General Category > LisaList2
Deserializing UniPlus UNIX?
jamesdenton:
Have you tried a different compact flash card? It's possible there are some issues reading/writing to the card. Also, do you recall which mode/target combinations you used to initialize the compact flash card originally?
blusnowkitty:
--- Quote from: jamesdenton on July 21, 2020, 09:56:36 am ---Have you tried a different compact flash card? It's possible there are some issues reading/writing to the card. Also, do you recall which mode/target combinations you used to initialize the compact flash card originally?
--- End quote ---
It's been able to run GEM(DOS) and Office System fine. I don't remember the setting offhand but I've left my X/Profile in the default configuration it ships in that works with LOS and MacWorks.
blusnowkitty:
Big bump, I know - I got a real 5MB ProFile yesterday so I hooked it up and tried to get UniPlus going again. This time, as soon as I specified w(0,0) at the copy prompt, the heads immediately crashed against the end stop and behaved as if they were trying to go further. No lasting damage as far as I can tell, thankfully.
What I did notice is that the installation instructions seem to be assuming that you'll have a 10MB disk installed, which would be consistent with how the real ProFile suddenly shot to the end of disk and kept trying to go further. I'm pretty sure I was using a 5MB STAR with my X/ProFile; I couldn't figure out how to set a 10MB STAR without it complaining. I wonder if it's possible that since the X/ProFile has nothing to physically crash into, it was "overformatting" my 5MB STAR with 10MB settings and somehow wrapping around to the beginning of the 5MB image? This might explain why the installer would die when it attempted to boot from the X/ProFile.
ETA: Aha, I saw Ray's post on absurd Uniplus disk sizes and it seems my assumption on it expecting a 10MB disk is correct :)
rayarachelian:
--- Quote from: blusnowkitty on March 16, 2021, 09:24:04 am ---ETA: Aha, I saw Ray's post on absurd Uniplus disk sizes and it seems my assumption on it expecting a 10MB disk is correct :)
--- End quote ---
Well, almost. It doesn't expect a 10MB or a 5MB ProFile, rather it has two different sets of entries for swap/root in it's partition table. One set is for 5MB ProFiles, and another for 10MB ProFiles, and then the instruction sheet: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/unisoft/UniPlus+_System_V_Installation_Instructions.html tells you which one to use for swap or mkfs.
So it's really a bit of a trick that allows it to function without detecting the size.
My guess is that early on, Apple shared details about the ProFile disk protocol, but not about the special block 0xffffff that has that info in it.
compu_85:
I found this article this morning... it looks like Apple commissioned UniSoft to do the port for the Lisa:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212052600/http://www.cfcl.com/~eryk/weblog/archives/000183.html
-J
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