[Coco] Floppies to PC or other OSs

[Pete Rittwage]

Doesn't the omniflop driver/software support CoCo disks (and TRS-80 and
many others)? I thought for sure I have imaged disks back and forth with
that on a semi-modern Windows XP machine.

-
Pete Rittwage
C64 Preservation Project
http://c64preservation.com


On Wed, February 13, 2013 1:45 pm, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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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