Rainbow disk drives and color monitor

Thread View: comp.sys.dec.micro

2 messages

[T] Back to Threads [V] Tree View [G] Group Articles

2 total messages Started by Richard Thomsen Wed, 28 Oct 1987 14:53

#1185

Author: Richard Thomsen
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1987 14:53

40 lines
2649 bytes

	I sent this before, but did not receive much response.  I do not know
if it is because no-one is interested, or because no-one saw it.  Now that
the mailing list has picked up, maybe someone cares.

	My Rainbow disk drives failed, so instead of replacing them with the
normal DEC drives, I bought two Shugart double-sided 96tpi disk drives and
wired them into my Rainbow.  They worked pretty well, but had some problems
when first being turned on (the disk access would fail, but would start
the drives spinning.  Accessing the disk again while spinning would then
work properly.

	Anyway, I modified the BIOS (Version 2.11) to fix this problem,
and then continued to modify it so it would use both sides of the disk.
So now I have two normal disk drives, but they do both single and double-
sided disks.  This involved modifying the BIOS, the Z-80 code, the MS-DOS
bootstrap, and the formatter.  So I do not have an I-drive, but my two
drives will do the same thing, yet are still 100% Rainbow compatible (as
well as doing Rainbow double-sided disks at over 800K bytes each).

	Basically, I just added the double-sided capability to the BIOS,
since it would already do Rainbow and IBM 8- and 9-sector single-sided
disks.  Now mine does all these, as well as the double-sided versions of them.

	I wrote to DEC and tried to get the BIOS and permission to modify it
and to distribute the modifications, since it is DEC copyright code.  I never
got any response from them at all.  If the BIOS is truly in the public domain,
then I would be greatly interested in getting permission to distribute
changes to the BIOS.  Assuming anyone is still interested.


	On another problem, my color monitor failed.  The blue gun seems to
have failed, or the drivers for it.  I cannot afford to get a new one from
DEC, so I have done nothing about it yet.  Does anyone have the schematics
or any other information that might help me fix the monitor, or at least test
it to find out if it is the tube or the drivers?

	Any help will be greatly appreciated.

						Richard Thomsen

Re: Rainbow disk drives

#1186

Author: art
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1987 14:34

27 lines
1954 bytes

As you indicated in your previous note.  You can distribute changes to the
BIOS without violating any copywright laws.  You can not however distribute
a full copy of your modified bios without DEC's permission.  I did write
to Ron Gemma (Rainbow product manager) on several questions.  I included
your question as part of the letter.  After a wait of 6 months I finally
received a form letter that made it very clear that DEC had never even read
my letter.  The form letter was an answer to the form letter that appeared
in a year old WARUG newsletter asking for MS-DOS 3.10, networking kit etc.

Thru other verbal communications I have been told that MANY MANY of the form
letters were received by DEC and anything that looked like it came as the
result of the C. Mack/ T. Needleman generated letter writing campaign was
answered by this form letter.  At this point you could write an article
telling how to do it.  DEC Professional or Ted Needleman would probably
be willing to pay for such an article.  I would like to obtain the information
on how to do it, and probably would make the changes.  

 
     
*
*---Art
*
*Arthur T. McClinton Jr.     ARPA: ART@MITRE.ARPA
*Mitre Corporation MS-Z305   Phone: 703-883-6356
*1820 Dolley Madison Blvd    Internal Mitre: ART@MWVMS or M10319@MWVM
*McLean, Va. 22102           DECUS DCS: MCCLINTON
*

Thread Navigation

This is a paginated view of messages in the thread with full content displayed inline.

Messages are displayed in chronological order, with the original post highlighted in green.

Use pagination controls to navigate through all messages in large threads.

Back to All Threads