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HP 9885M and Series 200/300 Computers
12-19-2019, 11:25 PM (This post was last modified: 12-19-2019 11:26 PM by Michael Fehlhammer.)
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HP 9885M and Series 200/300 Computers
9885 is not a typo in the headline - I am trying to operate an old single sided 8 inch floppy drive (mainly used along with 9825 computers) connected to a series 200/300 computer and BASIC 5 or BASIC 6 for workstations.

There MUST be a way to accomplish that because:
1. There is a dedicated binary "HP9885" since early versions of BASIC/WS, up to version 6
2. There is a special cable "5061-4211 98622A-002 to 9885M Disc Cable" I just have bought, which fits to the special connector of the 9885M and the widely used GPIO interface "98622A".

Currently I have connected my 9885M to a 9000/382 running under BASIC 6.21.
I installed the binaries for the GPIO card and the HP9885.
If I now try to access the drive with commands like CAT ":HP9885,13" (my 98622 uses select code 13, 12 is used by the standard parallel interface), the drive gives a clicking sound (locking the disk into place?), then either the system hangs or I get a "bad mass storage system" error message.

The problem is that this behavior can result from a bad disk drive as well as from a wrong configuration (maybe).

I haven't got any of these old calculators 98x5 or 98x0 and don't want to start to collect them. Therefore I can test my newly acquired 9885M only in combination with series 200 and 300 computers via the 98622 interface. (The seller claimed that it was working connected to a 9825 computer).

Regarding configuration, there are LOTS of switches and jumpers on the GPIO card, and according to the series 200/300 peripheral install manual, these switches have to be set according to the requirements of the peripheral.
But unfortunately the 9885M and its requirements aren't mentioned in that manual.

The documentation for the 9885 that is available online was printed before 1980, therefore series 200/300 computers can't even be mentioned.
Maybe there is kind of an addendum that describes the settings of the GPIO card for use with the 9885 drive?

I am curious whether anyone has ever successfully driven a 9885M by a series 200/300 computer ? Or by a series 80 or series 100 computer?
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HP 9885M and Series 200/300 Computers - Michael Fehlhammer - 12-19-2019 11:25 PM



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