[Coco] Floppies to PC or other OSs

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 13 February 2013 13:27:36 Phill Harvey-Smith did opine:

> On 13/02/2013 14:42, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> > On 2/12/2013 9:26 AM, Daniel Campos wrote:
> > If you have Windows 98 or earlier, it is easy to implement a DISK
> > utility to read/write coco disks with 256 byte sectors.  Several
> > exist.
> > 
> > They also appear to exist for Linux.
> 
> setfdprm and dd work fine for transfering CoCo images to disks and disks
> to images.

Yup, they do indeed...  Until you run into some motherboard vendors idea of 
a joke, like ASUS.  I am using an M2N-SLI Deluxe here, a board carrying a 
quad core phenom that cost me $285 bare several years ago, and have yet to 
make it do anything with a 256 byte sectored disk, the FDC returns no 
errors other than IO Error, but it simply does not work.  The FDC designers 
have quietly thrown 256 byte sectored disks under the bus.

Sending a downloaded new issue of a nitros9.dsk to my coco over a serial 
port, using rzsz, works but is about as painful as watching paint dry since 
it takes the better part of an hour at 620 bytes a second, but now with a 
working drivewire, its not needed since you can run a mb script direct from 
a drivewire mounted image that only exists on the drives of this linux box, 
or it can be backed up directly to an hdbdos image IF its small enough, but 
that has not been the case now for several years.  So if I want to put that 
image on the coco's hard drives, I still rzsz it, to a file on /s1 (my 2nd 
HD) then locate it, then dmode /s1 to make it think its looking at a large 
floppy drive, then dsave it to the main drive.  Lots of ways to skin that 
cat.

But I haven't done that since drivewire.

> > With Windows/XP and later, Microsoft removed the API for setting the
> > floppy sector size.
> 
> While this is true there are replacement floppy drivers that will allow
> you to access disks with 256 byte sectors, if you are prepared to do a
> little coding on the PC end.
> 
> this can be found here : http://simonowen.com/fdrawcmd/
> 
> I've used this in the past for reading BBC micro disks that are single
> density 256 byte sectors.
> 
> > However, any unmodified COCO disk controller with any DISK basic ROM
> > is quite happy to read and write 512 byte sector disks, as long as
> > you have READ and WRITE verification off.
> > 
> > The BASIC routines can only access the first 256 bytes of the sectors
> > to read and write, but you can access the rest with PEEK() AND
> > POKE().
> 
> I even managed to get a DragonDos controller to read a High denisty disk
> by clocking it at 2MHz (instead of 1MHz), and configuring it as if it
> where connected to an 8" disk which uses the same data rate as a 1.44MB
> HD disk. I did have to use the high speed poke and have the code in ROM,
> for the 6809 to keep up with the data rate.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> Phill.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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