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MRS CP/M OS for Foundation Z80 Card


RickyDean

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Folks, yesterday totally by accident I found the rest of my,Foundation Z80 card software, a small package that had fallen out of the packet, some time prior. It has the master for the unit. These were last used about 2001ish so may not be usable.

But that being said I, having messed up the copy some time back trying to read it in a 51/4 floppy drive that I had just bought from ebay, that had successfully read and written to a couple of disk prior, am looking for someone to try to recover the main OS disks here. Someone with known good floppy capability and if need be a kyroflux to get good images of these files, so that the rest of the community can benefit too.

Any confident people? If not I will try to get a good 51/4 floppy drive, and try it again. These will probably not be in TI format as CP/M used, I believe a fat format and the one with the marking on it for 80 track was, I believe a DSDD disk not high density, not a 1.2Mb disk.

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You might want to read the reviews in MICROpendium 12/84 and 3/85. They seem to indicate that the system disks are TI SSSD (90K) format. Without knowing exactly what the disk format used would be, it would be "hit or miss" as far as recovering any of the data. That being said, I have a 5.25" DSDD drive connected to my system that works fine. If you have no other option, I would be willing to look at the disks.

Edited by atrax27407
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You might want to read the reviews in MICROpendium 12/84 and 3/85. They seem to indicate that the system disks are TI SSSD (90K) format. Without knowing exactly what the disk format used would be, it would be "hit or miss" as far as recovering any of the data. That being said, I have a 5.25" DSDD drive connected to my system that works fine. If you have no other option, I would be willing to look at the disks.

And I might agree on the terminal emulator, possibly being TI format, but the OS is KayPro II compatible I think, and I am assuming that is a fat format, though I haven't researched it. Thanks and I will keep your offer close. Thanks.

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Yes--the OS is a Kaypro format, not a TI one. I've been looking for a good copy of these disks for about 10 years now, as I have the card (and the Foundation monochrome 80-Column card that can be connected to it), but not the disks. . .so I haven't been able to determine if mine actually works.

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I have a fully functional Kaypro IV-84 equipped with a Lotharek drive. If the disks format is indeed a Kaypro II one, then I should be able to read and create digital copies of the disks.

 

EDIT: Actually making copies might be an issue because the Kaypro IV drives are double sided whereas the Kaypro II has single sided drives. It might still work however since only one side would be used, but I can't be sure. I am positively certain I can read Kaypro II disks.

 

Another alternative is to use the 22NICE program for DOS to read the disks and create copies on a PC equipped with DSDD drives. If DSHD drives are used, the results are variable, but in the past I have been able to create CP/M boot disks for my TRS-80 model 4 machine using it.

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I have a fully functional Kaypro IV-84 equipped with a Lotharek drive. If the disks format is indeed a Kaypro II one, then I should be able to read and create digital copies of the disks.

 

EDIT: Actually making copies might be an issue because the Kaypro IV drives are double sided whereas the Kaypro II has single sided drives. It might still work however since only one side would be used, but I can't be sure. I am positively certain I can read Kaypro II disks.

 

Another alternative is to use the 22NICE program for DOS to read the disks and create copies on a PC equipped with DSDD drives. If DSHD drives are used, the results are variable, but in the past I have been able to create CP/M boot disks for my TRS-80 model 4 machine using it.

Not all Kaypro II were single sided, I had one I took apart to build a portable TI and used the drives that came from it as DSDD drives for several years. Still have those drives, but the storage years weren't nice to my stuff, hence the current problem. I do not want to chance destroying these disks, till the data on them has been salvaged.

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It seems to me that in the 2001 year range that I used anadisk or some variant to save these as images to a device, but as of yet I have not located that device. Hard drive or other wise, but i have a bunch of ide drives that are stored and they might have that data on them. When I went to work overseas I stored everything, in sheds and semi trailers, so they did experience temperature differences here in south Georgia, the 9+ years I was OCONUS, but not direct sunlight. Anyway I want us, as a group to have these files in our repositories, for our use, as well as future TI'ers.

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  • 1 year later...

Any takers on recovering these disks, I am currently unemployed and it may be awhile till I can afford a Kyroflux system. Please read the thread to get a feel for what is going on. I'll pay shipping h costs of the disks, and wrap them real nice, boxed. Would like to have it done on quality hardware.

Edited by RickyDean
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5 hours ago, RickyDean said:

Any takers on recovering these disks, I am currently unemployed and it may be awhile till I can afford a Kyroflux system. Please read the thread to get a feel for what is going on. I'll pay shipping h costs of the disks, and wrap them real nice, boxed. Would like to have it done on quality hardware.

I have a Kryoflux, but my working 5.25 " mysteriously stopped stepping. 

I have scanned a couple hundred TI disks this way though and re-ordered the tracks for use.

If I get a floppy drive back in working order, I will get back to you.

In 87, I used a CP/M machine to run Wordstar.

 

 

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54 minutes ago, FarmerPotato said:

I have a Kryoflux, but my working 5.25 " mysteriously stopped stepping. 

I have scanned a couple hundred TI disks this way though and re-ordered the tracks for use.

If I get a floppy drive back in working order, I will get back to you.

In 87, I used a CP/M machine to run Wordstar.

 

 

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. But I just started experimenting with a teac drive I got from one of our members some time ago. It seems I may have made a disk image of the programs needed for the ti to communicate with the Z80 card. If this is correct then we have a start, and all I have to do is image the Z80 disks which is a different format than the ti can read natively. Adding that initial disk set in the next post.

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I used what appears to be a very good teac drive and was able to image the disk, that needs to be run from the ti to communicate with the Z80 card. Am loading that disk to Atariage now. The cpm disks will hopefully be posted in the next day or two. I have placed it in track image, sector image, and in image. It would be the initial disk, I believe.

FMASTER Z80 .dtk FMASTER Z80.dsk FMASTER Z80.hfe

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Okay 1 last file for tonight. This is a dump of one of the Z80 sustem disk, using anadisk 2.07. I don't know if this can be converted to disk image yet. I don't know how at this moment, but maybe one of you do. I had to cut the sleeve open and remove it from the casing and place it into another casing that would let the disk rotate. It seems to have usable data.

CPMZ802

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Well, I did manage to get the TI disk files copied, that was a good one. I don't know if we can pull any good files from the 2nd and 3rd TeleDisk images, the main one we need is the MRS.SYS and the MRS
BAT Files. The format.com and SSP.com files may be kaypro II format files and common on the internet. Unsure though. It looks like I'm not going to have joy on the other disks though as, the drive started creating small lines on the media. I have one that says it is 80 track 1s2d, but TeleDisk keeps truing to use 128 byte sectors and anadisk keeps saying it is either blank or high density. I am going to try to set up a 80 track Drive and try to read it.

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Well for you Foundation Z80 card owners, I may have finally gotten the OS for us. In the zip find a dsk image, in Kaypro II format, called MRSBootCPM.dsk, I used my DeviceSide FC5025, and cut open the disk envelopes and finally got one that would read. I then read out the other disks that came with it, included in the package. Someone try this and let me know if it boots your Foundation card, when you follow the manual. You can probably test these disk images with a Karpro II emulator, maybe in Mame. Please report your findings.

Foundationz80cpmMRS.zip

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10 hours ago, RickyDean said:

Well for you Foundation Z80 card owners, I may have finally gotten the OS for us. In the zip find a dsk image, in Kaypro II format, called MRSBootCPM.dsk, I used my DeviceSide FC5025, and cut open the disk envelopes and finally got one that would read. I then read out the other disks that came with it, included in the package. Someone try this and let me know if it boots your Foundation card, when you follow the manual. You can probably test these disk images with a Karpro II emulator, maybe in Mame. Please report your findings.

Foundationz80cpmMRS.zip 578.24 kB · 4 downloads

kaypro ii in mame says 'invalid image'

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

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