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 The Winchester Connection (also known as
WinConn) expanded
MICROCode Consulting's commercial offerings in the 1980s to encompass hard drive
support for CP/M and QP/M. Using the Western Digital
WD-1002 hard disk controller board and the X-120 expander card by Emerald Microware, this small
add-on driver offered a versatile package that supported numerous
Winchester/hard drives as well as various floppy drives. Written in Z-80 assembler for use under
QP/M, CP/M
2.x and compatibles, features of the Winchester Connection include:
- accommodate up to TWO physical hard drives
- each hard drive could be up to 64Mb in size
- warm-boot from the hard drive (for super-fast restarts)
- bad block lockout and full error recovery
- support for up to FOUR floppy drives
- user-defined logical-to-physical drive mapping
- full and incremental backup and restore utility
- no programming required, all setup is via an intuitive visual interface
Hardware
There are two pieces of hardware needed by your system for the Winchester Connection
to be used:
- For Xerox and Bigboard computers, an adaptor board that plugs into your Z-80 processor socket to provide additional I/O
in the SASI1 standard at 80H (default) is necessary.
Other systems that already contain additional I/O may not need this extender
but have to support the SASI interface. Emerald Microware's X-120 board
provided such a capability. (If more detailed schematic information becomes available, it
will be put here.)
- A Western Digital WD-1002 (or WD-1002X if you do not need floppy
support) is a must. The WD-1002 has hardware connectors for two MFM-interface
hard drives and a floppy drive connector. It is controlled via the SASI
interface. (Both MFM hard drives and the WD-1002 are hard to find these
days.)
Downloads
| Package |
Version |
Date |
Size (bytes) |
Download time
(28.8K baud) |
Click to
download |
| Winchester Connector package |
4.7 |
Jan 1986 |
42k |
16sec |
winconn.lbr |
| Winchester Connection documentation |
4.7 |
Jan 1986 |
84k |
31sec |
winconn.pdf |
| Winchester Connection package + doc |
4.7 |
Jan 1986 |
87k |
32sec |
winconn.zip |
Installation
Install this package as follows:
- Ensure all of your hardware is properly installed and operational.
You should know the base address of your SASI interface (default for X-120
is 80H).
- Install the software package entails running NULU on your CP/M or
QP/M
system and extracting the files to your system to some drive/user area,
likely drive A, user 0 as this is operating system area where you would want
your operating
system hard disk BIOS.
- Run HUTIL to set up your system per
the instructions in the Winchester Connection
documentation.
This is restricted for personal use software that is provided
without any warranty
whatsoever as described in the legacy Z-80 home
page.
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1SASI is a hardware and software standard that uses a
bi-directional parallel interface and employs a pre-defined protocol for
communication with mass storage devices (such as as hard drive controller).
SASI is the natural predecessor to the SCSI interface.
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MICROCode
Consulting "The
way software should be written"