HP-85 Floppy Disk Images

[Gerry Schultz]

Hi, I'm in a bit of a dilemma and I hope someone has a solution. I'm working on my HP-85A and developing a source of software for it. I have an HP92901M 5 1/4" floppy drives and just connected an HP 9121 3.5" floppy drives to it through HPIB.

As a side note: It took me a while to figure out how to address the drives from the 85. The MSUS is in the form ":DXYZ" Where X is the address of the HPIB I/F plugged into the 85 (it's address is set to the default '7'), Y is the address of the disk chassis (the 92901M has address '000' and the 9121 has address '001') and Z is the ID for the drives in the chassis (0 or 1). So, in my case, the MSUS for 92901M drives are :D700 and :D701. The MSUS for the 9121 drives are :D710 and :D711. This is explained in the Mass Storage ROM Manual. I was pulling my hair out over this until I read the right manual.

Anyway, the HP Computer Museum has images of the 80 series stored as a Teledisk image file format type .TD0. I also have an HP Vectra 33N with a 3.5" drive running DOS 6.22. I have been using this setup to make software disks for my HP Portable Plus and 9114 drives.

Another side note: I'm also working on getting the PIL-Box to work with the Portable Plus. ILPer version 1.43 (?) doesn't work for me under Win 7 on my HP laptop. But it does work on my Dell XP machine. I'm working with J-F.

The problem is that the HP 85 disk images are 5.25 images and when I try to write the image to a 3.5" disk it fails. The destination disk has to be the same geometry as the image. Now, according to my reading, the 9121 is a 3.5" version of the 5 1/4" 92901 drives. They both store 270k worth of data and use the same file format. The only exception is that the 9121 is SSDD and the 92901 is DSSD drives and this is what's killing me. I don't have and the Vectra doesn't support 5 1/4" floppy drives.

So here are my questions. First, is there any way to make Teledisk write 5 1/4" disk images to 3.5" drives? Second, are there 3.5" Teledisk disk images that I can obtain? Trying to find a way to obtain HP-85 software is a royal pain.

Thank you for your assistance.

Gerry

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Is there some particular software you are after? There are a couple other sites that have software for 80 series machines in the form of the individual files from the diskettes/tape that you could then use lifutil to write the files to the diskette in the format of your choice.
http://www.series80.org/index.html and http://www.vintagecomputers.freeserve.co.uk/hp85/

In case you are not aware, software designed for the 86/87 will not work on an 85 BASIC programs from an 83/85 automatically get fixed up when run on an 86/87. If you had the text version of a BASIC program from an 86/87 it may run on your 85A. Binary program are not likely interchangeable at all.

[Dave Frederickson]

Yes, you can get Teledisk to write disks to different media. Just the other day I created 3.5" disks on 5.25" HD media for hp41cx for his 85. Notice that there are different versions of Teledisk for 3.5" and 5.25" media. You might want to try both versions. Also be aware that not all floppy controllers are created equal. You'll need a floppy controller capable of writing in the correct format. TESTFDC, available here, will tell you if your controller will work. I use an Adaptec 1542.

Dave

[Gerry Schultz]

Thank you Paul and Dave for your responses. I looked at both websites last night and I'm interested in trying them out. I'm not looking for any specific software, I'm just trying to figure out, when I find software I want, how to translate it back to the 85A. I'm also aware that HP-86/87 software won't run on my HP-85. I also want to try the TESTFDC to see how the Vectra's controller does with this test.

I did try Teledisk versions 2.11 and 2.16 with both of them aborting the transfer to the 3.5" drive.

Here's a little different approach. There are plenty of ISA HP-IB cards available on eBay. If I get one, then I can hook up the HP 92901 and 9121 floppy drives directly to the 486 Vectra PC. Is there a software solution to directly write the file images to the HP drives only using the Vectra? I do have an HP 82973A HPIL to ISA card so I can read and write DOS files to 9114B disk drives.

What would be a nice development is an HP-IB to USB hardware solution similar to J-F's PIL-Box solution. Then you can directly emulate disk drives, printers, etc. for any HP product that uses HP-IB. Support will be a nightmare though.

Thank you for your help,
Gerry

[patrice]

May be you are looking for keysight's 82357B USB/GPIB Interface High-Speed USB 2.0
http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-851808-pn-82357B/usb-gpib-interface-high-speed-usb-20

[Dave Frederickson]

Hi Gerry,

I'll try a 5.25" to 3.5" image on my system to help determine if that's the issue. Seems to me we had this come up earlier this year: 110 Portable Plus software, Teledisk.

If you're going to acquire an ISA HP-IB adapter you might be interested in checking out the HPDrive Project on hp9845.net.

Dave

Edit: If you like HPDrive, take a look at Ansgar's other projects. HPDir is useful for transferring files from LIF images to the PC and FDIO can write LIF images to the PC's floppy drive in 9114 format or create LIF images from floppies.

[Dave Frederickson]

I was able to successfully write 5.25" images to 720k 3.5" media using TeleDisk v2.16.