H17 floppy disk drive replacement belt

[Joseph E McGlone]

Does anyone have a source for a replacement H17 disk drive belt?

 

Joe

[steve shumaker]

Can anyone offer a suggestion for getting files and data from an H89
environment into something newer and more permanent? An acquaintance
has a wide mix of H89 media (hard/soft 5.25, HDOS/CPM, plus some 8"
media) and 2 functional H89s with appropriate controllers. Based on an
examination about a year ago, he believes all of it is functional so
he's looking for a way to move files to something like CD/DVD or at
least a modern hard drive.

Other than the obvious serial link, is anyone aware of connectivity
options that would meet his needs?

Steve

[Glenn Roberts]

I'm getting very close to having my USB interface working reliably. This is
using the FTDI/Vinculum interface and chip set. I've had some time to work
on it lately and I have a rudimentary capability working but I want to make
it more robust. When done you'll be able to execute commands to copy files
to a USB stick and vice versa. Right now this is driven off the H-8-4
serial interface (slow), though a faster interface might be possible once I
get it working. It should even be possible to create an HDOS device driver
that will let you mount "virtual" HDOS disks off the drive too but I haven't
started working on that yet.

This doesn't help you yet but I am getting close to something that's usable.
Initially I'll only have HDOS capability since I'm not set up for CP/M on
the H8 (though I may do something similar on my Z100 which runs CP/M).

Ah if only we all had more Spare Time :-)

- glenn

[Les Bird]

Joe, I don't have a source for a replacement belt but I'd be happy to
send you a couple from some of my defective drives. I'll put a couple
in the mail for you.

- Les

[Mark Garlanger]

I know Chris Elmquist was also working on some hardware that would replace one of the UART on the serial port and allow a direct connect to another computer's USB port. It has the potential to have much faster transfers. But from the last update I heard, there were still some issues to work through and the transfer rates were currently about the same as the serial port.

Mark

[Chris Elmquist]

On Sunday (10/25/2009 at 12:54PM -0500), Mark Garlanger wrote:
> I know Chris Elmquist was also working on some hardware that would replace
> one of the UART on the serial port and allow a direct connect to another
> computer's USB port. It has the potential to have much faster transfers. But
> from the last update I heard, there were still some issues to work through
> and the transfer rates were currently about the same as the serial port.

Yes... that's right. I have been side-tracked by work issues lately
but might be past that again real soon and can revisit this project.
I have the hardware complete and now need to improve both the H89 and
the host side software. I wrote the H89 utility in C and compilers of
that day were pretty inefficient, so I am loosing a lot of potential
performance in the code. I plan to rewrite these tools in assembly and
see what we get then.

I don't expect the 2 MHz Z80 to max out the USB link but I'd be happy
if it were moving stuff about as quickly as it can to the H-17 disk
for example.

Chris

--
Chris Elmquist