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Thanks for the response!

The group moved on to
https://groups.io/g/UCSDPascal
because the new Yahoo owner (Verizon?) decided to remove all user content in 2019.

A spidered image (from 2019) can be downloaded here
http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/ucsd/yahoo/files.zip
or here
http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/ucsd/yahoo/messages.zip
(with meta info)

Two utilites looked good - but failed on the skewed images - so i needed additional steps (see post above)

a) PSYSREAD (Delphi, with PAS source) complete with a nice GUI (Windows only?)
[included in the file dump from 2019]

b) command line utilites from Jefferson Computer Museum ('bu.exe' = UCSD burst files to disk)
[must be obtained from web site ?]

Woot. Just won 80 rainbow disks... I'll post when they arrive and I've read them in

I finally got around to examining the Rainbow disks I won last September.
They have Windows for Rainbow that looks fairly standard "7 disk" collection (the one that has both VAXmate and Rainbow drivers that people here have reported issues with).
Utility disks for the DEC (3 different kinds), CHS, DM220 and ACT winchesters. I'm unfamiliar with ACT, but I think it was some custom thing because there is also CP/M for ACT and MS-DOS for ACT "master" disks.
And a lot of different application software. I'll see about organizing it when I have time to read all these in.
Oh, and a lot of blank disks that might be the personal backup of somebody's computer from 1986 (the labels are unclear, and some labels have fallen off due to the march of time.

It could be useful to document the registers accessed.

If i remember correctly, registers not wired are logged (when a certain log level is set)...

I've finally started to read the disks (long story, too many other projects). So far the most interesting thing is the source code to drivers for the ACT Winchester Drives, sold in Australia (sadly the CPM disk was 'unformatted' according to kyroflux)
And a drive with the drivers for the Duncan MAC Donald, INC's DM220 winchester disk. Some track didn't read, but it sure looks like the disk had so little data on it that these tracks don't matter.
The CHS diskette also had some interesting data, but a few tracks early in the disk didn't read, so I need to see if they 'mattered' or not. Preliminary indicators are that it's all junk though.
The 4 copies of DEC's Winchester Utility/Diag disk (BL-W9688-M3) which we have lots of other copies of all seemed to read OK.
This is only a quick sampling of the disks... I'll post a pointer to the archive once I get them all read in...

Also, there's been little to no activity in the last year that I've been away... what's up with that?

A hobbyist project where people work on what they want to work on? I wasn't aware MAME was slavery.

I was wondering why the change from the past when more than a year's lull was unusual. Was there some news? Had the discussion moved? Had people left? Was there some issue with the code people were having that meant it was getting too hard to modify and fix? Was there some specific reason? Or were things just slacking off as people moved on to other challenges? .. by no means was it demand for anything or that anyone must work for my pleasure or ... slavery? Just curious about news of the last year, that's all...

As far as I'm aware the Rainbow works well enough for what people are doing and nobody familiar with the platform has stepped up to do more with it. This is how it is with computer support in MAME; if you have someone who wants to do the lifting for that platform, it's gonna have good constantly-evolving support. If you don't, it doesn't.

@Bsdimp: I sent you a personal message (here).

Hello forum!

I have been working on a (real) DEC Rainbow 100-A (128K), and one of my challenges has been to dump the ST-506 drive that it came with. I ended up writing a disk dumping utility (based on disk-xfer)

MAME has been extremely useful to me during development, since I've been able to test nearly the entire process virtually before trying it on the real hardware.

I've been uploading binaries to emulated Rainbow via the virtual serial connection using kermit/lcterm, experimenting with various stuff using DEBUG.COM and eventually successfully running the entire disk imaging process on MAME.

Big thanks to everyone who has been involved with MAME and the Rainbow emulation!

Missing info from this thread

While reading this thread, I've spotted some stuff that seems really useful, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be available anymore.

Basically all the dropbox links are now dead, but I'm especially missing these ones, I think mostly from Bavarese:

• Conversion RB100A to B (RBCONVRT.ZIP or RBCONVERT.ZIP) (github reference)
• skew_unskew.7z
• CODEBLUE_3.x_UPDATE_rev.20160804.7z
• IFORMAT_RECOVERED.7z
• POST 3.1 FIXES-JAN-1990.7z
• First_steps_Rainbow 100-B_January_2019_edition.pdf
• anything bsdimp's disk collection that are not yet available in online archives

If the authors, or anyone else still has these files lying around on their hard drive, I would be very interested in accessing them!

Issues with MAME

Like I mentioned, MAME's Rainbow emulation has been very valuable. However, there are some stability issues. Here are some problems I've encountered:

• Floppy access fails - (screenshot https://imgur.com/UTT1gn0) somehow only works on my debian virtual machine
• Sometimes crashes - I should probably start running MAME under debugger to get some more information
• Always crashes when re-connecting to serial port - but this can be worked around with a multiplexer

My ROMs

An older comment here says we're missing many of the language ROMS. I believe the ROM on my 100A might be the Finnish language ROM. I've dumped it using DEBUG.COM with the helpful instructions found here, and posted them online. I don't know if posting it here would break forum rules, but the sha1 is:

605a7a12b0c49445f76281203cbe7eed63d89222 rb100a-fi.e91