It's been a hell of a day! HP 9845/2x i8008/Sage II/2x Grid/TI

[Tony Duell]

> >> >I haev a Sage II (the later model with half-height 80 cylinder drives),
> >> 
> >>    That's like mine but it only has one HH drive. Any idea if these will
> >> handle four floppy drives? The manual says that it could handle four
> >
> >The schematics in the back of my Owner's Manual only show DS0 and DS1 
> >wired up, so I guess it only handles 2 floppies.
> 
>    I haven't looked at the schematics yet but I suspected as much.

Strange... I always look at the schematics first, if they're available 
(then source listings, and finally any user-manaul type of info...).


> 
> >
> >> Winchester drives. IF you have the Winchester board. I don't :-(  It
> >
> >Nor do I. But to tie in to a thread a few weeks back, I have a 
> >third-party board in mine. It's fixed on pillars stuck to the main board, 
> >and connects to the 2 50 pin bus headers. It contains a few TTL chips, 
> >and has a 20 pin header that's designed to link to a Pluto graphics unit 
> >(or at least that's what I think it's for). Alas I don't have any 
> >software to drive it.
> 
>    What's a Pluto graphics unit? The Sage only comes with512k of memory

The Pluto was a reasonable hi-res (for the time) graphics display system 
with its own 8088 microprocessor. Jules Richarson found one a few weeks 
back iIRC. I hvve one somewhere, it came with a Sharp MZ80-B, not with 
the Sage, but I think it's the same unit.

> (max). The Winchester adapter also contains up to 512k bytes of additional
> RAM. Any ideas about how to built a RAM card that can be used to increase
> the memory of the standard Sage?

Well, you have the system bus on those 2 50 pin headers. It should be 
fairly easy to wire up some modern SRAM chips to those, with a bit of 
address decoding logic. 

> >> CPM-68k for it so I'm on the look out for those.
> >
> >I hate to mention this, but IIRC Don Maslin's archive contained CP/M 68k
> >for the Sage :-(
> 
>     I wonder who finally ended up with his archive? Several people tried to
> take it over.

Oh for %deity's sake... There are 2 threads about this at the moment on 
classiccmp. Do you actually _read_ the list ? :-)

> 
> >
> >All (!) we have to do is find some way of transfering disk images to me 
> >in a format that I can actually make use of.....
> 
>      Snail Mail! I'll make copies as soon as I get it fired up. I need
> backup copies anyway.

Which means I'd better dig out my Sage again. I think I know where I put it.

-tony