[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[sampsa]

On Aug 9, 4:30 pm, Stephen Hoffman <seaoh... at hoffmanlabs.invalid>
wrote:
> On 2012-08-09 06:31:10 +0000, sampsa said:
>
> AFAIK, simh doesn't "do" physical device presentations.  There's no
> direct device I/O pass-through mechanism.   Nor would that pass-through
> really work, as there would need be something to convert the OpenVMS
> I/O activities within the address range that OpenVMS "thinks" is the
> controller chips, since how a VAX accesses its floppy drive junk I/O
> controller is undoubtedly different than how a PC box accesses its Junk
> I/O path.

Yup. Figured that out. But it did write the stuff to the disk (albeit
in one go) and read it back again successfully. Be interesting to
stick the disk in a real VMS box and see if it mounts.

Of course SIMH treats it as an 8" double-density RX02 when it's
actually a 1.44 MB 3.5" disk. No physical machines here so can't test
it.

Again, this is just for fun.



> The easiest working approach for reading the media contents would be to
> dd the floppy contents over into disk images, and connect those disk
> images.

Yup, that's what I'm doing now. Detach the image after DISMOUNT, dd it
to disk if necessary.


> You might also be able to put a disk image on the floppy drive to allow
> VMS to flash the light and scrape what's left of the oxide off the
> floppy media, but that's not going to allow you to read a VMS-format
> floppy loaded in the drive.

I don't own an 8" drive though, might be tricky :)

Sampsa