Hello everyone. I have now collected enough hardware, software and knowledge to start playing with HP-IL and my HP-41. Over time, I have collected two 82160A HP-IL Modules, two 82161A Tape Drives, an 82162A Printer, an 82163A Video I/F, an 82164A RS-232 I/F, an 82973A PC I/F and an 82183A Extended I/O Module. Last week I got the final piece I wanted, a 9114B 3 1/2" Disk Drive.
I've also been reading the HP-IL Introductory Guide as recommended in the Extended I/O manual which is a good read to learn more about how HP-IL works. Included in one of the tape drives is a tape that has the software for demonstrating the capabilities of the 41 system. I ran that over the weekend and successfully tested the tape drives, the printer, the video I/F and the Extended Function and Time modules built into the 41CX. So far so good.
I have about a dozen tapes (about half being new in their wrappers) and I want to make a backup of the demo tape. Since I just got the 9114 along with 10 disks, I thought I would use the Mcopy command in the Extended I/O module to copy the data from the tape to a 3 1/2" disk. Even though I reformatted the disk using Newm, I get hardware handshaking errors when I try copying the media on the 41CX.
I hooked just the two tape drives and had similar problems along with when trying to get a Dir from the tape drives and it reports invalid media even though they read fine before. So, I've broken the loop down and all peripherals appear to work when they are alone on the loop with the 41CX.
I suspect that some of the interconnecting loop cables are bad or perhaps one of the HP-IL connectors is intermittent. My question is, finally, can I use Mcopy (loop is set to 1=tape drive, 2=disk drive) to copy files from the tapee to disk? Also, are there any issues I need to be aware of to keep the HP-IL loop reliable? Finally, when using Nmda what number should I use for the directory size? 080?
Thanks for the feedback.
Gerry