ADTPro Lisa Profile Transfer

[fri0701]

Hi all,

I used ADTPro on my Apple III to transfer a complete image of a Lisa ProFile drive to my modern Mac. I'd like to use this drive image as a boot device in LisaEm, but the program doesn't seem to recognize it as a valid image. Has anyone successfully done what I'm trying to do here, or does anyone have any tips?

Thanks!

 

[fri0701]

Reading more about this, I'm probably asking the impossible, since I doubt ADTPro reads the tag bytes correctly off the drive. Unfortunately, I don't have much knowledge of BLU... I might have to dig into the documentation and see what other options exist.

 

[sunder]

Yes, BLU will do exactly what you want. see: http://sigmasevensystems.com/blumanual.html

You want H)ard Disk Functions -> R)ead from Disk to Serial Port - this will transfer from the Lisa's Serial port B at 56.7Kbps to another machine over X/Modem - note on Linux that I've had issues with minicom on linux where it will transfer the whole thing, but the end will fail so minicom will delete the file it downloaded. Not sure why, but what I've done to get around that is to make a hard link (as root) from another terminal window of the temporary transfer file, so that when minicom deletes it, it will still remain. YMMV.

LisaEm uses libdc42 for its profile images, BLU uses a different format. I have an experimental blu--to-dc42 program here: https://github.com/rayarachelian/lisaem/blob/master/src/tools/src/blu-to-dc42.c

which may or may not work - it doesn't seem to work with Widgets, but might for a ProFile.

Give it a try. (git clone the latest LisaEm off github and compile it yourself by running ./build.sh from the top level, but you'll need to have wxWidgets installed as well - see the README.md and the scripts directory which contains wxWidgets builders.) If you're on MacOS the latest beta has binary versions for blu-to-dc42 in the Command Lines folder of the DMG: https://lisaem.sunder.net/downloads/LisaEm_1.2.7-BETA_-_2020.03.31.dmg

The main thing is to do the BLU transfer which takes a few hours depending on what size ProFile you have. Once you have that, even if the conversion program doesn't work, you can keep the BLU image until I fix the converter.

 

[fri0701]

Thanks, Sunder! This'll be very helpful.

Is there a modern Mac utility/program for grabbing bytes from serial that you'd recommend? I have a DB15-DB9-USB cable setup I use with my Apple III for ADTPro that I'm hoping will also work for the BLU transfer.

 

[sunder]

On modern Mac OS X, you can probably use the brew.sh package system to install something like minicom which will work in Terminal.app or iTerm2.app if you don't mind that. Assuming your db9<-> USB cable is recognized by macos when you plug in, it should work, otherwise you'll need to obtain drivers.

You might also need a null modem adapter between the DB25 and a DB9<->DB25 on the Lisa and the USB serial cable.

see: https://pbxbook.com/other/mac-tty.html for some drivers and advice.

I'd give ZTerm a try on your mac and see if it will work, it won't work with catalina as that's a horrowshow dumpsterfire of incompatibility and overreaching totalitarian nightmare security, and possibly spyware now, but if you've got something earlier, do give ZTerm a shot. http://www.dalverson.com/zterm/

I've never tried these on mac os x, but googling around, they seem reasonable, so if ZTerm doesn't work, give them a shot, see which work for you and which have Xmodem built in.

https://www.emtec.com/cgi-local/download.php?what=ZOC7 (macOS)&link=zoc/zoc7257.dmg&ext=html

http://cutecom.sourceforge.net/

http://www.furrysoft.de/?page=goserial

The great thing about BLU is once you get it going, you can control it from the terminal program rather than having to go back and forth between it and the Lisa, and seeing BLU's menu on your terminal program is a good indicator that communications are working fine between your Lisa and your mac.

 

[Dog Cow]

http://www.furrysoft.de/?page=goserial

This is what I use: goSerial. Use its Logging option and you can get the raw binary byte stream in a file.

 

[fri0701]

I ended up using ZTerm, and it looks like it worked! I now have 3 Lisa ProFile disk images on my modern computer.

I ran all 3 of these through the "blu-to-dc42" utility and I now have 3 .dc42 images. None of these boot in LisaEm, however. My plan was then to set one of my dumped ProFile images on a virtual dual parallel port card and then boot from a fresh Lisa Office System install on the internal parallel port. However, when I boot from a LOS 3.1 ProFile image on the parallel port, no other ProFiles connected to dual parallel port cards show up. Do I need the ROM for that card to see drives at all?

Thanks for all your help!

 

[sunder]

Good to know ZTerm works!

Since the conversion didn't work, just hang on to the BLU images until I fix the bugs, might take a while, but you've done the hard work already. I'll try to image some of my own ProFiles and see what's needed to fix that tool. The last effort I made on that was related to Widgets, which almost worked, but not quite. Likely they both suffer the same issue, though BLU Widget images are slightly different.

In terms of LisaEm, yes, you'd need both the boot ROM as well as the dual parallel card ROM for them to show up in the boot menu as a dual parallel card as a bootable option.

But once you boot into LOS, LisaEm will lie to the running OS and tell it there's a card in that slot. But you may need to open the LOS Control Panel or Preferences or whatever it's called to tell LOS that there's a card in that slot and it has a ProFile and not an ADMP or some other device - LOS isn't exactly "Plug and Play".

There's also some issues with LOS where if you move the drive from one port to another it won't boot and it will return some error like 10727 or like it, so try to keep track of which port each ProFile was used on. I don't believe other OS's have that issue, but then again, right now LisaEm only runs LOS. You'd also want to make sure you set up the preferences to match the type of Lisa you have - i.e. I/O ROM 88 vs A8 and same card slot and upper/lower port.  I've seen this issue when moving a LisaEm profile.dc42 image from the parallel port to one of the card ports and on actual Lisas.

 

[fri0701]

Hi Sunder,

I read over the BLU image format (http://sigmasevensystems.com/blumanual.html) and the DC42 format (https://wiki.68kmla.org/DiskCopy_4.2_format_specification), and I decided I'd try to write my own version of blu-to-dc42 from scratch. I got a version working that produces bootable ProFile images from my raw BLU dumps! It only supports 5MB ProFiles at the moment. Once I clean up my code a bit, I'd be happy to send you a link if you're interested in taking a look.

 

[mactjaap]

Hi Sunder,

I read over the BLU image format (http://sigmasevensystems.com/blumanual.html) and the DC42 format (https://wiki.68kmla.org/DiskCopy_4.2_format_specification), and I decided I'd try to write my own version of blu-to-dc42 from scratch. I got a version working that produces bootable ProFile images from my raw BLU dumps! It only supports 5MB ProFiles at the moment. Once I clean up my code a bit, I'd be happy to send you a link if you're interested in taking a look.

This would be cool! I think it would be great to grab disk images that you can use.
 

Just to be sure.  Do you mean you can boot them in LisaEm? So transfer from the real disk to a “virtual” disk?

 

[sunder]

Hi Sunder,

I read over the BLU image format (http://sigmasevensystems.com/blumanual.html) and the DC42 format (https://wiki.68kmla.org/DiskCopy_4.2_format_specification), and I decided I'd try to write my own version of blu-to-dc42 from scratch. I got a version working that produces bootable ProFile images from my raw BLU dumps! It only supports 5MB ProFiles at the moment. Once I clean up my code a bit, I'd be happy to send you a link if you're interested in taking a look.

That's awesome! Thank you, much appreciated!

Hope you used libdc42 to save yourself time, but if you didn't that's fine.

 

[fri0701]

Hi Sunder,

Here's a link to my code: https://github.com/tfrikker/lisa_utils

Hopefully you find it useful for debugging purposes!

Feel free to PM/post here if you need my help with anything, or if you test it on any of your disks! I'm curious to hear how it goes.

 

[sunder]

Here's a link to my code: https://github.com/tfrikker/lisa_utils

Hopefully you find it useful for debugging purposes!

Thank you @fri0701 taking a look now

 

[IlikeTech]

Not sure if this is needed information, but ZTerm doesn't seem to work on Catalina cause it isn't 64 Bit.