8 Mb Disk Drive Support

Discuss construction, troubleshooting, and operation of the Altair 8800c computer

8 Mb Disk Drive Support

Postby AltairClone » May 16th, 2020, 11:30 am

With the new version 1.2 FDC+ firmware update and version 1.3 of the FDC+ Serial Disk Server, the FDC+ now supports two 8 Mb drives on your Altair. I have created a version of CP/M to use this new disk format. CP/M drives A and B are 8Mb drives and drives C and D are standard Altair 8" floppy drives.

The 8Mb drives are hosted on the serial disk server that can be connected to the Altair FDC+ board. The 8Mb drive looks like a standard Altair floppy drive but with 2048 tracks instead of 77 tracks. See “Requirements” below for the required firmware and software versions for the FDC+ and serial disk server.

CP/M is also patched to make the "user" construct of CP/M 2.2 more user-friendly (pun intended) to help organize the run away file collection that tends to develop on a CP/M hard disk. The update provides the following specific features:

1) The current user number shows in the CP/M prompt (e.g., "A0>" or "A5>", or "B12>").

2) If a typed command is not found on the default user/drive combination, then drive A for the current user is searched, then drive A for user 0 is searched. By making drive A user 0 the repository for system files, most every command will run as expected even when in a different user/drive combination.

Requirements:

FDC+ Firmware version 1.2 or newer
FDC+ Server version 1.3 or newer

Download these latest versions at https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/hardware/fdc+/
AltairClone
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Re: 8 Mb Disk Drive Support

Postby toml_12953 » May 18th, 2020, 2:12 pm

AltairClone wrote:With the new version 1.2 FDC+ firmware update and version 1.3 of the FDC+ Serial Disk Server, the FDC+ now supports two 8 Mb drives on your Altair. I have created a version of CP/M to use this new disk format. CP/M drives A and B are 8Mb drives and drives C and D are standard Altair 8" floppy drives.

Requirements:

FDC+ Firmware version 1.2 or newer
FDC+ Server version 1.3 or newer

Download these latest versions at https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/hardware/fdc+/


How can we find the FDC+ revision we currently have loaded?
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Re: 8 Mb Disk Drive Support

Postby AltairClone » May 18th, 2020, 6:58 pm

toml_12953 wrote:How can we find the FDC+ revision we currently have loaded?


Enter the monitor on the FDC+ and it has an option to display version information. See “2.1.1 On-Board Monitor” in the FDC+ manual.

Mike
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