I am interested in finding out more about the co-operative effort to
develop a QIC-40/80 (/117) driver for OS/2. I have begun some work on
building a "tape aware" floppy controller, which is a mundane floppy
driver with ioctl() extensions to allow for the QIC-117 commands, drive
enabling and modified timeouts.
My idea is to have command line arguments to the floppy driver which
define the tape support. The floppy types would be
360/720/1.2/1.44/2.88/Q40/Q80. There is an additional argument to
define to enable/disable codes which are usual extensions to QIC-117.
I have been splitting the QIC-80 spec into 'driver' and 'library'
portions. Tape commands tend to handled by the driver, but
construction of the file set is done in user space.
If you know how much of this work is redundant, or useful to others,
please let me know. My drive is an Archive SuperHornet (XL), QIC-80.
I am willing to test other drivers on this hardware if anyone wishes,
so that not only CMS drives are tested.
I'll get some more coherent info to you if you like.
==========================================================================
Fletch Holmquist (206) 823-2596 (home)
ESCA Corporation (used to work for Philips) (206) 822-6800 (work)
fletcher@esca.com (206) 889-1700 (fax)
Personally I think this approach is good. It would be technically cleaner
to have separate floppy and tape drivers but since tapes are hacked onto
the floppy controller, the combined version might work far better.
I suspect that more people are working on drivers than this list detects.
It could very well be that some people have teamed up in the meantime
and are working together without me knowing this. If this is the case,
it could be of use to broadcast it to the world so we are not doing
things twice.
The LINUX guys have dropped in and are working on actual code as well.
And a sales woman of CMS has appeared on the Net, advocating Sytos+,
but what else could you expect. At least, CMS *IS* on the Net now.
Many people mailed me rumours about CMS drivers for W* NT. Apparently
CMS wrote some beta drivers to support their drives with NT when it
appears out of the vapour cloud. Rumours say that these drivers are
not 100% NTish but just hacked W* drivers. Time will tell...
Please, anyone who is actually working on code, drop me a line,
so we can at least trace the progress of this project.
Regards, keep programming,
Jeroen
-- Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers, research engineer at | Stop connecting computers; Infolab, Tilburg University, The Netherlands | start connecting people!