Using PC as a emulated hard drive or floppy disk

[hgnhnnyt]

(05-09-2024 08:01 AM)Martin Hepperle Wrote:  There are solutions for the PC which connect a disk emulator with a CF card to the parallel port.
As far as I know they are relatively slow.
To adapt this solution you have to write a device driver for MS-DOS for the HP-150 which creates a disk drive device and redirects all read and write request through the HP hardware to this parallel port device.
Instead of using such a hardware plug-in device you could also write an emulator for the PC and connect the two systems via cable.

So you need two pieces of software: a device driver for the HP-150 and a disk emulator for the PC. As a classical parallel port like on the HP-150 plug-in card has only about 4 control lines available for the return path (I am not sure whether this card could be used bidirectional - look at Tony Duell's schematics), you have to break bytes into nibbles so that the control lines (like paper out, acknowledge) can be used to return any data from the drive emulator.

In total, I don't think that the result will make you very happy. It is probably much better to use the HPDRIVE solution on HP-IB for this purpose.

The parallel port extension board of the HP-150 is not very well integrated into the system and requires additional software to operate. It looks more like an afterthought, developed on customer request.

Martin

Is there a cheap way or diy way of getting a HP-IB adapter I was trying to work around it since I have a laptop and don't like tower computers so getting a pci card wont work. The adapters ive seen are hundreds and some were a few thousand.