[sdiy] [ot] Ensoniq Mirage

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 04:48:59PM +1100, Loscha wrote:
> Hi All,
>
>  I'm helping someone sell an Ensoniq Mirage. It looks in great
> condition, but we don't have any System or Formatting disks.
>
> Is there anyone in Melbourne who could help us out, please? The Mirage
> is located in Northcote, Melbourne.
>
> Thanks in advance!!

If you have some DD floppies (HD won't work well at all) and a PC 
running Linux with an onboard floppy controller - ideally, with an Intel 
chipset - then it's pish easy to create blank floppies for testing.

Format a blank disk like this:
$ superformat /dev/fd0 tracksize=11b mss ssize=1024 dd --zero-based

This will lay down the weirdass 5632-byte tracks (five sectors of 1024 
bytes, one of 512 bytes, 80 tracks, single-sided).  Now you need to get 
an image onto the disk.

A company called Syntaur claims to have been granted the exclusive right 
to distribute Mirage disks including the OS disks that were provided 
with the machine.  For a long time, the general consensus was that 
copying the OS 3.2 disk was okay, but not FMT-2 or MASOS because they 
weren't part of the original kit and Syntaur sell them.  So, I can't 
tell you on a public mailing list where to find images.

Theoretically you could set up the disk parameters and just use dd to 
write the image to the disk.  In practice, it's easier to use this handy 
wee utility:

http://lovesthepython.org/~gordonjcp/writedisk.c

Grab it, read the instructions at the top of the file to compile it, and 
write a disk.

A healthy Mirage will give ten or eleven clunks from the drive as it 
loads the OS, pause for a couple of seconds as it tunes the filter (the 
output is muted but with everything full up you may faintly hear a 
"pewpewpewpew" noise), and then load in the first lower and upper half 
off the disk (twelve clunks - pause - twelve clunks).

Hope this helps

-- 
Gordonjcp MM0YEQ