Winchester Connection

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.