On Dec 24, 2021, at 6:38 PM, Mitchell Smith <kb3...@gmail.com> wrote:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SEBHC" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sebhc+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/d3364fba-be44-49e4-a8f8-e9755149832fn%40googlegroups.com.
A few thoughts…
You say on some you “seem to have a good disk”. Do you mean sometimes everything works and you get a good disk and can boot it, access files, etc? or do you always have problems and your comment about “seeming to have good luck” was just based on the initial results of the disk imager getting your hopes up?
It sounds like you’re using “HD” 3.5” disks with the HD hole (upper left corner as you face the disk with the metal shutter at the bottom) covered with tape. What are you using for a disk drive? Is it an old drive or more modern one? It’s possible the older drive would have trouble reliably using HD media which has a higher coercivity. If you happen to have any older 3.5” disks (marked Double Density and/or “DS/DD”) you could try them. These were very popular in the early years of Macintosh as that’s what they used. Later everyone moved to HD, which stores twice as much (1.4M vs 720K).
Also you said you have “a couple” of 3.5” drives. Have you tried both? Same results? Several members here have reported seeing reliability problems with 3.5” disks/media. I personally have had pretty good luck using DS/DD media and old (ca. 1995?) disk drives by Sony and Epson.
I presume you’re not trying to do double-sided operation? That is possible but requires a mod to the H17 controller board and uses one of the bus pins to transmit side select. My suggestion is to use the original “100K” format (40 tracks; 10 sectors/track; 256 bytes/sector) which is what most of the H8D images are in.
You got the HSFE board from Norberto so I presume that’s the old Chris Elmquist one (ca. 2009)? Presumably it was working fine for Norberto…?
Also perhaps stick to the older H8D Utility for now as it is well documented
https://sebhc.github.io/sebhc/software.html (scroll down to the “Utilities” section)
I don’t think you need any features of the new one (which can handle both hard- and soft-sectored disks)
Finally, you said you have an SVD that works. You should be able to boot from that and then FORMAT and SYSGEN a physical floppy. You can make the SVD be SY0: and the floppy SY1:
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/74fd4ed9-7bcb-48e8-a953-5080c9ca9c2an%40googlegroups.com.
Great progress Mitch!
Last year Norberto developed a new version of the H17 board that incorporates an on-board HSFE capability. But (big but) it’s designed as a “piggyback” board to load on top of the H37/67 board. Now if you have an H37 board it’s much more logical to use the 3.5” drive as a soft-sectored drive, giving you ~720K of storage.
Here’s the info:
Norberto’s H8 Computer  (koyado.com)
This requires a Z80 and PAM37 or higher ROM to work.
Other than the power up sequence issue what reliability issues have you had?
From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Mitchell Smith
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2021 8:34 AM
To: SEBHC <se...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [sebhc] Help with H8DUtility3
Thanks for the help and suggestions!!
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/31f5943a-d647-4562-8bd3-66a5d74778d4n%40googlegroups.com.
Soon, we will have the full size H17 controller with VDIP1, FT245R, and HSFE Controllers included.
Norberto
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/00e301d7ff6b%2429293930%247b7bab90%24%40gmail.com.
Nice setup. Thanks for sharing the pics!
Todd Goodman has been working the new board orders for us.
https://retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boardinventory#norberto_collado_s_heathkit_h8_h89_boards
The “rev 4” Z80 CPU board is the latest, listed as “H8 Z80 64K RTC ORG0 v4” on Todd’s site
I have a Rev 3.1 version of the board which I don’t plan to build if you (or anyone else here, should you decline) wants it. The rev 4 board incorporates a few enhancements over 3.1 but I can’t recall an exact list. One enhancement is that the Rev 4 uses an EEPROM so it’s easy to flash new ROM image. Also Douglas’ enhanced ROM software has some nice features including ability to load/run programs directly from USB flash.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/1052323e-7289-49f0-ad90-e0904bb7961en%40googlegroups.com.