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Looking for information on the Victor Vicki

H

Haemogoblin

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 22, 2011
Messages
231
Location
Sheffield, England
Hey guys

I've seen one of these machines for sale and as I've always hankered for a portable green screen DOS system. I tried looking up on them but couldn't find much, other than a lot of people asking for boot disk.

Does anyone own one of these and can maybe fill me in? I'm guessing it doesn't use a standard format, maybe 360kb disks?
 
This PDF Document states that the 1.2M Floppy's are the same format as the Victor 9000/Sirus1.

If that is the case I have the following two files (Victor9000):
1. cpm11victor-kryoflux.7z
2.dos31victor-kryoflux.7z

Each file has track{00..83}.0.raw

These would have to be written to 5.25" Floppys, to verify they would boot.

Larry
 
How would one go about writing the images to floppy? Can it be done with a more modern system with a floppy drive?

The floppy drive does have me wondering how easy the system would be to use along side other MSDOS machines I have. I've read they are not IBM compatible, so you can't run regular IBM software on them. Only what was produced specifically for the Victor / Sirus range.
 
The Kryoflux Board can write the files back to floppy's, as that is what created the .RAW files (tracks).

I've used the HxC Software to convert all the .RAW files to a .SCP file of 25.7 MB (25,730,996 bytes) for cpm11_raw.scp and
24.4 MB (24,441,806 bytes) for dos31_raw.scp. But, I'm not 100% sure the HxC software conversion is 100% correct.
The newer GreaseWeazle can also write the .SCP files back to floppy's.

I'm just about ready to test my Version 1.0 GreaseWeazle Adapter Board. Parts arrived yesterday to allow me to finish it.

If you locate someone with a Kryoflux, it wouldn't take long to create two floppy's.

I searched and located a Victor Website, but it's currently down. It's also on the wayback machine
URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20111029083302/http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/

Appears to be a lot of Public Domain Software, plus Maintenance Manuals and Schematics etc.
Download all the files here: http://web.archive.org/web/20111029083302/http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/



Thanks.

Larry
 
Last edited:
It just so happens that I'm the chap currently selling a Vicki on Ebay in the UK.......I have sold a few previously having acquired a job lot of them from an old insurance company where they were used as insurance sales field force equipment back in the 80's.
I have had a few of them but have struggled to easily find disk images for the machines. The earlier ones I had did come with a 360K bootable MSDOS disk but I no longer have boot disks and really need someone with another Vicki (or equivalent) to provide a copy for me.

I'll see if I can find the link to some Kryoflux images I found a while back but you would obviously need access to such a device to write them out to disk.

They are nice machines and are built like a tank - its possible that owners of the previous 5 or so that I have sold might have got them to work but not seen anything through this forum.
 
I thought I was unique....

It looks like there are no less than three Vicki's on Ebay UK at the moment - mine is the cheapest one ;-)

The others are a portable with no keyboard and apparently no signs of life and a desktop Vicki but with a 3.5" drive but seems to be fully working with a monitor and possibly with a hard drive installed by the appearance of the screen display.
 
ldkraemer said:
The Kryoflux Board can write the files back to floppy's, as that is what created the .RAW files (tracks).

I've used the HxC Software to convert all the .RAW files to a .SCP file of 25.7 MB (25,730,996 bytes) for cpm11_raw.scp and
24.4 MB (24,441,806 bytes) for dos31_raw.scp. But, I'm not 100% sure the HxC software conversion is 100% correct.
The newer GreaseWeazle can also write the .SCP files back to floppy's.

I'm just about ready to test my Version 1.0 GreaseWeazle Adapter Board. Parts arrived yesterday to allow me to finish it.

If you locate someone with a Kryoflux, it wouldn't take long to create two floppy's.

I searched and located a Victor Website, but it's currently down. It's also on the wayback machine
URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20111029083302/http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/

Appears to be a lot of Public Domain Software, plus Maintenance Manuals and Schematics etc.
Download all the files here: http://web.archive.org/web/20111029083302/http://www.actsirius1.co.uk/



Thanks.

Larry
Click to expand...

The actsirius1 website has been down for more than a year. I did get a message back from the website owner indicating it would be back up soon (in about April last year).
As I recall though he didn't have any Vicki software.
 
I realise this is a bit of necromancy but I'm on lockdown and wondered what had been going on in victorland :) - those images (I created them) won't work on a vicki even if they can be written - it needs a different BIOS - which I don't think they can. The reason being that they were read on a normal fixed speed drive, and the drive electronics tidy up the bitcell timings. This doesn't work well with the variable speed disks from the victor and you lose data. Writing will have the same issues. The only way I think it's possible to do this with a kryoflux or greaseweazle is to adjust the rotation speed of the drive to ensure the fluxes arrive at a speed consumate with what the drive electronics expects. Likewise for writing.
 
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