Re: Reward offered: Macintosh software for Corvus Omninet

The saga of can't get there from here ..

Well, it turned out that I had to dig out a 400K drive and attach it
to the motherboard on an LC III, after tearing the drive down to the
least amount of pieces possible, and starting over. The thing is, I
have a really nice working 400K drive .. for next time.

The procedure was basically similar to http://apple2.org/35Drv/index.html

What basically happened was over the years I've always just made 400K
backups using Copy II Mac in the day, and with the IIgs, SpeedySmith,
or later on, Photonix. So I've had this http://twitpic.com/ckx36
Constellation III set since it was released, and this particular one
has never been touched.

I used to install classroom LANs in the late 80's and very early 90's,
where the Apple II was involved. Many setups around the San Diego and
southwestern states that had either Corvus OmniNet or ELAN AROS III,
were setup by or serviced by me in the later years. DigiCard was just
too weird to mess with. :)

For many years I used a Corvus OmniDrive to run my BBS, the whole
thing was pretty cool because you could edit code, add files, etc-
while people were online. Gee, imagine what we take for granted
today.

Oh heck.. the fun there was in that, when you'd see a caller dial in,
go straight to AE and start looking for the latest and greatest. You
could have all kinds of fun. They do a directory, find Ultima V, and
pick a file to snag, you on the other computer hurry the hell up
and ..
]RENAME ULTIMAVD1<#342>,ULTIMAVD0<#342>
When AE says file not found, they do a catalog again, they might see
that it says D0, or they do another one, instead. D2.. well, rename D2
as D1. ;-) Just remember what you did so you can put it back when they
hang up. Or another sick one was to have a copy of the DOS 3.3 System
Master on the same volume but hidden from AE Pro. Hurry up and rename
the files so that whatever they choose to transfer, they actually get
the DOS 3.3 system master instead. :)

Anyhow, being as the only thing that has a floppy thats setup is a
IIgs and //e, I chose to use Photonix this time to make copies of the
disks and then use Shrinkit to make disk archives since that can be
moved to the Mac and uploaded, emailed, whatever.

Well, Photonix copies the disk. Great. "ding" at about 50%, then I
look and see "400K MFS" on the screen. I didn't even realize it was
400K. The original disks are generic, they don't say anything on the
shutter. Thinking back, I guess Constellation III could have been of
the 400K era, or more likely since the product was compatible with the
Mac 512K and did not require the enhanced ROM set, they shipped 400K
so it would work on anything.

So it's now creating red across the rest of the copy and I figured
thats normal, it's reading half the disk. The other half is
unformatted. (the top side of the disk). Next, I go to put the disks
into the IIgs which is a ROM 3, and it promptly informs me that it's
an MFS disk which I know, and that I should use a Macintosh to read
it. Yeah, thats fine. I was hoping Shrinkit GS would just let me image
the things.. and the ROM 3 has this other deficiency with the
SmartPort that when you select the Device to Archive in ShrinkIt, if
there is not a volume online the device does not show up.

Shrinkit GS does not support 5.25" disks as devices either, so this
isn't a problem there. My usual trick there is to put in some other
disk, so that the drive shows up, and then after it's showing and
selected, swap the media.

This is how you get ShrinkIt GS to offer you to format a floppy,
because you can't put a brand new unformatted disk in to unpack to. As
I said, it won't allow you to select the drive to write to it. Put in
something else, select it, swap the disk.

So ShrinkIt goes about it's business to read the disk and then about a
minute later errors out with an I/O error.

Okay, fine. It does this on all three, except two others take longer.
Turns out that what I had was one of the three original disks just did
not want to read from about 50% of the way through. That was the only
one I had tried in Photonix. Otherwise later on, when I tried the
others in Photonix they copied quickly, as I was just going to mail a
set of disks. I didn't remember which I was doing first, but when I
got to the one at the bottom of my small stack, it errored out in
Photonix again. So I saw that as I properly did remember doing years
back, I did use Photonix to copy 400K disks, this one had a real error
on it.

I've used the A2 to make copies of Mac and Lisa disks lots of times
back in the Apple dealer days. It was just easier than waiting for
Copy II Mac to load, and Photonix was like 10 times the speed.

I refurbished a couple 800K drives and a couple 1.44MB drives so that
I could try these disks again, or the one disk at least, as the drives
I'd been using all these years started to get picky about insertion
and ejecting anyway. Time to redo them. The carpenter's door always
swings crooked, and so does the disk drive refurbisher's drive.

Anyhow, some time passes, go to KC, come back again, all this in the
midst of the move from hell. I might as well have been moving across
town, two states over or whatever. It would have been easier than just
moving from one end, and one floor, to the other floor and other end
of the same house. So thats over with, I'm back from KC. Lets look at
this again..

Nope, nothing I can do wants to read that disk, and I start tearing
into stuff looking for more disks. I have to have a copy of these
things somewhere. Just where.. have the boxes of Mac disks gone.
http://twitpic.com/gwpwl. I did find something, but .. not 100% sure I
rely on what it says, so ... I keep trying. By now I'm in need of a
Mac with GCR support for another need as well, and this time I figure
I can do this too. So after some follies with getting said Macs to
boot with SCSI Voodoo cameo appearances from back in the day, I've
resorted to an LC III and the refurbished 400K drive that I had to get
out of the back end of a large walk in crate full of stuff.

The 400K drive read it just fine, the disks the contents moved to HFS
disks, the HFS disks can now be dealt with using GS/OS, the files can
be done with ShrinkIt GS on the file level even.

I had no inclination what so ever to deal with Stuffit and disk
images, or ShrinkWrap on the Mac. None at all. With the contents now
copied back onto a 1.44MB floppy and moved to the IIgs I can recreate
exact 800K images of the 400K disk set, so even though all this stuff
fits onto one disk, it's on three for archival sake.

The original 400K drive had no issues at all with reading that set of
disks, thats kind of a first to have to resort all the way back that
far down the food chain. Any Mac with system 7 or less can read a 400K
disk, Lisa or Mac variety.

So thats why there's so many variations on that download that I made
available.

Now, all during this I'm also actually working on a Corvus drive gone
bad and that was the other desire to have the software.

Constellation III was a release primarily for the Macintosh, as when
booted an Apple //e, or /// on the OmniNet, even if you had set up the
drive with Constellation III, the Apple II and /// support was still
Constellation II.

Also in the midst of all this, I am still not able to locate the set
of 5.25" Constellation II disks, and all the A2 archives out there
have only Constellation III and utility sets prior to it being
officially called the Constellation operating system. The original
Corvus drives, the H series ones, that used the ribbon cable did not
have the same setup as the OmniDrive. You could load Constellation II
onto the H series drives, but you needed a multiplexer to OmniNet
bridge box to get that drive on anything other than an Apple ][.

The OmniDrive had host adapters for the II, ///, Mac 128-Plus and SE
with serial port adapters. Additionally, there were Atari and TRS-80
Transporter interfaces.

The II and /// card are basically the same except that the
official /// card has no firmware on it and the card is a little
bigger so it reaches all the way forward into the case notches so it
doesn't move. If you added the firmware ROM onto the /// card you
could use it in a II- and just yank the ROM on a II card to use it in
a ///.

They worked all the way through to the IIgs, but the situation was
more optimal on the IIgs if you had newer firmware. In a similar way
to the ProFILE card, it worked just not as fast.

There's some other images of the OmniDrive stuff in the Twitpic
listings as well.
.

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