6/30/05, Craig A. Vanderborgh craigv@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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