Pertec ISA interface card

[Chuck(G)]

If the Catamount uses a 62-position D-sub connector, it quite likely is the same as the Overland/Chi cards.

[Gerardcjat]

Hello Antonio,

I have not answered your P.M. !! Shame on me !
Point is : I DO NOT have cable schematics.
- I DO have a cable that I can point to point trace, but I am not positive on what that cable it is for !!
- Qualstar 1052 on one side for sure, but on the other side ??

I will check tomorrow, and anyway, will "extract" the cable pinning.
OF course, Chuck(G) is probably right in his assumption ( as usual )

[DoubleD]

Thanks Chuck,

Yes, it does have the same D-Sub 62 but I want to be reasonably sure the wiring is the same before I attempt.

It would be very helpful if anyone who has the ATC-8 or ATC-16 could please check if the pinout is the same of the TX/Overland as described in this table:http://www.sydex.com/overcbl.html

Thanks a lot!

@ Gerard: No bother, I thought you were busy looking for that diagram!
However, if you have never hooked up your unit to any controller, checking the pinout of your cable (for ATC? PCTD? TX?) would be useless.

[Chuck(G)]

If it helps, I've used that chart to wire up a cable between a PCTD-16 controller and a Fujitsu 2444 drive; it works just fine. You can double-check by seeing if the pins labeled "GND" in the chart are signal grounds on the controller that you have.

[NeXT]

Incredible.

It's been almost seven years and this thread is still going.

[DoubleD]

Chuck, looks like you are right!
Thanks a million, hope to test the whole thing next weekend.

[DoubleD]

Incredible.

It's been almost seven years and this thread is still going.

"Listen, and understand! That Thread is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!!"

And you can only blame yourself for this! LOL

[asbesto]

Hi there, I'm happy to see this thread still alive

Here at "Museo dell'Informatica Funzionante" Computer Museum in Palazzolo Acreide, ITALY (http://museum.freaknet.org), we're trying to hack our QUALSTAR 1052 tape drive, to read raw data from it. We need this to recover some old computer tapes coming from a poland system (MERA-400, http://mera-400.pl)

We have an IBM 9348 drive but is only 1600/3200, this tapes are 800 BPI starting block, and data is at 1600, so our IBM drive can't read the data part, because the header is 800 bpi and give an error.

Obviously, we got the qualstar drive without any PERTEC interface board We only have his cable with that weird 3 row cannon.

So we took a look on schematics, and saw so many points from where we can maybe read some raw data.

We hooked an Arduino Mega, trying to read data from ENV, ZCD or other parts of the board - using RSTR (TP5) as a strobe, while the tape moves using the test mode (switch 1 on, others off). We have a tape written at 1600 BPI with a known pattern, but all we can read seem to be garbage - I think we can't find a good read strobe. We also don't have signals / data on J2 connector - reading there can be useful but nothing happens; when we read data on ENV connector (directly on the output of the LM319 line) we have data flowing also thru the "OUTREG" chips, but nothing on J2 (e.g. no IRSTR on pin 34).

It seem that, being in "test mode", the tape is not putting any data on J2 connector.

Any idea about how to read stuff, or about how to "fool" the drive forcing it to put data on J2 connector?

Any help is appreciated

Gabriele

[Al Kossow]

trying to read data from ENV, ZCD or other parts of the board - using RSTR (TP5) as a strobe

There won't be a single strobe to read all nine channels as raw flux transitions. You will need to digitize the channels and do phase decoding on each channel individually in software since there can be skew between tracks either on the original tape, or in the head stack.

[asbesto]

OK for the raw flux transitions - I can understand that I need to digitize and decode them - but doesn't the tape circuit do this? Can't I tap somewhere to read the decoded data directly? I mean, those data are fed to the PC interface, so somewhere they are in that circuit - can't we read them?

We spot TTL data on the output registers U40, U41, U42... they seem decoded, aren't they?