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Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1 Software

pdevine

pdevine

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 1, 2021
Messages
124
Location
Bay Area, California
Hi all,
I've been slowing building up an archive of software for the early 80's Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1 computer. I've been uploading copies of what I have found so far to https://archive.org/details/@pauldevine.

If anyone has any software for the machine, please let me know. I'd love to make a copy of what you have and send you back the originals. I'm particularly interested in any early copies of the Programmer's Toolkit or the various rarer operating systems, like Unix, UCSD Pascal, or Concurrent CP/M-86. I'm also in search of some of the early network drivers or the Victorlan server software. Finally, any source code related to floppies or hard drives would be welcome too. Really I'd like to get my hands on anything you come across or have sitting in your basement.

Some of the discoveries so far include many versions of MS-DOS, CP/M-86, and copies of dBase II, Multiplan 1.0, Autocad-86, and Wordstar 2.99—to name just a few.

Thanks,
Paul
 
Paul,

Welcome to the forum, Paul!

It's great to hear of anyone creating a software archive, for any platform. I don't know much about the Victor, but any piece of hardware is all but useless without the software.

- Alex
 
Can I ask how you are imaging the disks? I don't know much about the Victor 9000, but I've heard the disk format is difficult to transfer files from since they are somewhat unique. I made some 800K disks the other day for a mac using a greaseweazle with FluxEngine and noticed that FluxEngine recently added Victor 9000 support.
 
I'm also curious how that works - someone attempted to archive several with a Kryoflux a while back on the Kryoflux forums, and that resulted in a very badly noisy dump. Not something that could be written back.
 
It was me that tried with the kryoflux - it really couldn't get them properly. I've now been using a greaseweazle and it manages perfectly. The fluxengine software can decode to sector images. Greaseweazle can also write index aligned SCPs back and they do work on a real V9k. Not bad for a little open source board :)

My workflow for duplicating would be greaseweazle->SCP file->fluxengine software->sector image->fozztexx's tool to extract files & manipulate, or turn sector image back into index aligned SCP, SCP->greaseweazle->fresh floppy.

Using a TEAC FD55-GFR for reading and writing. Single and double sided images work fine.
 
I've been working with both the Fluxengine and the Applesauce disk imaging hardware. They can both correctly read Victor 9k disks now, and momentarily the Applesauce will join Fluxengine in being able to write them; there's an Applesauce beta I've tested that's working well for writing. The author's of the tools worked with me to adapt the format to the disks. I've been uploading mainly applesauce recordings to archive.org, although lately I'm trying to make an effort to put fluxengine flux recordings in there as well in case someone only has one tool. I'm uploading both a sector .img file, the actual contents as files, and a flux recording of the disk. I've also been trying to include a photo of the original. A good minority of the disks include some paper that describes the contents, and I'm including photos of those where they exist. Unfortunately the CPM disks don't extract individual files so I'm just uploading the .img and flux recordings.

The Victor format presents particular challenges as the Victor drives adjust the speed of the disks as it writes the files, to keep the bit density consistent as the tracks change size due to the inner tracks having a smaller circumference. These disks were recording 1.2MB at a time that IBM was storing 360K. They really pushed the hardware available. In addition, the Victor had a PLL to compensate for mistiming that was particularly forgiving, along with a lack of precompensation it means that reading the disks on standard hardware is quite error prone. Hence the earlier attempt by Kryoflux having lots of challenges. I believe that's been getting an update as well.

A lot of the disks I'm working with have had challenges being read as they're from 1982-1989 and have some bit rot. About 30% of the disks read cleanly the first pass around. About another 30% will read after ~5 attempts. The remaining 30% have a lot of corrupted files. I've found that the fluxengine can read some files, the applesauce some others, and I have one Victor 9000 and another Sirius 1 that have 4 drives between them. I have 4 modern floppy drives and the 4 vintage Victor drives. Each of the drives and access methods can see different parts of the disk. For many of the disks I've had to read various bits across all the drives to reconstruct what's on the original disk. It's been generally taking anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 hours to reconstruct each disk. I've been trying to make sure the end product has all the same files and remains bootable if it originally was. The original owner of the machine I purchased was meticulous about making 2 backups of each disk. So generally there's an A disk and a B disk. I can often recreate the contents by meticulously pulling from each of the copies across the 8 drives and just trying endlessly. I'm a bit stubborn. So far I haven't had a disk that I couldn't peace together—though there are 1-2 files that have been lost across 40 disks or so.

Fozztexx's https://gitlab.com/FozzTexx/vtools is also quite handy as drdanj has pointed out.
 
Touch wood, everything I've done with the method I outlined above has worked first time. Perhaps I'm lucky or my disks were written by a fairly stable victor! I've not actually tried direct writes of sector images back to disc using the fluxengine software - is that working reasonably well? (The number of places this conversation takes place amuses me :D - for clarity I'm danielj elsewhere).
 
Daniel, I was meaning to respond to your post about your workflow. I do something similar, but it's greaseweazle->fluxengine software->sector image.
I don't make any intermediary file and just read the disk directly into fluxengine. What's the benefit of making the intermediary scp?
 
I tend to make an SCP just out of force of habit for archiving purposes, but I also wasn't completely trusting in fluxengine making SCPs as I haven't really ever used it for that, so I just do the initial dump with the greaseweazle commandline then make a decision about how I'm going to manipulate the resulting flux file afterwards :D

Fluxengine can produce an SCP dump at the same time as doing the sector image, so I think that's probably the neatest way to do it assuming the files it creates are compliant, I can just never remember the command line! I prefer SCP over the fluxengine format simply as lots of different tools can read it and as such it's become something of a standard.
 
When I use my greaseweazle I have fluxengine save a flux archive as it's reading the disks. I prefer to have it also create a Victor 9000 img file at the same time because it’ll retry sectors that don’t validate the checksum. If I do a straight scp copy I don't think there's any validation. I made a little bash script for myself as I found remember the commands frustrating too. I usually use the fluxengine .flux format to archive the fluxes but you can also save the output as an .scp as you create the .img file.
 
You are of course doing things the sensible way - straight through FE is clearly that :D I really should just get a batch file in there.
 
Can anyone in the UK write a boot disk for me :)

We have a couple of machines to get running.

I think a greaseweasle sounds like a tool we need but at the moment I just want to fix the seized motor and then see if the machine will boot :)
 
Is there a manual for kryoflux on the greaseweazle and how to create Victor disks ? (and how to install it on MacOS ? I think I need Python)

I have a V4 on order and just need to find a disk drive. the GFR ? is that so its got the power to write high density ? I have a 55F ?

I suppose I'm looking for a masterclass :)
 
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