Date : Thu, 08 Mar 1990 17:41:00 EST
From : Kevin J. Cummings <CUMMINGS@S55.Prime.COM>
Subject: Any Morrow user's out there?
Written 10:28 am Feb 21, 1990 by curt@omni.UUCP in S55:comp.os.cpm:
>In article <1529@shell.shell.com> svh@shell () writes:
>>I've just bought a Morrow S-100 Z80 computer with a 16M hard drive
>>and 5.25" floppy. This beast has a "Wunderbuss" that has a real
>>time clock, and several serial channels out.
>
>you have a Decision 1. MD-{1,2,3,11,34, etc) are single board
>computers. i have 2 of these suckers and they have a very nice
>floppy controller and a fairly surreal cpu card (z80 with mmu).
My understanding of the Decision 1, was that it was NOT a single board
computer, rather an MPU-Z card (with ROM), a floppy disk controller (either
a Disk-Jockey 8", or a DJ/DMA 5/8"), and possibly a hard disk controller
(an HDC-A or an HDC/DMA). They also had an IO card (either a Wunderbuss
or a Multi-IO card).
>>Since I can read hard/soft sector disks, I think there should be
>>or must have been a utility to read NorthStar disks on this machine.
>
>if you have the morrow cp/m for this sucker, you should be able to
>read northstar hard sector 5.25 inch disks directly. the most
>current cbios i have seen is version 3.1E.
The CBIOS that came with my DJ/DMA controller was E3. It would only
use soft-sectored 8" and hard sectored 5" (NorthStar Formats).
I asked for (and received) an upgrade to E4 (with a new prom and a new
PLA device for the DJ/DMA) that allowed me to use MD2 and MD3 disks
as well (soft sectored). I have modified my CBIOS to recognize some
other soft-sectored formats as well: Heath-Zenith, OSBORNE-1, and IBM-PC
CPM-86. (There is a problem with the OSBORNE code as the DJ/DMA seems
to be able to read, but not write in the SD mode, even though DJFORMAT
claims to be able to format them....)
I also received an IBIOS with the HDC/DMA I purchased which seemed to
be a spin-off of E3, but would allow for dynamically installing new
devices into the BIOS (I'm not sure how, this software came on an 8"
disk, and I only have 5" drives).
>>I also have a 256K RAM card that was intended for use with
>>Micronix - a Z80 UNIX. I'd like to check out CP/M 3.0. Has
>>anyone ported to this machine? Alternatively, does anyone have
>>a RAMDISK driver for the expansion memory?
>
>ron jacobs, an ex-morrow employee will gladly sell you for a
>few bucks, a ramdisk driver. his last phone number was:
>(415) 525-0212 (berkeley, california).
I wrote a RAMDISK driver for the Compupro CPU-Z board using its
bank switching technique. It was quite easy to integrate it into
the Morrow BIOS (thanks to their high level/low level device
implementations, I was able to bury all of the low level code in ROM on the
CPU card!).
>>Finally, has anyone upped the hard drive to a workable size?
>
>it should be possible, given cbios and mwformat source.
>i have both, if you tell me where to send it. (or, i could e-mail
>it to you) (legal eagles: is this legit? morrow is no more)
>
I had no trouble upgrading the MW portion of the CBIOS to support the
Shugart 5MB drives, and then a MINI-SCRIBE 40MB drive I was using.
The only complaint I had was that the CBIOS as shipped would only support
ONE set of drive parameters (to minimize re-initializing the HDC/DMA).
That meant you couldn't mix different sized hard disk drives, you could
use up to 4 of the same sized drive though.
>>Steven V. Hovater Shell Development Company (713) 663-2711 (work)
>>svh%shell.uucp@sun.com
>> or svh%shell.uucp@rice.edu
>
> curt mayer, kernel hacker
> home: 415-923-9104 work: 415-966-1024 x 216
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
One final note, the Morrow CBIOS assumes you have access to MAC or RMAC
to assemble it! I spent a lot of time removing the macros so I could
assemble it with ASM. Then I "inherited" a copy of RMAC with an OSBORNE
from a relative. Sigh! It was also relatively easy installing ZCPR-3.0
support into the BIOS, tho you start to run out of room in the BOOT sector
of the 5" disks! You have more leaway if you boot from 8" (and lots of
extra room if you boot directly from your Hard disk if you can!)
===========================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.
InterNet: CUMMINGS@S55.Prime.COM
CSNet: CUMMINGS%S55.Prime.COM@RELAY.CS.NET
UUCP: {uunet, csnet-relay}!S55.Prime.COM!CUMMINGS
Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration, I've come
to the conclusion that your new defense system SUCKS..."
===========================================================================
Sorry this didn't get out sooner, our news feed site changed addresses and
didn't tell us, SIGH!