>  Do make sure and let me know how it works for you!!!
> Also, make sure and follow the steps. When I do it,
> I forget to do the first disk attempt after powering on.
> It just won't work because I depend on the bios to
> initialize the variables and the controller. I need
> to carefully read my own instructions.
> Later
> Dwight
>
>
> >From: "Dwight Elvey" <dwight.elvey at amd.com>
> >
> >Hi Robin
> > I don't recall which jumper setup was correct for the
> >serial but as I recall, things were just what was the
> >
> ---snip---
>
>
> --
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