[LispM] MicroExplorer Question

[William von Hagen]

(I've essentially posted this same message to the lispm-hackers mailing 
list - I apologize if this means that you've gotten multiple copies of
it.)

I own a variety of working LispM's (Symbolics 3620, 3650, and MacIvory
II, TI Explorer I and II, and Xerox Dandelion, Dandetiger, and 1186),
and am trying to get a MicroExplorer (software version 5.0) working in a
Mac II FX (32 MB, MacOS 7.6.1) without any documentation. If anyone
could outline the procedure to me (or has the actual docs that they
could scan or photocopy), I'd be eternally grateful In the meantime,
here's what I've tried to date: The "Host Software" floppy appears to
contain the actual binaries, while disks such as the "Development System
Software" disks appear to contain slices of the load band. On the "Host
Software" floppy is a utility called "MkPFiles" which (according to the
online "About MkPFiles") seems to create partitions as disk files that
will hold the reconstituted bands, in a directory called "LISPM".
However, when I run this and try to create a Partition File, it reports
Error(-51) and goes no further. Can anyone tell me what this error means
and what I might be able to do about it? 

Also, when I run the actual TI MicroExplorer binary, it reports that it
can't load the microcode file, even though I've tried putting that in
various locations (root of the hard drive, working directory, LISPM
subdirectory, etc.). There is a configuration file for the uExplorer
software, but I don't know the meaning of most of the entries or the
specific syntax. It's just a text file, and I've experiemnted with some
of the settings, but can't get past the failure to load the Microcode
file.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with any suggestions (or the actual
docs - I'd be glad to pay postage or FTP scans or PDFs from anywhere!).

Thanks very much, and happy new year to all!

  Bill von Hagen
  vonhagen@vonhagen.org
  http://www.vonhagen.org