Before launching into a full build i decided to spend some time testing stuff out. Did the critical cards work? Did i have all the required disk images? What combinations work? Could i use a SCSI drive emulator with the SASI card?
I set up a small STD card cage with a power supply and used a 5.25” HD density 8” substitute drive for checking out the disk images. Disks were written with greaseweazle.
All the files, including the TurboDOS 1.4 Manuals and the Pulsar disk images, are available at the Microbee Technology Repository
Both STD-6016 80186 boards will boot from disk 8_287_01 using a STD-6216 SASI card.
The configuration utility on the boot disk allows setup of STD-6016 (80186) and STD-6080 (Z80B) slaves.
Adding a second 6016 board with the same configuration does not boot. Changing the DIP switches 8 on the second board allows the master to boot.
None of the STD-6080 boards will boot from their native disk, 8_288_01. They all boot as slaves to a 6016. There may not have been a master configuration boot ROM, or the configuration may be via a dip switch. This disk may not have boot tracks.
Once the system is configured to use a slave, the master is no longer available as a console.
The STD-6216 works with SCSI2SD, but I have not been able to boot from the SCSI2SD. BOOT looks like it can copy the boot tracks but no success. Perhaps some SCSI2SD tweaks might get it there.
The system won’t boot from floppy if the SCSI disk is on. It may be attempting to boot from the SCSI disk but failing in a big way. There is a SCSI2SD parameter to delay startup.
To configure the STD-6080 slave, the CONFIG program needs to be able to access the distribution files for the STD-6080 – particularly PROSLV8.SYS. I did this in a single user configuration by setting up the hard disk first and then copying over the STD-6080 files.
The STD-6080 slave cannot run the STD-6216 executables, so on startup it has to have access to its own files. It’s possible to switch to the master using MASTER, but there seem to be some limitations, eg the config program seems to gag. It’s fine with the 1MB card so perhaps less limitation with that card.
The distribution disk does appear to have a master system for the STD-6080, but I don’t seem to have ROMs to load it – unless it’s by configuration link.
