EEVblog® Electronics Community Forum

Products => Computers => Embedded Computing => Topic started by: david.given on March 26, 2023, 11:24:51 pm

Title: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: david.given on March 26, 2023, 11:24:51 pm

I'm trying to read the PHILE and PHILE+ file systems (I have a floppy disk flux-level reader project, and someone has shown up with some weird m68000-based SBC running pSOS, which runs off floppies). The official documentation (the 'pSOS System Concepts' PDF) has just enough hints in it that I've managed to reverse engineer just enough of it to be able to read some files, possibly correctly, but there's a lot of weird numbers and edge cases I don't know anything about.

Does anyone have any pointers? Not just documentation, but existing tooling for creating and reading these filesystems would be invaluable too. I did see a web reference to one once but like an idiot I didn't save the link and now I can't find it again!

Title: Re: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: eutectique on March 27, 2023, 09:28:26 pm

Would these documents be of any distant help?

http://bagfed.free.fr/pSOS/PSOS_System_Calls.pdf (http://bagfed.free.fr/pSOS/PSOS_System_Calls.pdf)
http://bagfed.free.fr/pSOS/PSOS_Programmers_reference.pdf (http://bagfed.free.fr/pSOS/PSOS_Programmers_reference.pdf)

Title: Re: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: david.given on March 27, 2023, 10:25:40 pm

Thanks, but sadly not! The document the API side of things and I'm really looking for the implementation side.

I did hear that pSOS was open source at once point, but if so I can't find any trace of it. I am sure there must have been some tools for accessing PHILE filesystems from PCs at one point. It really doesn't help that lots of people on the interwebs use both 'psos' and 'phile' for all kinds of other stuff. They should be more considerate, dammit.

Title: Re: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: SimonR on April 17, 2023, 08:46:20 pm

Do you still need this? I have some information on Phile that I could try and scan

Title: Re: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: david.given on April 18, 2023, 01:00:33 pm

Yes, please! Apart from anything else, there seems to be very little information on PHILE on the internet and it's in grave danger of vanishing completely...

Title: Re: Does anyone here still know about pSOS?
Post by: fenugrec on March 06, 2025, 06:05:41 pm

Note : links on bagfed.free.fr are dead; webarchive has not scraped those PDFs. At some point the website may have moved to 'www.bagfed.net (http://www.bagfed.net)' but that is also dead today.

Found an alternate source for those PDFs at

https://roffe.nu/psos/PSOS_Programmers_reference.pdf (https://roffe.nu/psos/PSOS_Programmers_reference.pdf)
https://roffe.nu/psos/psos_system_call.pdf (https://roffe.nu/psos/psos_system_call.pdf)

Wonder if someone has early 90's version of the source code...