On Fri, 2 Oct 1998, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> A "Catweasel" board can do a lot of the formats including Apple. It's
> available in two flavors, IBM PC, and Amiga. The big problem with the one
> I've got for one of my Amiga's is the lack of software to actually do
> this!!!
How many formats do you have software for? I'm interested because I was
thinking of getting a Catweasel board for my Amiga.
But early in the summer, I decided instead to try to make the best of my
A1020. Unfortunately (?), I found a job only one day after I wrote my
first line of code, which only managed to turn the drive motor on and off.
:)
I probably wouldn't have got very far, but my first test would have been a
raw read of every track, dumped to a file. An attempt at a Teledisk-type
thing.
Figuring out the disk formats themselves would have been a lot of work.
I wanted eventually to have something that would be a combination of
Teledisk and 22disk, but able to do GCR formats as well.
At any rate, Paula can access a lot of formats. There was software that
came with the Apple2000 emulator which can read Apple ][ disks into .dsk
images, and according to the one of the old Amiga manuals, software exists
that will write to that format as well (I just haven't located a copy).
With a tweak to the drive's RPM, the file misc/emu/1541.lha on Aminet will
read 1541 disks into .d64 images. I've tried it and it works well. It
also comes with source code!
There was a commercial product called either DOS-2-DOS or DISK-2-DISK (I
forget which) which was able to access 1541 disks on a filesystem level,
for reading AND writing. But it would only format a disk with less
tracks (only tracks within certain speed zones were formatted), and it was
probably careful about where it was writing, too. That variable-speed data
clock is not something Paula can deal with very well.
For Atari 8-bit disks, there is misc/emu/551conv.lha on Aminet. This
reads and writes several Atari formats. I've used it to read AND write
disks for use with on my Atari 810 and XF551 drives.
Of course, I can also read/write 360K and lower MS-DOS formats with
CrossDOS and my A1020 as well.
I see no reason why more formats couldn't be accessed with this hardware
configuration. Not Macintosh DD formats, not _writing_ reliably to 1541
disks, not accessing hard-sectored disks, but anything that doesn't vary
the data or rotation speed and is soft sectored should be doable.
Low level information on as many disk formats as possible would help a
lot, as would filesystem information.
Too bad I don't have the time now for this project, or I'd reawaken it.
BTW, there's an excellent article by Betty Clay entitled "Amiga Disk
Encoding Schemes" in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Amiga Transactor magazine. That
article, plus the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and RKM: Libraries &
Devices were my starting points for the project.
> Zane
> | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
> | healyzh_at_ix.netcom.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast |
> | healyzh_at_holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector |
> +----------------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
> | and Zane's Computer Museum. |
> | http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/ |
Doug Spence
ds_spenc_at_alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
Received on Sun Oct 04 1998 - 08:03:33 BST