6/30/05, Craig A. Vanderborgh <craigv(a)voxware.com> wrote:
> I have already downloaded your installation .exe. Is there any documentation
> available for your Windows fdrawcmd?
That's the stand-alone driver installer, which is a run-once thing.
I've got a header file with some definitions and some documentation
describing how to use it - I'll email you with details once I've
uploaded the updated files (should be within the hour). Reading and
writing Mirage disks should be just as easy under Windows as Linux.
Late last night I had a look at formatting a Mirage-format disk, but
ran into a problem. It seems like the 5.5K disk format is too tight
to be formatted with the PC controller, which only gives control over
the gap3 length. Even with a gap3 of 1 byte, the end of the track was
wrapping round and overwriting the start of the first sector.
About the only standard controller solution I can think of is to write
the disk as 6*1024 sectors, and interrupt the controller sometime
after the final id header is written, but before the final data area
wraps to overwrite the first sector. This is similar to the technique
used to write (short) 8K sectors to 6K tracks, as demonstrated by the
DOS CPDWrite utility.
I've been experimenting with writing short sectors in my own driver,
with some promising results, but it's not ready to be used yet. I'm
not sure if/how the same thing can be achieved under Linux without
some kernel hacking.
Simon Owen
http://simonowen.com/
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