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Looking for Corvus OmniDrive, or Parts

bruizer

New Member
Joined
Nov 24, 2021
Messages
3
Location
Minnesota
Hello! I am looking for a Corvus OmniDrive, working or not. I was hugely into these when they were modern back in my high school days; I learned more about it than the staff who came to me for help, which in turn set me on a course to become an IT professional today.

Anyway, I own one 5MB Corvus OmniDrive that has a fault light on it, and the other lights out - this is a condition that isn't covered in the diagnostic and service manuals (usually its a combination of lights), so I am in search of either parts (main disk controller/motherboard), or working or non-working complete units. I've been looking for a working until for almost 10 years now with now luck, but I recently discovered this site so I am eager to become a contributing user here.

Also am interested in acquiring a set of Constellation III disks (or labeled images) for Apple II and/or Mac to go along with it. I have a set for Apple II in the form of disk images but they are unlabeled so, with the exception of a 4 of them, I am unable to identify them and if/whether they are all valid or not.

Any help would be most appreciated. Also I am looking to pay fairly, not expecting any kind of donations or freebies.

Thanks for reading.
 
I have a big pile of omnidrives and boards, and a Mac omninet adapter. I don't think I have any constellation III disks, but i'll have to dig around and see.
 
I have images of Constellation III+ (last version). Problem is that the PM system here is completely broken. But, let's give it a shot anyway. I'll send you a note with my e-mail address and would ask you do the same. Maybe it will work by some miracle.

Al: I am a very motivated Corvus hobbyist and would be quite interested in knowing what you have. In particular, I'd like to find the disk images for Constellation II Apple CP/M support. ALL of the image on the web are Constellation I (or just plain Constellation in most literature). The C2 images are apparently Unicorns. Sellam had them at one point, but they were apparently lost when his landlord stole the contents of his storage space.
 
They should be in the CHM collection and now I have an Applesauce.
I'd be interested in your C III+, you have my email.
 
I have a big pile of omnidrives and boards, and a Mac omninet adapter. I don't think I have any constellation III disks, but i'll have to dig around and see.

Hi Al Kossow - I think I received a private message from you this afternoon but it's coming through blank. I guess that's been an issue here for a while. Would you mind emailing me directly? I don't mind sharing my address here. I'm at bill@billnienaber.com. I would very much love to talk to you about your pile of Corvus :)

Also thank you to "shirsch" for the help with Constellation III disk images. Happy Holidays to you both!
 
Hi all, I’ve been digging out my pile of Corvus stuff as well. And have been able to get consultation III (I think) installed on two 5pm drives.

I have a Mac omninet card but not sure of the cable pin outs to use. Any chance anyone here knows anything about?

Also I have a few disk interface cards. Some with tan capacitors and two with blue. The blue ones don’t seem to work. I read a thread somewhere a few years back and someone knew the story but I can’t seem to find it now.

Anyone still messing with this stuff or anything left in that pile.? =:)

I have two or three disk servers boxes and two of the omninet drives.

My next project is to start working the omninet project.

Anyways. Thanks for any help and let me know if anyone wants to talk about this stuff.

Cheers

Max
 
Hello! I am looking for a Corvus OmniDrive, working or not. I was hugely into these when they were modern back in my high school days; I learned more about it than the staff who came to me for help, which in turn set me on a course to become an IT professional today.

Anyway, I own one 5MB Corvus OmniDrive that has a fault light on it, and the other lights out - this is a condition that isn't covered in the diagnostic and service manuals (usually its a combination of lights), so I am in search of either parts (main disk controller/motherboard), or working or non-working complete units. I've been looking for a working until for almost 10 years now with now luck, but I recently discovered this site so I am eager to become a contributing user here.

Also am interested in acquiring a set of Constellation III disks (or labeled images) for Apple II and/or Mac to go along with it. I have a set for Apple II in the form of disk images but they are unlabeled so, with the exception of a 4 of them, I am unable to identify them and if/whether they are all valid or not.

Any help would be most appreciated. Also I am looking to pay fairly, not expecting any kind of donations or freebies.

Thanks for reading.
Hello! I am looking for a Corvus OmniDrive, working or not. I was hugely into these when they were modern back in my high school days; I learned more about it than the staff who came to me for help, which in turn set me on a course to become an IT professional today.

Anyway, I own one 5MB Corvus OmniDrive that has a fault light on it, and the other lights out - this is a condition that isn't covered in the diagnostic and service manuals (usually its a combination of lights), so I am in search of either parts (main disk controller/motherboard), or working or non-working complete units. I've been looking for a working until for almost 10 years now with now luck, but I recently discovered this site so I am eager to become a contributing user here.

Also am interested in acquiring a set of Constellation III disks (or labeled images) for Apple II and/or Mac to go along with it. I have a set for Apple II in the form of disk images but they are unlabeled so, with the exception of a 4 of them, I am unable to identify them and if/whether they are all valid or not.

Any help would be most appreciated. Also I am looking to pay fairly, not expecting any kind of donations or freebies.

Thanks for reading.
hi bruiser,

I, with you I worked in my computer lab in high school and managed the disk ( the computer teacher was a math teacher and had no interest)

How’s your project going?

I have one 6mb drive that had no disk. But I hooked a DREM up and got it to install and run constellation III.

Have you seen these befor?

Max
 

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Dose anyone have an idea what this card might do? It’s listed as a Corvus concept test card for the apple. As the concept was another company altogether I’m at a bit of a loss. Also it has no input/output connected, and only a few small chips, no big rom.
 
I have a Mac omninet card but not sure of the cable pin outs to use. Any chance anyone here knows anything about?
For Mac 128 and 512 the Omninet box simply plugs into the 9-pin D-SUB printer port on the computer. A Mac Plus requires an adapter like this:
mac_plus_corvus.jpg

Signals are obtained from the 8-pin mini-DIN printer connector on the computer. +5V power is picked off the 9-in D-SUB mouse interface.

Here's a wiring chart:

Please refer to pin markings on the relevant connectors and/or an
authoritative online source to correlate numbering to physical
location. There are too many cases where novice (or careless) folks
have published pictorials that fail to indicate whether the connector
in question is male or female, or worse, whether the front or back is
being portrayed. Even more egregiously, I've seen drawings that fail
to match any orientation of either M or F!

Start with 'pinouts.ru' for community vetted drawings.

Apple Mini-DIN (8-pin) 9-pin F (Corvus box)

1 6 Hsk Out (not used by Corvus)
2 7 Hsk In / DSR
3 5 Tx-
4 1,3 Gnd
5 9 Rx-
6 4 Tx+
7 n/c
8 8 Rx+

In addition to the signal connections above, the Transporter requires
+5V DC power. On a Mac Plus this is picked off the 9-pin D-SUB mouse
connector using a 9F --> 9M "pass-through" cable.

Pass-Through 9-pin 9-pin F (Corvus box)

2 2 +5
3 3 Gnd

Grrr. Cannot figure out how to keep the board software from munging the column alignment. Hopefull this is clear.

I've never been able to get a Mac Transporter to work with a machine newer than a Mac Plus. YMMV.
 
Thank you very much.!!!

That would have been near impossible for me to figure out. ( the +5v off the mouse )
 
You are welcome. Years ago another hobbyist sent me a photo of the original Corvus adapter and a document that purported to show all the connections. Suffice to say the author made every error possible in terms of pin numbering, charts and pictorials. I eventually threw in the towel and reasoned out the connections on my own. The only thing worse than no documentation is poor and inaccurate documentation.
 
Reviving a thread from earlier in the year. Before digging in to setup an Omninet network I was looking around to see what others had going on and found this thread.

Courtesy of @BradC I came by some Corvus Omninet gear and disks. If anyone's interested in the Networking source, the disks have the MS-DOS drivers for the Victor 9000 Omninet cards. Included in it are a bunch of standard libraries that look like they're common to all platforms. There's software for both the server and client DOS sides. I was thinking about trying to get a network setup between a Victor 9000 and another platform. I currently only have the Victor hardware but it looks like the Apple and IBM cards are available.

Below is a comment from one of the source files.You can find the rest of the disks here: https://archive.org/details/@pauldevine?and[]=subject:"VictorLAN". Everything is labeled VictorLan, which was simply the re-branding of the Omninet networking gear for the Victor platform. There's both compiled distribution disks as well as source disks in a mix of assembly, C, and PL/M-86.
#include "legal.h"
/*
* XTMOD.C - T R A N S P O R T E R D R I V E R S
*
* The 'XT' procedures offer an interface to the OMNINET transporter
* card. If the hardware interface should change then this should be
* the only module which will require changing. The 'XT' procedures
* are the only ones which are PUBLIC. The other procedures denoted
* as 'YT' are local to this module. XTTIMER and XTTIM are provided as
* assembler timing utilities which are found in 'XTMOD.ASM'. TRACE is
* provided as a debugging aid found in 'TRACE.C'.
* Summary of the interfaces :-
*
* XTINIT - Initialisation procedure, resets the transporter
* and sets up the port addresses.
*
* XTWAIT - Put the transporter into receive mode and wait for
* a specific period of time for data.
*
* XTENDR - Cancel the receive mode.
*
* XTSEND - Transmit the data to a specified destination.
*
* XTWHOM - returns the station number
*
* XTECHO - Detect if the specified station is present.
 
Is there any way to grab all those images in bulk? It's tedious to download one by one and I'm losing place because file names often don't match the ones in the heading.

UPDATE:

$ pip3 install internetarchive
$ ia download --search VictorLAN
 
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