I remember working at a Commie dealer around 1983 and they had a demo 9060, list price CA$6,000. Yup a grand a MB..... Kind makes that $200 1TB SSD look like a pretty good deal, eh.
What a great project and video -- gratz on the successes! I giggled a bit at the story about buying bad drives, as I went through the same thing, though I eventually lucked out from a local electronics junker. In the end though, the lack of subdirectories just killed me and I decided that CBM 8x50 floppies make pretty good 'subdirectories', organization-wise. :)
Thank-you. I'm glad that you enjoyed the video. Was thrilled that it all worked out as well as it did. Initially I had my doubts when I first received the 9060. I can see that you'd prefer an 8050 or 8250, as it is absolutely true that it'd be easier to "subdirectory-ize" your software on a few of those disks over a HD with a seemingly endless directory.
There are plenty of 3.5" to 5.25" drive mounts that include both the horizontal and vertical screw holes, no need to 3D print. o.o They're made of nice metal.
Thanks for pointing that out. At the time however I had a dead MFM drive so it made sense to simply create a mount and utilize what I had. Plus, the frame of the ST-225 is quite robust, and offers a really nice solid platform onto which I mounted the SASI and DOS boards and hang the DREM underneath. The 3D printed Mount only took me a couple hours to design, and am very pleased with the end result. I don't think, for me, I'd do it any other way. But, I do appreciate your comment.
Only the newer version of the firmware takes that long to format (there's a printed note from Commodore about the change in time with the new revision). The older version was much quicker, so perhaps it only did one pass, but for some reason, they felt it was important to do the extra pass. Perhaps it's to catch marginally bad sectors? Drives used to be a lot less reliable, and it was 100% ordinary for MFM drives to have a few bad sectors. Many vintage systems had either a replacement table scheme or the ability to have "bad" files soaking up the bad blocks, but a few only worked with perfect drive surfaces.
Yes, errors on HD's back then was commonplace. I concur that it swept through the format 6 times in an attempt to encounter errors prior to concluding that the format was successful. I was not aware that the older revision of DOS3 had fewer sweeps. Thanks for commenting on that! I will have to give that a try.
The seller seemed pretty indifferent about the whole thing. Kinda not surprising given the lack of care given to packaging it up. I ended up getting a whole "$100" back. It was that or return it. I wanted the drive more than I wanted the $$$ so I took his hundred and moved on.
Are you familiar with the old sega vector games? They used a electrohome G08 vector monitor with 2 custom ic chips.: are you familiar with them? We seek a programmer guy that can help duplicate them.. please reply!
Quite the journey... Thanks for the information dump and sharing your experience with these!
Thank-you for your comment. It turned out to be a fun project. I'm looking forward to trying to be successful in expanding the capacity beyond 7.5mb.
I remember working at a Commie dealer around 1983 and they had a demo 9060, list price CA$6,000. Yup a grand a MB..... Kind makes that $200 1TB SSD look like a pretty good deal, eh.
Yup, the cost of storage these days is nothing compared to where it all started!
What a great project and video -- gratz on the successes!
I giggled a bit at the story about buying bad drives, as I went through the same thing, though I eventually lucked out from a local electronics junker.
In the end though, the lack of subdirectories just killed me and I decided that CBM 8x50 floppies make pretty good 'subdirectories', organization-wise. :)
Thank-you. I'm glad that you enjoyed the video. Was thrilled that it all worked out as well as it did. Initially I had my doubts when I first received the 9060. I can see that you'd prefer an 8050 or 8250, as it is absolutely true that it'd be easier to "subdirectory-ize" your software on a few of those disks over a HD with a seemingly endless directory.
There are plenty of 3.5" to 5.25" drive mounts that include both the horizontal and vertical screw holes, no need to 3D print. o.o They're made of nice metal.
Thanks for pointing that out. At the time however I had a dead MFM drive so it made sense to simply create a mount and utilize what I had. Plus, the frame of the ST-225 is quite robust, and offers a really nice solid platform onto which I mounted the SASI and DOS boards and hang the DREM underneath. The 3D printed Mount only took me a couple hours to design, and am very pleased with the end result. I don't think, for me, I'd do it any other way. But, I do appreciate your comment.
Only the newer version of the firmware takes that long to format (there's a printed note from Commodore about the change in time with the new revision). The older version was much quicker, so perhaps it only did one pass, but for some reason, they felt it was important to do the extra pass. Perhaps it's to catch marginally bad sectors? Drives used to be a lot less reliable, and it was 100% ordinary for MFM drives to have a few bad sectors. Many vintage systems had either a replacement table scheme or the ability to have "bad" files soaking up the bad blocks, but a few only worked with perfect drive surfaces.
Yes, errors on HD's back then was commonplace. I concur that it swept through the format 6 times in an attempt to encounter errors prior to concluding that the format was successful. I was not aware that the older revision of DOS3 had fewer sweeps. Thanks for commenting on that! I will have to give that a try.
@@8BitResurgence There appears to be a RevA (posted by me) and a RevB on zimmers.
Thanks@@ethandicks3, I'll check it out.
I hope you had some firm words with the seller and got some money back. They are liable for the shipping damage.
The seller seemed pretty indifferent about the whole thing. Kinda not surprising given the lack of care given to packaging it up. I ended up getting a whole "$100" back. It was that or return it. I wanted the drive more than I wanted the $$$ so I took his hundred and moved on.
Curious what model the miniscribe was that worked? I have a 9060 I want to upgrade to 9090 and don't make fabricating brackets.
I had two Mac G5s trashed in shipping that way.
Are you familiar with the old sega vector games? They used a electrohome G08 vector monitor with 2 custom ic chips.: are you familiar with them? We seek a programmer guy that can help duplicate them.. please reply!
Hello. Thanks for your comment. I wouldn't be interested in pursuing such a project.
Would you like to sell you old power supply for the D9060? i have a 110V supply and would like to switch to a 230V
Sure, send me an e-mail (8bitresurgence@gmail.com)