Dying PCjr drive; options?

[Dave Dunfield]

>Ironically, I have a 5150 with the full-length FDC with a very long port on it 
>(something like 40-pin female?) that I assume I could connect drives to... but 
>I have no idea what the pinout is or where to obtain a cable.  I am not the 
>soldering type (watch me duck as the flying tomatoes come from the peanut gallery)

If I recall correctly, the 37-pin 'D' connector on the back of early XT
controllers is 1:1 with the 34 pin ribbon cable, and you can use a ribbon
cable 'D' connector to make up a nice tidy cable (check position on pin-1).

Btw, I made some changes to ImageDisks Align/Test function this morning which
may be useful to you. I added a real-time display of the following bits from
status register 3 at the top of the screen:

  F - Fault
  W - write protect
  R - Ready
  Z - Track 0
  D - Two sided

In this case, 'Z' would let you see exactly when the track-0 sensor comes
on and off (as you adjust it's position).

I also added commands to Format and to Write individual tracks "on the fly"
from the test function (there was already a function to read tracks). So now
you can do pretty much anything the drive is capable of under manual control.

I should have it posted in a day or two.

Regards,
Dave
-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Collector of vintage computing equipment:
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html