MikeS
Veteran Member
Well, most folks would probably just ask a kind soul to send them a boot disk, but if you're up for it this does sound like a useful addition to the PC boot options.On the plus side, I easily found a DIN cable as you described. On the minus side it converts to 4 audio cables, so I'm hoping 2 of those are optional. Another minus is that apparently the 5160 and 5170 do not have cassette ports.
So I'm going to pursue the serial-card path first, and probably start another thread about this if I think this is a feasible project. IBM Basic does support PEEK and POKE, so in theory if I can access the serial card from BASIC using a short hand-typed program, I should be able to do absolutely anything. The challenge will be coming up with the machine code that will be capable of reading blocks of data from the port and writing those blocks to disk....without DOS in memory. It would need to be able to format a disk as well.
But as you say, only the 5150 has a cassette port, only IBM machines have BASIC in ROM and not every system has a serial port (and not every modern PC has sound I/O FWIW ;-) ) so it's still not a universal solution. Remote boot software does exist for other systems besides the Apple and I'm a little surprised that it doesn't seem to already exist for a PC; probably because only a relatively small percentage of generic PCs are genuine IBMs with ROM BASIC.
Good luck.