Message from a Moscow user

In a letter dated Friday July 18, 1997, Igor Gruzdev informed Andrew Mikheyev:

AM>> prefix). At one time I myself assembled Pentagon-128, and it still
AM>> works for me. Now I’ve connected it via LPT to IBM and am transferring floppy disks
AM>> to the screw.

IG> Mmm-mm... Would you like more details? Is this without alterations to the sinclair circuit? Can you really look at the program and
IG> how to connect it? And under is-dos? What is the program for IBM?

Yes, it’s all mine, of my own making. And there is no need to redo Sinclair, he has two ports on the music player. You use one for data, the other for control signals. But programming them for input/output takes a very long time due to index access to them, so the speed is low (8 KB/sec). In principle, I could throw it here, but everything is written there too disgustingly - it’s a shame to show it. I'm not so used to writing programs. I just did everything quickly, in one day I soldered it, programmed it, pumped it up. In addition, everything there is not universal -
it is only designed for transfer from ZX to PC.

P.S. Who would write decent software for data exchange between IBM and ZX. So that it would be possible to send individual files back and forth. I had such an idea, only
there is no time for everything, and it will be difficult to debug - there is no TV in the room where the IBM is located
:(

Sincerely, Andrew. Sunday July 20, 199723:40.

AM> There is a counter idea - to make a package in the HOBET style, but which would
AM> work with a remote drive. Those. you load it onto the IBM, in one
AM> window you have the IBM directory, and in the other - the directory of the floppy disk that sticks out in the
AM> Sinclair drive.
AM> Thus, it all comes down to writing a commander for IBM. And on
AM> Sinclair there will be a program that processes requests. According to my
AM> calculations, it will take
AM> a maximum of kilobytes.

You can. But why specifically for IBM? You can even use Speccy, otherwise it would be a waste to write two
versions.

bye, with all the best wishes, Pavel Fedin.

AM> This morning I wrote a letter here, where I suggested that Commander
AM> write
AM> to work with a remote Spectrum disk drive, and now, in the evening
AM> this idea came to my mind
AM> - what if you don’t write Commander, but write
AM> a driver that would manifested itself as drive 'B', but it
AM> would only receive data from the Spectrum drive. This way we can use hobeta
AM> as a communication program. How's it going? Cool, did I come up with this? :)

Not bad. And how did I not think of it myself before?

AM> There is one thing BUT - it will be possible to write this only if the job
AM> uses the interrupt functions Int 13h. If it works with the floppy drive
AM> directly through
AM> ports, then my idea is impossible to implement - you still have to
AM> write your own commander.

It must be through INT 13h - the sectors are read...

AM> I would try to write such a driver, but you want me came.
AM> Or throw it in the echo, otherwise they often ask, what kind of files are these
AM> *.$c and how to work with
AM> them...

I can’t - I’m an Amigot, and getting on the BBS is now somewhat problematic. :-(