• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

TurboDos Resurrected!

Load times concern the timing of head movements for read/write operations, and sector offset and interleave concern the pattern in which sectors are laid down on a given track of the disk (interleave 1 would indicate they are sequential, interleave 2 that they are every second sector on a single revolution. Choices relate to tuning for best performance depending on system capability compared to RPM of disk. Longer interleave intervals slow down the data rate to match capability of slower system. I'm not expert with Winchester layouts.

Best ask this question in the Hardware forum where more people will see it who are not particularly following this TurboDos thread. There's a whole hive of hardware experts there...

Rick
 
Thanks for the suggestion. Rick, are you interested in getting TurboDOS up on your system? I believe that I have the necessary files.
 
Hi All;
I had/have TurboDos, on an Advanced Digital S-100, But, as i used it, it quit being able to boot, and without some kind of CPM or TurboDos System, I could Not fix the Boot tracks, If that was the Problem..
I could have been a Floppy Drive Reading problem, come to think of it.. Anyway, I have not tried to use it for Many Years..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Marty - most likely it was a FDD read problem. CP/M loads its BIOS from boot tracks on each boot disk, but TurboDos loads BIOS from a file called OSLOAD.COM that is called directly from the boot ROM of the machine. Probably your system has a generic FDD problem, or the EPROM has become corrupted with time, or your boot disk has become corrupted.

Each of these issues can be fixed. I would start by getting hold of a CP/M ROM monitor, on an EPROM that you plug into your system in place of the TurboDos EPROM. You can search this forum for previous threads about this, including my posts about my package MINIMON that you are welcome to adapt for your system.

This would boot a minimal system from ROM containing enough tools to test FDD function, RAM etc. Once you have tested working FDD, you can test the boot disk, try calling OSLOAD.COM from the monitor, or dump disk contents on screen to check the directory and file contents.

The OP on this thread is the current World Champion of TurboDos Resurrection!

Rick
 
Hi All;
Rick, Thank You for your response, If I remember correctly, it would load less and less of the OSLOAD.COM file, not as many Dots appearing on the screen, before it showed an Error message, or stopped loading.. Most likely its the boot disk, as it has a WD 2793, and the Drive itself loads other things on other systems.. I currently use it with my Tarbell 1011 Controller, on my Altair 8800..

THANK YOU Marty
 
Hi again Marty -
That's good news - at least it is better than a ROM problem. It sounds like there could be a minor alignment difference between the drive and the boot disk. If so, you could probably recover the boot disk files using something like 22DISK or another disk analysis tool, even on a DOS machine, and make a new disk with refreshed signal. The expert on disk recovery is Chuck(G) - I'm not sure whether Chuck reads the S100 threads but he seems to monitor the Hardware threads.

Rick
 
Hi All;
Rick, Thanks for the reply and the information.. That sounds like You have hit the problem Right on the head.. That makes perfect sense as the Floppy Drive is not the Drive that they were made on, So they could be off alignment by a hair or two..
I just tried two of the Boot Diskettes on my Advanced Digital Board, and they both show a - 10 error, which I think is an S4 Record Not Found, When Set it indicates that the desired track and sector were not found..
Either track or sector address ID or mark is unreadable or corrupted..
I only tried these two Disks, I didn't get down the collection and try any other diskettes..
I am trying to have a reliable Floppy Disk Controller that I can then Read the different Sectors and Tracks that are on a NON CPM Diskette, for a friend of mine and save the files on my PC for Him..
THANK YOU Marty
 
Hi All;
NewCastle, Thanks for Your offer, I have the Super Six, and some others, but they are Buried, so I am not sure what they are, and they are missing most of their Parts, as well as broken Crystals.. So, This Board is the only Running one I have at the present..
I have Disks that are CPM 3.0, But I am not sure that they are readable or have been corrupted as well, not just the Boot Tracks..
I will when I have Time to go and see What BitSaves has, as well as the link above.. But, Right now I am Busy Working on this other Problem for my Friend..

THANK YOU Marty
 
New_castle_j,
It would appear that you have one of the last ICM CPZ-186 Master boards made by ICM before the sale of the company to Cubix. Nice to see it working again. The who;e product line was really fun to work on when we designed and built them back in the 80's. I miss it sometimes. That's probably why I restarted my CPM work again. If you have any question about the hardware or software, let me know. But be gentle, it has been almost 30 plus years since I worked on any of that hardware, but I do remember a lot about what we designed. I may need help from you if you are interested. I'm thinking about either porting the code to my P112 board, or doing a whole new hardware design to support TurboDOS's networking and multi-user capability. Maybe an Ethernet interface between masters.
 
Last edited:
Jerry? I recognize your picture. Welcome to the forum! A pleasure to "meet" you. I've got lots of TurboDOS and ICM resources to share and an impressive story to tell about the stuff you guys designed. Since you're not able to use the private message feature yet, just put my screen name in front of @ yahoo.com and you can reach me. Wow, looking forward to talking more.
 
Welcome from me too. If you want to jog your memory about TurboDos, I studied it in emulation earlier this year on comp.os.cpm:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fr...elevance/comp.os.cpm/YAY4BPJYuss/trH_h1f3oZIJ
or just search for this subject in comp.os.cpm:
Turbodos V1.43 on Z80 Emulator with ESKAY Software Tshell
I knew nothing about TD and got fascinated with it. I hope to eventually get it running in hardware since I have ADC SuperSix master and slave cards
but I still consider myself a noob when it comes to S100 hardware. I would sure be interested in what your recollections are.

Larry G
 
Thanks Larry and new_castle_j. By the way new_castle_j, what is your first name? The system new_castle_j is running is based on the ICM CPZ-186 16-bit master running at 8MHz, and I'm not sure about the number of slaves he is running. But they are 6MHz Z80 128K memory slaves that are memory mapped into the masters memory space, and data packets between master and slave is transfered by way of either an LDIR instruction for Z80 masters or block xfer with the 80186 master. On the Z80 masters I did use the DMA chips memory-to-memory transfer capability and that was even faster. But ICM was the only company that was doing memory mapped slaves. Everyone else was using I/O transfers, which as much slower. I brought the memory mapping technology with me from Tarbell Electronics when I designed his Z80 CPU board and Double density board. There is also a memory disk for TurboDOS if you have the extra memory. It has to be linear addressed memory, not I/O block selected type, for it to work. The file name is TURBO.REL and the config code is called TURDSK.MAC and those files go all the way back to TurboDOS V1.22

I'm going to get a hold of Bob Ruiz and Ron Tozaki and see if either of them still have any information from those days. I do have some myself, mostly stuff from when ICM bought MuSYS,
but not much stuff related to the ICM product line. I do have a copy of the SAS-200 schematic, and some Personality board info. The quintesential book on TurboDOS configuration info is a book named TurboDOS_Configuration_Manual_Jun86.pdf written by Don Shulz, Steve Rasmussen, and Anne Wang. Mostly geared toward ICM products, but in general a great help in trying to figure out the configuration info for TurboDOS. I'll also have to ask Don if he still has any ICM info. The great thing about ICM was that most all of us are still in contact with each other. The only one I'm aware of gone now is Sam Calvillo, our marketing VP and brother-in-Law of Bob's. Sam passed away about 3 years ago.

As for me, I'm retired now, living in Prescott AZ, and have rekindled my interest in all things CPM/TurboDOS. Just what I need, another hobby on top of my Ham Radio interest. I'm also a member of Linkedin if you want to see what I've been doing since the ICM days. It's under the name Jerry Mulchin.

I'm currently running a P112 board with the GIDE interface and 174Mb of disk storage on a ZSDOS O/S. While the ZSDOS stuff seems to run OK, it is just not TurboDOS, which is much more of an elegent O/S to work with. So I will probably design a complete new set of hardware for the TurboDOS side of things. I haven't decided about the 16-bit master stuff yet. I'll just tackle the Z80 side first. Will probably use a 80S180 CPU running at 33MHz and 1MB of memory. I'm also thinking about extending the 80S180's memory space to 4Mbytes using additional memory mapping like in the ICM stuff. Static memory is so cheap now it doesn't make sense to not have a large Memory Disk. Anyway, I've rambled on enough. I'll send a direct email to new_castle_j and see if we can make phone contact.

Later....
Jerry Mulchin
 
What I love about TurboDOS is:

1. It's CP/M compatible.
2. Machines can be networked via RS-232

'All we need is the ported OS for whatever Z80 box we have, and we can network.

And, there is also a DOS client for connection to the PC world.

The manual mentioned in the previous post is here: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_icmICMTurbnualJun86_11472850

Other interesting sites, previously listed are:

http://www.cpm8680.com/turbodos/

http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/turbodos.html

http://z80cpu.eu/roche-pages/79-data-articles/archive/79-turbodos
 
Last edited:
Hi All;

I have an ADC Board, and Years ago I had it Running TurboDos, various versions, from about 1.13 to 1.22 and I think up to 1.43.. But, since then something has deteriorated and slowly it made all of my Boot Disks unbootable..
So, I have Not used it in some time..
I also have had a Double Density Tarbell Floppy Controller that I wanted to use in my Altair, but I never got it to work, I also have a couple of Tarbell Single Density Controllers..
I had trouble keeping the operating system on these as well, I since have discovered I had some of my Memory turned off, which may have been the trouble..
I finally had to go to John Monahan's Z80 and Floppy controller as nothing else would work.. And for now I have Not gone any further on any of my S-100 machines since I am in PDP 11/45 mode at the present time..

THANK YOU Marty
 
For many years I was a dealer for IMS Technologies and have several well-preserved TurboDOS computers, as well as a large number of S-100 16-bit user boards (some never used). These computers have been stored for several years and I assume they still work, although I haven't fired them up in a long time. Since they may be of historical use to somebody, I thought I would post this message to see if there is any interest in them. Feel free to contact me at bob@mcssb.com if you would like more information. Thanks.
 
Oh a few things happened since then. I got it to run on x86 pc's in 2020 then I did a bringup on my ADC Super Six z80 back in 2021 with 8" and 5" floppies and hard drive with master and two slave terminals.
Both setups still run fine. I know nothing about your LBB's though.

Larry G
 
This is very cool. The first computer I ever wrote a program for was the IMS Series 8000 that my dad had at his radio station in the early 1980s. I'm getting ready to pick up most of the cards (and the backplane) for that system with the goal of eventually setting it up to run TurboDOS.

I've found a couple of drive images that will boot CP/M and then allow you to load TurboDOS from a second hard drive image. I'm interested in getting it the x86 version to work on a PC (5160?) but so far the only diskette images I've found seem to be for DOS commands that allow DOS to share TurboDOS resources, rather than actually allowing the PC to run TurboDOS.

Right now I'm going through the documentation found (mostly) on bitsavers, and just trying to get a handle on it. (And trying not to get distracted by the hardware documentation, which I've also been working through.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top